Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers

Exploring Radical Potentials

Urvashi Kuhad

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

Science fiction, as a literature of fantasy, goes beyond the mundane to ask the question: what if the world were different from the way it is? It often challenges the real, builds on imagination, places no limits on human capacities, and encourages readers to think outside their social and cultural conditioning.

This book presents a systematic study of Indian women's science fiction. It offers a critical analysis of the works of four female Indian writers of science fiction: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Manjula Padmanabhan, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Vandana Singh. The author considers not only the evolution of science fiction writing in India, but also discusses the use of innovations and unique themes including science fiction in different Indian languages; the literary, political, and educational activism of the women writers; and eco-feminism and the idea of cloning in writing, to argue that this genre could be viewed as a vibrant representation of freedom of expression and radical literature.

This ground-breaking volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literature. It will also prove a very useful source for further studies into Indian literature, science and technology studies, women's and gender studies, comparative literature and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

Science fiction as a genre

Needless to emphasize that the SF is an established literary genre which has its origin in the West and has received tremendous response from writers belonging to different countries in the world. The popularity of SF has become manifold. Perhaps it is for this reason the SF has emerged as a separate field of investigation in the literary analysis. Considering its growth in the present literary scenario of the world, attempt has been made here to focus on the origin and growth of SF in the West.

The origin of science fiction in the world can be traced back to the 17th century writers who were producing speculative fictions about new technologies and discoveries. A genre conducive to science fiction was that of utopian fantasy, which included an imaginary voyage to a far off land. The rich tradition of science fiction traveler’s tales was started by Francis Bacon which was considered as one of the first and foremost champions of the scientific style of writing. His work New Atlantis (written in 1617; published in 1627) is an example of this style. Most such works of the period, the utopian fantasies, did give importance to scientific and technological advancement, yet relegated to them a minor role in the face of matters of social, political and religious reform, which assumed the centre stage. The writers who laid emphasis on matters of scientific progress were not always enthusiastic about it.

The narrative form of the imaginary voyage also came to be used by many writers in a satirical format. Such writers were: Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and the third book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Their works gave rise to a tradition of ‘anti-science fiction’ or dystopias. The narratives of fantastical voyages appeared alongside the standard format of religious fantasy, the dream story. The seventeenth and eighteenth century science fiction literatures began to use the dream as a plausible means of allowing themselves to access the future. This tradition was common until the late nineteenth century. An early example of this can be seen in Somnium (A Dream, 1634) by Johannes Kepler. The work is an attempt to understand/imagine how life on the moon might have adapted to the long cycle of day and night. Johannes Kepler was the first to take the Copernican theory of the solar system and put it into the form of a dream vision to articulate his queries.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) gave science fiction a form that became established in the last decade of the nineteenth century as the principal narrative form. The “formula of an unruly and unfortunate artifact bringing about the downfall of its creator became established in the last decade of the nineteenth century as the principal narrative form.”¹

Most science fiction criticisms place the origin of science fiction in the nineteenth century, taking a few select texts from earlier (epochs) centuries as precursors. For instance, the science fiction critic Peter Nicholls is of the view that science fiction requires a scientific outlook and the “‘the scientific way of looking at the world did not emerge until the 17th century, and did not percolate into the society at large until…the 19th’”². He asserts that before the 19th century, science fiction could not be considered as a genre. Similarly, Brian Aldiss, SF author and critic, considers Mary Shelley’s nineteenth century novel, Frankenstein as the first SF text.

It is common enough to find critical histories of science fiction that begin, after a brief mention of a few earlier texts, with the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Both the writers are called as ‘The Father of Science Fiction.’ They greatly influenced the development of SF in the 20th century. On the other hand, there are critics who refer to earlier texts to mark the origin of SF. Lucian’s second century A.D. text, True History is treated as an example of proto science fiction. In this particular work, the narrator’s ship while sailing is caught by a hurricane and gets tossed into the sky. The ship then sails to the Moon. In another work by Lucian, the Icaromenippus, the protagonist flies to the Moon by using the wings of a vulture and an eagle. Some critics even go onto mention texts as early as The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible, because they have brought together passages that can be considered as both ‘realist’ as well as fantastic, carrying the impossible and imaginary.

A text like Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature we have, becomes interesting in the sense that while it tells us the story of a hero who encounters supernatural happenings and monsters, it enables us an encounter with differences. The monsters that the reader comes across can be called as nova. Another work of proto science fiction is Thomas More’s Utopia, often cited as a starting point for SF. Written in 1516 in Latin, Utopia was translated into English in 1551. The work as the title suggests is a utopia, an ideal society in which everybody coexists harmoniously. The setting is a fictional island. Utopia creates an alternative world, which gives it the status of being a science-fiction. In showing the island as a place where all the ‘goodness’ are available, the rest of the world is considered as a place for the evils and full of problems. As such, the text is not concerned with an encounter with the ‘other’.

Another critic namely, Robert Adams considers SF to be ‘post-Romantic,’ the literature which came after the revaluation of culture and metaphysics linked with the Romantic period, from around 1780-1830.³ He adds that SF shares certain characteristics with the sub-genre of ‘Gothic fiction,’⁴ evolved from the Gothic style. Brian Aldiss says that the Gothic stressed on the remote and unearthly. “But the Gothic was only a symptom of the larger literary and cultural phenomenon known as ‘Romanticism’, and in particular it is the notions of the Imagination and the Sublime associated with Romantic writing that sets the agenda for the development of SF.”⁵ These two, Imagination and the Sublime contribute to what is also referred to as ‘Sense of Wonder SF’⁶, which provided the artistic structure for all SF writers of today to work in.

Robert Adams does not locate the origins of SF in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein even though the text may play a significant role in the development of SF. But in the Paradise Lost (1674), Milton allows his imagination to move about freely through the whole of the solar system: to think of things such as whether the Moon is inhabited by a race of aliens.

if land be there,

Fields and inhabitants: her spots thou seest

As clouds, and clouds may rain, and rain produce

…………………………………………………

…………………………………………………

With their attendant moons thou wilt descry⁷

Adams interprets the text as one that represents Otherness (Satan) with the aim to demonise him.

The crucial thing is that this is a text about the most alien of aliens its authors could imagine: an alien who is so radically Other than God that he cannot be contained within the universe God has created. Milton’s Satan is the original bug eyed monster.⁸

Reading this way, one can say that Milton’s poem becomes science fiction. Besides, the epigraph of Frankenstein has been taken from Milton’s poem, (‘Did I request thee, maker, from clay to mould me man?’) and one can say that the novel could be a retelling of Paradise Lost. Frankenstein’s monster too is in many ways like Satan and the first book he learns to read is Milton’s Paradise Lost. The alienated monster is Shelley’s novum. The novel, according to Darko Suvin, set in motion a common theme of SF, that progress is inseparable from disaster. According to him, novum is the main formal device of SF. This term was coined by him and it is the Latin term for ‘new’ or ‘new thing’ (the plural being nova). Novum in science fiction refers to the ‘point of difference’ that distinguishes the world rendered in SF from the world which we inhabit. This novum crucially distinguishes between SF and other forms of imaginative or fantastic literature.

Adams clarifies that although Shelley’s novel played a significant role in the development of SF, yet it is with the works of Verne and Wells, at the end of the 19th century that the genre grew as a meaningful category, since this period saw a range of SF works were written, rather than an isolated single novel. And it is more through Wells’ involvement, rather than Verne’s which led to the growth of fiction concerned with the experience with difference.

John Clute, another SF critic, defines the experience of reading Verne as “a sense of coming very close to but never toppling over the edge of the known.”⁹ Similarly, Patrick Parinder describes Wells as a pivota...