Science meets fiction

Science meets fiction

	The animal called science fiction T V Venkateswaran is a scientist with Vigyan Prasar, New Delhi Recent sci-fi questions conformism, creeping bureaucracy and commodification, but fails to offer alternatives to global commodification
	The origins Arvind Mishra is co-author of Science Fiction in India and Harish Goyal writes science fiction in Hindi Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires inspired early science fiction writers in Hindi
	Aliens v babus Debjani Sengupta teaches literatures in English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Industrialisation, modernity and science fiction in Bengal
	From cache Vinayak Razdan works with a start-up as a social games developer/designer Isaac Asimov relied on the past to create visions of information system
	And so it goes Aniruddha Sengupta is a writer constantly struggling with all manners of temptation presented by his chosen home, Goa Meet Kurt Vonnegut and his uninvited alter ego
	Shadows of modernity Yohan J John is post-doctoral research associate at Boston University’s Neural System Lab Into the wellspring of sci-fi
	Infinite sphere Dilip Raote is a journalist and sci-fi buff Challenging the sceptics
	The missing Anil Menon is a science fiction writer Desi sci-fi lost and found

The animal called science fiction

Walk into a well-stocked bookstore. You are likely to find a section marked ‘science fiction’, stacked with brightly coloured covers illustrated with intricate spaceships floating in the vast space with weird looking alien, or men and women clad in bizarre apparels in futuristic cities. Flip through it, the tropes are quite recognisable: travel to other planets, encounters with extraterrestrial life forms, utopian social speculation, futuristic extrapolation or even travel back/future in time.

What is this animal called science fiction? Is it romance? Yes, it can be—even an intense romance between a woman and a machine (Bicentennial Man). Is it horror; drama; humour; action; soap opera (Star Wars)? Each piece of science fiction could be potentially identified with one of these genres. However, what sets sci-fi apart from other literature is a narrative centred on the sense of wonder. The sense of wonder might be engendered by the natural, such as the rings of Saturn or horizon of the black hole, or by the technological, such as a space station or a rocket ship.

At the heart of this genre is construction of a world other than our own, another planet (or even another universe) or a future world in which conditions have changed—alien invasion, Martian colonies, a permanent cure for the ageing process. The “what if?” in science fiction enables readers to focus on the human ramifications of the story and allows science fiction to become a powerful instrument of speculation and social critique. In science fiction, ‘the idea’ is the hero.

Scholars like Darko Suvin locate the emergence of sci-fi in the West to the intellectual impact of the Copernican revolution. By challenging the authority of scripture, Copernicus challenged the authority of the Church, the prime axis of political power in his times. Potential dissolution of the social and political arrangement, that was hitherto seen as permanent and god given, opened new avenues to imagine future social arrangements, radically different from the present. It is in this context that we should read Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The protagonist of this utopian science fiction, reports visiting a distant island, where society is ordered in immeasurably better ways than in the Europe of his times. In spite of science fiction being “fantastic”, it is not pure fantasy. While the mythical and fairy tales are set in “once-upon-a-time far away, beyond seven seas and seven mountains”, sci-fi is futuristic fiction. This is not to say that all sci-fi novels must be set in the future, but to state that the genre is counterfactual literature: not things as they actually are, but as they might be, whether in the future, in an alternative past or present, or in a parallel dimension.



The genre draws from the post-Galilean modern science, a clear break from the magical apprehension of the cosmos to a newer materialist, non-magical discourse. Suddenly, the cosmos was vast, new and unimagined objects (like the moons of Jupiter) were discovered and further new ways of thinking about time was possible. No longer was the trope of magic essential to bring about awe; science (and increasingly technological potential) was enough to create wonderment and spectacle. If fantasy relied upon the magical to generate a counterfactual, true science fiction is expected to do so only with prospective/plausible potential of science and technology. That is why Jules Verne scorned at H G Wells (The first man in the moon, 1901) for using purely magical anti-gravity material cavorite to lift his rocket to moon.

Two dominant narratives have come to stay in sci-fi; hard (didactic) and speculative (fantastic). The former, exemplified by Verne’s narratives, sought to teach science through fiction. The later, exemplified by H G Wells, developed fiction through science. Further, if Verne transported his readers to exotic locations, centre of Earth, moon, North Pole and distant planets, Wells took the reader on a journey through time.

Jules Verne scorned at H G Wells’ The first Man in the Moon (1901) for using purely magical anti-gravity material cavorite to lift his rocket to moon

Sci-fi literatures of the 19th century mirrored the aspirations and fears of the middle classes. Take Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century. The protagonist of this 1883 novel, a young woman, is exploring the Paris of 1952, looking for a suitable career. The utopian Paris in the imagination of the author was teeming with aircabs that transported people, and each home contained a telephotoscope to broadcast the latest news and entertainment, and where the government is swept out of office every 10 years in a planned decennial revolution. The novel speculated not only on technology, mass transport and communication, but also on questions of feminist issues (women’s career) and forms of government (elected democracy).

In contrast, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is a mark of the fears of the elite unable to reconcile themselves with the rapid changes in the social fabric in the wake of emergence of capitalism. Having moved the source of terror from the supernatural to the scientific and rejected the naïve belief in the scientist as hero and in technology as inherently good, the novel is a romantic rejection of technological progress. The archetype, the mad scientist who, in his hubris-filled pursuit of knowledge and power, betrays basic human values, became a defining plot for future.

Films like Armageddon try to justify nuclear weapons at a time when protests against them are strong

Science fiction, in particular, imagines change in terms of the whole human species, and these changes are often the result of scientific discoveries and inventions that are applied by human beings to their own social evolution. Small wonder socialists of one hue or other like Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H G Wells and Jack London were sci-fi writers. All these early to mid 20th century authors believed scientific and utopian romance was allied with the social reform of amoral laissez-faire capitalism.

Science fiction of the 1960s and ’70s was impelled more by what Italo Calvino called “a utopian charge”, a powerful, unformed desire to rid the world of poverty, racism, sexual repression and exploitation, than naïve scientific romance. Soviet writer Ivan Yefremov’s acclaimed sci-fi novel Andromeda (1957), which broached virtually every issue relevant to socialist concerns, from science to the arts to ethics, and engaged Western science fiction in a well-informed subtle polemical dialogue, is noteworthy.

This is not to say all works of contemporary science fiction were to take a socialist standpoint. Critics have pointed out that in recent times pulp sci-fi, especially from the US, has been a major inspiration for the development of super-weapons of mass destruction. Sci-Fi films like Independence Day and Armageddon have been deconstructed to reveal the insidious ideological force of an apparently harmless form of entertainment. Scholars point out that these films attempt to rationalise nuclear weapons at a time when mass movements for abolition of nuclear weapons in the world are growing in strength. The role of American pulp sci-fi in denying global warming is well known.

In its time Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill may have been seen as hilarious, but after August 1945, technology is anything but naively good. Naturally, man-machine relationship has engaged the imagination of sci-fi. The naive view of technology—of machine relieving man of the drudgery—has given way to suspicion and mistrust of technology. When an ultra-modern new generation computer is asked the question “whether there is God”, the machine replies “yes” and strikes dead a man who is about to turn off the machine in Fredric Brown’s Answer (1954).

Recent sci-fi questions conformism, creeping bureaucracy and commodification. It highlights the cause of environmentalism, cautions against xenophobia and advocates tolerance and multi-culturalism. It critiques capitalism’s expanding sphere of influence and its often sinister relationship with technology (Avatar). However, unlike earlier times, these works rarely pose solid political questions or offer alternatives to global capitalism.

We seem to know what we do not wish, but it appears we are not yet able to articulate what we desire.

T V Venkateswaran is a scientist with Vigyan Prasar, New Delhi

The origins

In its early avatar, science fiction in India was closely connected to mainstream literature. Mainstream littérateurs also wrote science fiction and the genre was closely tied to the politics of the mainstream literary movement. Though many trace the germs of Indian science fiction to ancient writing, especially some Sanskrit scriptures, it’s safe to describe Ambika Datt Vyas’s Aascharya Vrittant (A Strange Tale) as the first modern work of Hindi science fiction.

Vyas was a mainstream writer and Aascharya Vrittant was serialised in Piyush Pravah, a Hindi literary magazine, between 1884 and 1888. This landmark of early Hindi literature was inspired by Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires. It was certainly futuristic for many Hindi readers: it narrates the adventures of Gopinath as he undertakes a journey underneath the earth.

Voyages Extraordinaires continued to influence Hindi writers in the coming decades. In 1900, Saraswati, another popular literary magazine published Babu Keshav Prasad Singh’s Chandrlok ki Yatra (A Journey to Moon)—around 60 years before the first humans landed on moon and more than a hundred a years before India’s Chandrayan began exploring Earth’s satellite.



Saraswati continued to give space to stories inspired by science. But not all of them were futuristic. In 1908, the literary magazine published Aascharyjanak Ghantee (A Call Bell Wonder) in 1908 written by Satyadev Parivrajak. The murder mystery was inspired by the principle of resonance described by Galileo. Scot, the story’s main protagonist, often hears a mysterious sound. Investigations trace the sound to a bell which rings without any external force applied to it. The mystery complicates with the arrival of a Japanese visitor, Oku Matsumi, who wants to purchase the bell at any cost. But Scot refuses to part with it. One day he is found dead. Detective Augustus, also called Teekshna Buddhi, is asked to investigate the bell owner’s death. Augustus finds blood stains on the bell. He visits Deewankhana, a large building half-a-mile from Scott’s house. He finds a big bell on its top floor, the Ghadiyal Ghanta. Teekshna Buddhi relates the ringing of Scot’s bell to the principle of resonance. The resonance of Ghadiyal’s sound causes vibrations in the smaller bell half a mile away. The vibrations are furious on the day of Scot’s death leading the bell to fall on his head.

In a story published in 1924, the protagonist wakes up in the 22nd century to find crops genetically modified

Many critics see Aascharyjanak Ghantee as a story that popularised a scientific phenomenon. Futuristic fiction in Hindi came into its own with the publication of Rahul Sankritayan’s Baisvin Sadi in 1924. The story is a description of a society set in 2124. Technological improvements are the harbinger of political and social reforms. The story begins with its protagonist Vishwabandhu falling asleep in 1924. He wakes up 200 years later in a completely changed world. The world is governed by a single entity: the world government. In this world, Vishwabandhu finds the president an Indian, Shri Datt, the prime minister a Japanese, Ohiro, the education minister is a Russian, Molon, and the health minister an American, David. People speak a single language. There is no police force. Vishwabandhu thinks scientific progress has reached its zenith. Agriculture is driven by biotechnology. Farmers introduce desired traits in crops genetically.

During Sankritayan’s time, no one had thought of genetically engineered or genetically modified foods. Vishwbandhu finds villages earmarked for the production of any selected single crop: a village with apples, another with oranges and fields of one type of supercrop stretched miles long. He finds the supercrop of apple in one area and the supercrop of orange in another. Animals are found only in zoos and people communicate with a device akin to the modern Internet. There is also a radio phone, like the modern video phone.

During the 1930s, Yamunadatt Vaishnav Ashok inculcated ‘Indianness’ in his stories through careful introduction of local locations, familiar protagonists and plot development.

Arvind Mishra is co-author of Science Fiction in India and Harish Goyal writes science fiction in Hindi

Aliens v babus

Flour mills, jute mills, cloth and brick mills,
Machines that dig out water and make landfills,
Elephantine machines make roads a day,
Pranam at the feet of machines,
Town and country are now twins.

Kolkata Barnan by Rupchand Pakshi

Science was increasingly gaining popularity among the educated elite in Bengal in the last quarter of the 19th century. This was because of a rapid mechanisation of English businesses by the 1880s that led to a growing desire among the colonised Bengali to master the alien technologies and sciences, largely perceived to be a remedy against superstitions and ignorance. It was also a way in which colonial modernity could be understood and mastered. The growth of Calcutta as an economic and political centre in the heyday of the East India Company is implicitly connected to the advent of industrialisation in that period, and its impact on colonial Bengal’s cultural, social and political life. The interface between science, technology and culture would soon be reflected in literature.

The first science fiction written in Bengal was in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the effects of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to be felt in Bengal’s social and cultural life. Hemlal Dutta’s Rahashya (The Mystery) was published in two installments in 1882 in the pictorial Bigyan Darpan. The story revolved around the protagonist Nagendra’s visit to a friend’s house, a mansion completely automated and mechanised. Automatic doorbell, burglar alarms and mechanical clothes brushes were some of the innovations described in the story in a tone of gawky wonder.



An early practitioner of science fiction in Bengal was Jagadananda Roy (1869–1933), a prolific science writer, who contributed articles to the magazine, Sadhana (edited by Rabindranath Tagore), and whose books included Ghrohonokhotro (Planets and Stars, 1915) and Pokamakor (Bugs and Insects, 1919). His science fiction novel Shukra Bhraman (‘Travels to Venus’, written in the 1890s) described an interstellar journey and visit to another planet. Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), probably inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, wrote Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (The Diary Of Heshoram Hushiar) in 1922. Like Jagadananda, Sukumar Ray also wrote on scientific and technological subjects explaining natural phenomena or new technology to young readers in the pages of Sandesh, a magazine first published in 1913 by his father Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri, a notable member of the Brahmo Samaj and a writer himself.

In Premendra Mitra's sci-fi stories, a Bengali travelled to space in search of Black Hole or dived under seas to discover the mysterious origin of the universe

In its eccentric and hilarious narrative Heshoram was a spoof on the science fiction genre because the writer poked fun at the propensity of Western science to classify and name things, and that too in longwinded Latin. The brief story suggested that the names were given arbitrarily to objects and the name of a thing was somehow intrinsically connected to its nature. So the first creature that explorer Heshoram met in the course of his journey through the Bandakush Mountains was a ‘gomratharium’ (gomra in Bengali means someone of irritable temperament), a creature that sported a long woebegone face and a cross expression. This tour de force certainly subverted the generic characteristics of a sci-fi and although just an extract, Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary was unique in its scathing critique of colonial science.

Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) was one of Bengal’s most famous practitioners of science fiction. Mitra’s stories are still read avidly in Bengal. His memorable character Ghanashyam Das (Ghanada in short), first appeared in a story called Mosha (‘Mosquito’ 1945), in which a mad scientist created a new strain of mosquito to wipe out the world. Ghanada’s timely appearance and an even timelier slap saved mankind from this virulent breed. Ghanada, a lanky bachelor famous for his tall stories and his even taller brand of courage and curiosity, was a personification of Mitra’s humanistic ideology and moral universe. Without greed and scrupulously honest, Ghanada strove to rescue mankind from the apocalyptic failures of science. In collections of stories like Ghanadar Galpo (Stories of Ghanada) and Abar Ghanada (Ghanada Again) that Mitra wrote through the ’50s and ’60s we saw this quintessential Bengali travelling to space in search of Black Hole or diving under the seas to discover the mysterious origin of the universe to fortify our engagement with the world.

Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary in early 20th century was unique in its critique of colonial science

Leela Majumdar (1908–2007), a niece of Upendrakishore, was probably the first woman in Bangla to venture into sci-fi. Her science fiction fantasies were peopled by extraordinary humans, plants, animals and ghosts. Through her presentations of the bereft, the strange and the underdog, she not only managed to stretch the borders of middle-class domesticity, but also presented an inclusive vision of the universe where strange things could be accepted with ease and nonchalance. Most characters of her stories had a marginal place in society. They were small people, sometimes literally so, as many of her heroes were children: naughty children, poor children, or children who were the despair of parents. The marginality of her characters was a social marginality rather than an intellectual/imaginative one: her heroes might be poor or unimportant but they were forever curious about the world and unafraid to explore its possibilities.

Although hugely popular and often bestsellers, her writings expressed a certain world-view that critiqued Western Enlightenment-driven notions of science prevalent in the Bengali public sphere. Almost all her science fiction stories used science in a double bind—science was a “narrative of progress”, a sign of modernity, and also a signifier of a space in which a critique of modernity could be articulated because it accommodated the marginalised. Majumdar’s sci-fi stories like Shortcut and Shiri (The Stairs) suggested that science could be good, because science empowered us with knowledge and compassion, and could be a source of freedom. A true scientist was always a true humanist. And likewise, the marginalised and the downtrodden could be freed by science because only science was capable of removing poverty and injustice.

The humanistic and altruistic aspects of science could also be seen in the stories of Satyajit Ray, son of Sukumar Ray, who carried on the family tradition of science fiction writing and created Professor Shonku in 1961. The first science fiction featuring this eccentric hero was written for the magazine, Sandesh, and was called Byomjatrir Diary (The Diary of a Space Traveler). In all, 38 complete and two incomplete diaries (the last one came out in 1992) narrated the fantastic world of Shonku’s adventures, inventions and travels. As a fictional character, Professor Shonku was tremendously real: courageous yet forgetful, inquisitive yet self-controlled. His wit and humor made him very human and his inventions were impressive: Anhihiline, Miracural, Omniscope, Snuffgun, Mangorange, Camerapid, Linguagraph. Some were drugs, some gadgets and some machines but all with human purposes and uses. None were allowed to reign over or be more powerful than the human mind that invented them. Some of Shonku’s machines even took on human characteristics and were transformed from mere inventions to beloved companions with human names. The first diary started by describing Shonku’s efforts to build a space rocket. The first one that he built came down on his neighbour Abinashbabu’s radish patch. Abinashbabu had no sympathy for Shonku; science and scientists made him yawn. He often urged Shonku to set off his invention on Diwali so that the neighborhood children could be suitably entertained.

Shonku’s world was a real, human world. In his preparations for the space journey he decided to take his cat Newton with him. He had invented a fish-pill so Newton would not starve in space. Two other of Shonku’s companions would be his loyal servant Prahlad and robot Bidhusekhar. The first entry on the latter is worth a longer look.

“For the last few days I can hear Bidhusekhar making a ‘ga,ga’ noise. This is strange in itself because he is not supposed to utter a sound. He is a machine, he must do whatever he is told, the only sound he is supposed to make is the clang of metals when he moves…. I know he has no ability to think nor does he possess any intelligence. But now I can see a difference in him.” That his robot had unimaginable human characteristics became evident when Shonku made Prahlad try out his spacesuit. “Today I called Prahlad to the laboratory to try out his suit and his helmet. It was a sight. Prahlad was in splits. To say the truth, even I felt like laughing. Just at this moment I heard a metallic guffaw and turned to see Bidhusekhar sitting in his chair swaying and making a new sound. There can only be one meaning to that clatter. Bidhusekhar was also sniggering at Prahlad.”

Debjani Sengupta teaches literatures in English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her essays on Bangla science fiction have appeared in Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World and in Extrapolation

From cache

“And the prospect of the Encyclopedia Galactica itself—what a monumental project! Imagine the reaction when the public learns that the Galactic Library is involved with such an undertaking designed to highlight the splendor of our civilization—our glorious history, our brilliant achievements, our magnificent cultures. And to think that I, Chief Librarian Tryma Acarnio, is responsible for making sure that this great Project gets its start.”

Acarnio gazed intently into the crystal sphere, lost in reverie.

~ Isaac Asimov’s Forward, The Foundation (1993)

Asimov was a prolific writer. Wikipedia entry against his name will tell you that the man wrote or edited more than 500 books and composed an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. If words imply information, surely his writings must offer a server worth of information. And somewhere in those words are his many visions of humanity’s future.

Ironically, for someone who anticipated some of our information systems in his writings, Asimov died a victim of lack of information in 1992. Back in the 1980s, if information about HIV was easily and readily available, he may not have contracted the virus from blood transfusion during a bypass operation in 1983.

In one of Asimov’s futures, creation of Encyclopedia Galactica seems like a conceited exercise driven by ego. In reality, we humans ended up creating an all-encompassing encyclopaedia of everything, the Internet, inadvertently, out of our ability and need to crunch big numbers, need to handle data, need to process and create information, and a need to dispense it. Given similar needs, Asimov in a way did conceive something akin to the Internet in his famous story The Last Question.



In this story, one of his most curious literary creations, Multivac, evolves alongside man as they together try to find an answer to the question: can entropy be reversed? Surprisingly, as time passes, Multivac shrinks in size even as its computation power increases exponentially. It goes down to “personal” size and then to a two-inch cube that is connected through “hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind”. Asimov conceived this story in around 1955, just when Alan Turing was talking along similar lines based on his work with computing machines. Moore’s Law, that clearly relates computational power and integrated circuit size, was formulated only in the 1970s.

Multivac appears in a number of other Asimov stories too and it almost always appears like an oracle. Or rather an oracle that does not beat around the bush and answers directly. You ask a question, you get an answer. Unlike the de-centralised structure of most of the Internet today, Asimov almost always thought of Multivac as a centralised entity that may be controlled, most often by the government.

In 2002, a survey carried out by the Nobel Institute on 100 of the world’s best authors from 54 countries led to Don Quixote being declared the best book of all time. Newspapers trumpeted the news. But how does one arrive at the “best book of all time”? A year later, Salman Rushdie, one of the writers who took part in the survey, claimed the writers who took part in the survey were asked to list, in no particular order, 10 of their favourite books, then this list was fed into a computer. In the end, the computer declared Don Quixote to be the greatest and most meaningful book of all time. Only decades ago, the fact that a machine was deciding matters of art may have raised some eyebrows and maybe given rise to some interesting critique of the methodology. But not a whisper was heard.

Compare this to the plot of Asimov’s 1955 story Franchise and the debut of Multivac. The story is about the US election in 2008. The election was a simple affair. Computer selected a man, a representative of the electorate, and asked him a few questions. Based on this one man’s answers, a President was elected. With all that computational power at hand, it probably was not hard for Asimov to guess which route humanity will take. At the start of this story, the protagonist is weary of the computer-driven election process but by the time the process is over, and after he has exercised his vote, he feels: “In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him!) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise.”

Multivac shrinks to personal size and then to a two-inch cube connected through hyperspace

Wasn’t fate of past empires, too, sealed by the decisions of a select few? Marx would probably agree, even as he would ask Asimov to explore the idea a bit more.

In Asimov’s The Dead Past (1956), the protagonist discovers that the government is deliberately keeping people from looking into the past, even though it has had the technology to do so for years. The government manages to keep this technology to itself, not by denying the existence of such technology but by building a bureaucracy around it, and by effectively managing the information about it. It publishes bogus journal articles about ancient history that would excite no special interest from the general public. It hides the time-viewing machine right under the nose of the people by telling them that the viewer is working, always busy seeing the dead past of some ancient period. The protagonists manage to get past the government blockade and even build a portable time-viewer. However, in an anti-climax, they realise that the government was not wrong: once the time-viewer is out for public consumption, most people will only be interested in the mundane and the illicit. They realise that the government was only trying to protect the world and that their action of unravelling the truth has unbalanced the world and pushed it towards an uncertain future.

Invert this story, twist it a bit and you can see a prophecy about Wiki-Leaks and questions it opened up. Information may or may not be liberation but control of information is certainly power. Were not libraries burnt during the crusades for power?

A good science fiction writer may or may not be right about his vision, but like a good fortune-teller he will certainly read your past, your fears and worries, and then he will conjure an appropriate future, one that is almost always identifiable. We did read about these cool gizmos connected to hyperspace, but who would have written that people would be hooked on these pad-thingies? Who would have written that mobile devices would cause men to have bad dreams about the health of their testes? Who would have written that these devices and their support towers would proliferate even before any proper health study was done on their usage? Who would have claimed that even though writers of future will have better research tools and more time at hand, yet purely out of economic reasons, the age of prolific writers would be long over? A fortune-teller does not need to be perfect. Approximations are enough. That is the beauty of science fiction writing, the best of it only needs to get the past right.

To summon visions of future, Asimov too relied on the past. It is almost like Asimov’s man will only perform actions that he has already performed in the past. His man is almost an automaton. The inputs and outputs are always predictable. Only the plot, the simulation within which this automaton runs, offers various kinds of challenges with its simple twists and turns. It is past broken down into a simple edible recipe with a lot of dressing of delicious jargon. And sometimes with this dish, comes a fortune cookie, a message, a piece of information about the future.

Vinayak Razdan works with a start-up as a social games developer/designer

And so it goes

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a man who identified himself as Kaushik Das Gupta, the Features Editor of Down To Earth magazine. He told me about this science-fiction-themed issue and asked me if I would write a piece for it. I agreed. Thinking about science fiction and its links to environmental issues, I decided to do a piece on one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, and the lateral way he had of looking at the earth, humanity and the problems each creates for the other. But as I began writing the article, a strange thing happened. I was interrupted—by the computer! Suddenly, words started appearing on my screen which I wasn’t putting there. What it turned out to be ... okay, the best way to let you, the reader, know what it was is to let you read the piece as it emerged, with all the interruptions. So here it goes ...

Evolution paints not just in broad strokes. Even what an individual turns out to be is in many ways an evolutionary process. Where you are born and where you live, who your parents and ancestors were, what decisions they took, all of this plays a strong role in who you end up being.

Kurt Vonnegut’s great-grandfather Clemens was a Freethinker in Germany in the early 19th century, a member of a group that rejected organised religion for a secular, scientific outlook on life. Given this ancestral proclivity, it is kind of inevitable that Vonnegut would turn out to be a humanist and a radical.

From his earliest writing, he focussed on the perils of modern-day development, especially the Western model of industrial development. His first published novel, Player Piano, was set in a dim and dystopian future not unlike that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where technology had left humans reduced, ironically, to the status of automatons. Unlike Huxley, though, Vonnegut took a more pessimistic view of mankind’s response, with little hope of deliverance remaining at the end of the story, which felt odd, given that the book itself felt lighter and less oppressive than Huxley’s. As Granville Hicks wrote in a review of the book in the New York Times, “Player Piano is … a less serious (book) than Brave New World, but what Mr. Vonnegut lacks in fervor he more than makes up in fun. ... Whether he is a trustworthy prophet or not, Mr. Vonnegut is a sharp-eyed satirist.”

The element of fun is what keeps Vonnegut’s dark view of the future of our planet from becoming oppressive. Later in life, one journalist wrote of him: “Vonnegut adds humor, a wild black humor, while most sci-fi is serious to the point of boredom. … Vonnegut seems pre-occupied with genuine human questions, about war, peace, technology, human happiness. He is even bitterly anti-machine, anti-technology, anti-science.”

Along with a strong humanism, these are all properties that show up in many of his main characters. They are true of Paul Proteus, the out-of-synch-with-society protagonist of Player Piano. They could well describe the millionaire Eliot Rosewater whom people are out to show as insane in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. And they are true of the recurring autobiographical character, Kilgore Trout, whose first appearance is in that book.

Trout, who is described as having great ideas, but being a terrible writer, was orig

*o*
Hey!
Huh? What the hell?
You writing about me?
Who ... what ... are you?
I’m Kilgore Trout.
What do you mean, you’re Kilgore Trout?

Damn, if I had a dime for the number of times I have had to do this … I am the disembodied consciousness of Kilgore Trout. After my creator died in 2007, I was reduced to some form of digital super-consciousness, caught in what I can only imagine is a cyberspatial chrono-synclastic infundibulum. I don’t really know—He might have been able to explain it. All I could figure out is that if someone uses my name on a computer or refers to me in some way online, I materialise there.

But that’s not what a chrono-synclastic infundibulum does, according to Vonnegut.

Oh, what did He know? I’m the one who’s been through it all. He just wrote about me.

Are you saying that you actually wrote some of the stories he mentions in his books? But how could you—you’re just a character?

Just because I’m fictional doesn’t mean my ideas aren’t real. Come on, even a child knows that.

Yeah, sorry. I really love your little stories, especially the ideas behind them. They seem so simple but have so much to say. Like the one about the money tree with 20-dollar bills for leaves that attracts people to it so they will kill each other around the tree’s base and become its fertiliser.

That? That wasn

Hello? Mr Trout? Kilgore? You there?

That was the strangest thing! It was unbelievable, but the evidence is right there on my screen. Whatever it was, it seems to have stopped all of a sudden, so I don’t see what I can do but get back to writing my article.

Vonnegut recognised the complex relationship between corporation, war, and the exploitation of people and resources

What began as a detached dystopian view of the world in Player Piano became darker and gloomier as time passed. The inaction on the part of the world’s leaders on critical environmental issues was something Vonnegut wrote about both in his fiction as well as in columns and essays. In one article, he wrote, “Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.”

He left no room for doubt on what he felt the cause of the planet’s malaise was. In another article in a magazine called In These Times, he wrote, “Our close cousins the gorillas and orangutans and chimps and gibbons have gotten along just fine all this time while eating raw vegetable matter, whereas we not only prepare hot meals, but have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system in fewer than 200 years, mainly by making thermodynamic whoopee with fossil fuels.” In his stories, Vonnegut also recognised the complex inter-relationship between corporatisation, war and the exploitation of people and resources. He satirised this nasty web in a Kilgore Trout story called The Gutless Wonder, in wh

*o*
Hey!
Wow! Are you back?
Oh, it’s you.
Yes. By the way, what is that mark that appears before you do?

It’s an asshole opening and closing.

Oh, I get it. From that drawing Vonnegut did in Breakfast of Champions.

Not Him—that was me, too. What are you doing, anyway? How come I keep popping up here?

I’m writing a piece on Vonnegut for a magazine on environmental matters.

Here’s what I think the truth is: we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey       — Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey

Yeah, that was one of his pet peeves. Always complaining that the planet was going to the dogs.

You don’t think it is?

No. I know it is. I’ve been to the future, and there’s nothing there. But I shouldn’t be telling you that.

Nothing? Really?

Forget I said anything. What brought me back here?

I was writing about your story The Gutless Wonder.

Oh yeah, the one about the mass murderer.

Well, he was just a pilot who dropped bombs because his country was at war.

Yeah, and killed thousand, perhaps millions. That’s what a mass murderer does. Just because he doesn’t look into the eyes of the people he’s killing doesn’t change that.

I loved the irony of the story. This guy who kills people by the townful is shunned by society not because of his deeds but because he has bad breath. Such a powerful commentary on contemporary values.

It’s all about the advertising, boy. Television is truth. Reality shows are the new reality. And if your TV tells you that bad breath gets you shunned, then bad breath does indeed get you shunned. Don’t matter what you did or di

Damn! He’s gone again! Time to wind this up, anyway. I’ll end with what a little alien in one of Trout’s stories says about a global epidemic: “After the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust and the gratuitous atomic bombing of Nagasaki, not to mention humankind’s poisoning of the air, the waters and the topsoil, your planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of you.” And Vonnegut’s own comment about this from an article titled ‘Last Words for a Century’ that he wrote in Playboy in 1999: “Yes, and the planet will soon run out of petroleum in any case—so our great-grandchildren will inherit an enormous junkyard.” So it goes.

Aniruddha Sengupta is a writer constantly struggling with all manners of temptation presented by his chosen home, Goa

Shadows of modernity

There was a time when the human ability to conjure visions from beyond the domain of everyday experience expressed itself only in tales of the supernatural—in myth, legend and fairy story. Humans once lived in a shadowy world populated by spirits, gods, demons, angels, and phantasmagorical beasts. Magic and mystery were the key forces in nature. Our myths gazed into the past—often to a Golden Age that came to a tragic end, perhaps because of human wickedness or divine capriciousness. Our myths helped to fend off the ever-present darkness on the margins of settled life.

But one day a new light arrived in the village, and the forest, with all its irrational terrors, was cleared to make way for the factory. We were told that magic and mystery would soon be replaced by reason and certainty. Wild nature would be tamed. When we moved from the village to the city, the glories and dangers we imagined no longer belonged to the past, but to a future in which humankind might one day illuminate all the dark corners of the Earth. But even electric light casts shadows, and factory fumes shroud us in a new kind of darkness. In the interplay of new forms of light and dark, good and evil, science fiction finds its wellspring.

In the yoking of science—with its methodical mastery of matter—to the freedom and flight of fiction, science fiction walks a tightrope between the possible and the fanciful—something not usually expected of myth. This creative tension finds expression in three broad and overlapping ways of seeing. Science fiction can manifest itself as a lens with which to examine the possibilities latent in an idea or technology, a funhouse mirror with which to reflect society or history, or a kaleidoscope with which to experience a sensory immersion in an alien realm.

Isaac Asimov’s body of work is exemplary of the first, and some might say purest, form of science fiction—a lens that brings into focus the fuzzy implications of science and technology. Here, the science really is central, and individual human characters often seem no more than vehicles for the unfolding conceptual drama.

In the Robot series, Asimov explores the moral and ethical consequences of the Three Laws of Robotics. (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. (2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. Asimov’s robots—portrayed as the epitome of rationality—contend with the inevitable conflicts and paradoxes that arise from a seemingly simple set of laws. What constitutes harm? What constitutes inaction? What should robots do if humans attempt to harm each other? And how can the robots be certain that the laws are in conflict? These conflicts culminate in the novel Robots and Empire, in which a robot with unique telepathic powers, R Giskard Reventlov, divines a new law—the Zeroth Law—which places the concerns of humanity above those of individual humans: a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. The Zeroth Law is not programmed into Giskard—it simply emerges in him—but in trying to rationally decide whether it will be good for humanity or not he ends up destroying his positronic brain. In this fatally consuming struggle we can see echoes of the tortured life of the mathematical genius Kurt Godel. Godel may have been driven mad by his logical proof that logic itself must either be inconsistent or incomplete. The robot Giskard, before he dies, passes on the Zeroth law—and his telepathic powers of persuasion—to another robot, R Daneel Olivaw, who is entrusted with the task of being caretaker of humanity as it pushes beyond Earth to colonize the galaxy.

In Asimov’s Foundation series, human society has long since spanned the galaxy, and we follow the legacy of a mathematician, Hari Seldon, who has developed the laws of psychohistory—a combination of history, sociology and statistics used to make predictions about large groups of people. Seldon’s laws predicted that the Galactic Empire would collapse, leading to a period of barbarism lasting 30,000 years. Horrified, Seldon sets up two Foundations that are to strategically intervene in the events of the galaxy, reducing the period of barbarism to “just” 1,000 years. The last book in the series, Foundation and Earth, even links the story with the Robot series, making explicit the connections between the aims of psychohistory and the Zeroth Law of Robotics. In taking a view of future history that stretches into the tens of thousands of years, Asimov’s lens focuses not on any particular technology, but on scientific rationality itself. Can humans and their technologies (robots) be used to take care of an abstraction—humanity? And who or what gets sacrificed for the “greater common good”?

Looking outward through a lens typically does not lend itself to much in the way of introspection. For this purpose we have mirrors. The 20th Century’s great genre-crossing works of dystopianism—Brave New World and 1984—stand as canonical examples of the mirror style of science fiction. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the state religion is Fordism, inspired by Henry Ford’s assembly line—a system based on mass production, a rigid chemically controlled caste system, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. Any desires that cannot be met in these ways can be assuaged with the wonder-drug soma. But those who dare to be dissatisfied with their lot in life are cast into exile. In George Orwell’s 1984, a police state perpetually at war is controlled by an omnipotent Party watched over by the deified and omnipresent leader, Big Brother. It is a nightmarish world of constant surveillance, torture, paranoia, servility, and betrayal. Orwell apprehended our fears will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us. During the Cold War, the world seemed to be presented with two opposed visions—the cruel totalitarianism represented by the Soviet Union, or the vampiric seduction represented by Western consumerist capitalism. The logical conclusion of one would give us Big Brother, and that of the other would be Fordism. Like Old Testament prophets of doom, Huxley and Orwell are inviting us to look within ourselves to root out the seeds of such awful destinies. In the US, we seem to be witnessing the merging of these two means of control. The increasingly militarized police force beats back the protesters and dissidents—those for whom freedom means more than mass-produced hamburgers and shiny electronic toys.

George Orwell apprehended our fears will ruin us and Aldox Huxley apprehended our desires will ruin us. During the Cold War the world seemed to be represented by these two opposed visions

But light need not only be used for practical purposes. Most science fiction, it must be said, does not take itself so seriously as to focus too sharply on any single moral, political or technological idea. Rather than haranguing us with portentous warnings about our present or our future, the kaleidoscopic aesthetic presents a dazzling hodge-podge. Many people enjoy science fiction for no better reason than its grand canvas of spaceships, androids, aliens, ray guns, and intrepid humans dashing about the planet or the universe on an adventure of limited pedagogical value. A lesson might conceivably be derived from a movie like Predator or Alien but it seems as if the point of such movies is the sheer visceral thrill engendered in the watching. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its dark implications for malevolent artificial intelligence, is more an audiovisual adventure than a conceptual exploration: how else can we explain the power of the psychedelic dreamscape with which the film ends? This kind of interpretation seems especially true of a movie like The Fifth Element, a giddy ride through a future that seems contrived purely for sensory stimulation. Even the quasi-mystical overtones in the plot appear kitschy and ironic. If we refrain from intellectualising our experience of science fiction, we can appreciate the effervescence and inventiveness of an art form that isn’t necessarily about anything.

Most sci-fi does not take itself so seriously as to focus too sharply on any single moral, political or technological idea

Some works of science fiction, however, cannot be said to fit neatly into any of the above categories. They are transcendental, in that they encompass all of the categories, creating an emergent whole that confounds easy pigeonholing. The film, The Matrix, is emblematic of this form. It uses the hacker aesthetic of the Internet Age as a springboard from which to launch into a stylised war between humans and rogue machines—machines that were once designed to serve humans, but later enslaved them in an illusory virtual world: the matrix. But the Matrix is also a mystical story of self-discovery and personal liberation, taking on an emancipatory logic found in many religions. Neo’s liberation from his womb-like prison is the first step on the road to discovering that he is the One—a man prophesied to end the war and transform the matrix itself. In this he is like the Buddha, attaining Nirvana and spreading his revolutionary message throughout the world. He is also a Messianic figure, dying and then being reborn for the salvation of the enslaved. But even this does not fully capture the multiplicity of messages latent in The Matrix. If emancipation means unplugging from a comfortable world and awakening to a real world of war and desolation, then The Matrix can also be read as a cry for left-wing revolution in the modern post-industrial world: unplug from the matrix of consumption, and rise up against those who see us merely as a source of fuel. Whether the filmmakers intended any or all of these interpretations is irrelevant. For a generation of young people, The Matrix was a rite of passage: for those who chose that path, it was an initiation into a world that could be read as a matrix of symbols.

Symbolism also plays a role in the epic television series Battlestar Galactica, but that role is far more murky. The overarching plot bears a vague resemblance to the biblical exodus, in which the Israelites wandered through the wilderness in search of the Promised Land. There are also references to Greek mythology—there are important characters with names like Hera and Athena. Humanity has been all but exterminated by the Cylons—a race of renegade robots created long before by humans. The remnant of the destroyed Twelve Colonies of humanity—named after the 12 signs of the zodiac—band together as a flotilla searching for a new homeland. In their quest for a home planet they turn to ancient prophesies about a 13th colony, Earth. While the symbolic mysteries unfold and baffle, the series also presents us with less ethereal—but no less engaging—debates on the nature of democracy and justice, on the role of the armed forces during crisis, and on racial profiling and discrimination. The central plot element that injects an unprecedented vitality to these debates is the discovery that the human population has been infiltrated by a group of Cylons indistinguishable from humans.

Unlike the kind of science fiction in which the enemy is readily identifiable, the humans in Battlestar Galactica are also at least partly at war with themselves. The resonance with the era of “with us or against us”, Homeland Security and terrorist sleeper cells is undeniable, and yet Battlestar Galactica does not lend itself to easy moral, political, philosophical or religious lessons. What you glean from the series depends to a great extent on which characters you choose to focus on, or which symbols you attempt to decipher, and in this complexity its closest equivalent is perhaps the Mahabharata.

The quintessential example of transcendental, mystical science fiction is the original Star Wars trilogy—the series that ushered in a golden era of popular science fiction filmmaking in the 1980s. From the outset it appears to go against standard science fiction protocol. It is not set in a future Planet Earth, but “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. It features grand battles between good and evil, but it resists any identification of these conflicts with contemporary political questions. And though it has all the riotous jazziness of pastiche—part Western, part Japanese samurai story, part World War II campaign against Nazi SS officers—it has an emotional core that goes beyond cinematic thrill-seeking while simultaneously satisfying that urge. Star Wars occupies a special place in the history of popular science fiction: it’s a blockbuster that paints a mythic story on a galactic canvas. It is no surprise that Joseph Campbell—the preeminent scholar of world mythology—was a major influence on its creator, George Lucas.

At times, it may seem that in mythologically tinged science fiction, we have all but forgotten the word “science”. Recalling a key scene from the first film (Episode IV), will help us restore the link. Luke Skywalker, trying to target a vulnerability in the Death Star, hears the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobe, telling him to use the Force, rather than the computer targeting system. In doing so, Luke succeeds where others who used their computers failed—using the Force allows him to destroy the Death Star. One can’t help but interpret this climax as a momentary turning away from all that is technological and robotic. The forces of evil with their martial technologies are captained by Darth Vader —“more machine now than man”—while the forces of good are lead by a scruffy band of rebels and an old man espousing a “sad devotion to that ancient religion”. Even someone fully embedded in the world of technology—sitting in its very cockpit—has a choice regarding whether or not to fully submit to the machine.

In showing us what our lenses, mirrors and kaleidoscopes are capable of, science fiction invites us to wonder what we humans are capable of, if only we are brave enough “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

Yohan J John is post-doctoral research associate at Boston University’s Neural System Lab

Infinite sphere

Science in the West is a consequence of the revolt against the bullying of the Christian Church. The Church said God created everything in a week and anyone who questions this is a sinner who must be punished severely. This provoked the thinking types, who wondered how it all happened, when did it begin, why so many life forms were created, is Earth the centre of the universe, why does the apple fall? These mind games were originally undercover activities, but they produced geniuses like Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and many more. Science became a respectable pursuit as the power of the Church declined.

But the conflict did not end. There are now many fundamentalist sects whose minds are trapped in Old Testament times. There are also the compromisers who say that religion is very scientific. And there are the scientist sects which ridicule religion and claim that God is a delusion and everything is the result of only evolution. The “God Delusion” evolutionists are as noisy and aggressive as creationists. An Indian scientist who does his morning prayer ritual and then goes to his laboratory will be seen as weird by these Western sects. As science and technology progressed and the positive and negative consequences spread globally, questions began to be asked. What next? What will be the immediate and distant future? How will science and technology affect human relationships? What will be the consequences of the pollution of the atmosphere and water? How will viruses adapt and evolve to fight medical advances?

This wonder about the future has produced science fiction that extrapolates sci-tech developments to a possible future, on Earth and in space. Science fantasy goes beyond sci-tech extrapolations. But science and technology are accelerating so fast that science fiction and fantasy become obsolete within a few years. Science fiction of even the 1980s did not anticipate mobile phones and SMS lingo, laptops, ipad and icloud, Facebook, consumerism and the organised dumbing down by the media, and deformed babies caused by air and water pollution.

The only science fiction that seems to be heading for reality is that of The Time Machine by H G Wells, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell. The world is already in Wellsian time when Homo sapiens are divided into a majority of stupid Eloi and the minority Morlocks who feed on the Eloi and keep them entertained.

Science fiction, like crime thrillers, is about action. So there is no futuristic speculation about quiet, solitary figures such as writers or artists and how or what they would create, and how literary and artistic language will change. Could an Indian 100 years ago have made sense of this current language of a slum teenager: “Tera kya problem hai? Kayku tension leta hai? Enjoy, yaar! Kuchh trouble hoga na, to apunko SMS kar, ya missed call de! Apun sab fixing karega!” Certainly not. So, what will teenage language be 50 years from now? How will writers churn out stories, plays or poems when pen, paper and keyboards have disappeared? Will classics of the past be written by scholarly computers into contemporary languages?

There is no sci-fi about trees, flowers, fruits. But it cannot be ruled out. Imagine a bedroom full of genetically modified potted plants swaying and glowing to the rhythm of a mating human couple. Perhaps the plants can be connected to music systems, which convert their swaying into a symphony, raga or rock ’n’ roll. We know that trees/plants enjoy music and have extrasensory perception—it was discovered by the genius polymath and sci-fi writer Jagdish Chandra Bose a century ago—and music is now used in grain fields and greenhouses to cheer up the plants and increase their output.

Science fiction is about action. There is no speculation about quiet, solitary figures like writers and artists

To speculate about artists of the future, when canvases and paints are obsolete, is a little easier. The painter stands before a large electronic screen, runs an electronic brush on the screen and presses colour buttons. When the painting is finished he e-mails it to an art dealer, several art critics and art galleries. In the homes of buyers the painting appears as an image on electronic walls. The painting can be switched on or off, and enlarged or miniaturised. The comments of art critics flash below the painting. The viewer stares at the screen and blinks eyelids fast. A choice of music appears on the screen. The viewer focuses on one and blinks. The music starts. It is impossible to predict the music of the future, but one can play a mind game. Imagine the combination of a Picasso and jazz, Mona Lisa and opera star Maria Callas or Kiri Te Kanawa, a Mughal painting and the awesome Begum Akhtar. Sculptures too will be 3D images, or can be converted into solid pieces by nanotechnology. Will these predictions be obsolete by 2025?

What about mythology, a field ridiculed by Western scientists as extravagant fantasy? Science fiction becomes quickly redundant, but mythology has survived for thousands of years and will continue into the distant future. Why?

Sci-fi quickly becomes redundant. But mythology has survived for thousands of years

According to Western beliefs, there was no science in the ancient past. Therefore, there cannot be science fiction. This is ridiculous fundamentalism. Ancient civilisations built awesome pyramids, temples, palaces, fortresses, planned cities with water supply and plumbing. They had agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, trade by land or sea routes, coinage, art, doctors and medicine and surgery, astrologers, transport systems, science of warfare and weapons and armour, kitchenware and the art of cooking which required judging the chemical consequences of food items.

All this could not have been possible without an understanding of maths, physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, botany, astronomy, design and manufacture of complex tools. There were no science journals then where these ideas could be written in “proper” scientific form. The ancients were not interested in theory, but in the down-to-earth application of ideas. The ancients were lateral-thinking practical people.

According to Western belief, ancient past was devoid of science, and therefore of science fiction. This is fundamentalism

Mythology has flying humans, invincible armour, mind-controlled weapons, flying machines, spaceships and space warfare, colonies on other planets, submarine cities, talking trees and animals, wormholes through which deities did instant travel over long distances, parallel universes, mass manufacture of babies (100 Kauravas), robots and artificial intelligence, fetus learning (Abhimanyu and Ashtavakra), futurology, telepathy, environmental concerns, and much more. If the ancients didn’t have science how did they conceive these ideas, some of which can be implemented now and some are still in the distant future? If modern science fiction writers and sci-tech specialists cannot think more than 20 years ahead, how did the ancients think in terms of thousands of years? It is an awesome mystery that requires serious scientific investigation.

Are mythologies memories of a very distant past which ended with a catastrophe on Earth? Only small groups of humans survived. Deprived of all science and technology, they started the evolutionary process again some 20,000 years ago. But their memories of the glorious ancient past were transmitted from generation to generation until they could be written down as what is now called mythology. Ridiculous idea? Where is the archaeological evidence of this past? Well …

Consider another possibility: Earth is invaded by aliens from a distant solar system. They created bio-robots (who later called themselves Homo sapiens), stayed around for a while to speed up the evolutionary process, and then departed. Are mythologies records of these aliens?

Now consider this distant future. Earthlings colonise Moon, Mars and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Because of different gravity and environmental conditions, the body structure of humans changes. It is impossible to travel back to Earth conditions. Over decades and centuries the colonisers become shorter or taller, their skin changes, the eyes evolve to cope with radiation. Sexual mating, pregnancy, and baby delivery will be different in the varied gravity conditions. The plants and animals taken there from Earth will also evolve differently.

Then there is a catastrophe on Earth. All life on land is destroyed and Earth is entirely under water, except some mountain tops on which a few survivors have sought shelter. A new evolutionary process begins. Meanwhile, memories of Earth civilisations will become mythologies in space colonies. New deities will be added to the old folklore—Einstein, Gandhi, Rajinikanth, Bruce Lee and many others. Surely, these mythologies too will be ridiculed by scientific sceptics.

The Big Bang, which started it all, happened nearly 14 billion years ago. The end of the universe, or the Big Crunch, is many billions of years ahead, long after Sun has become a white dwarf. Time will come to an end. Then the whole evolutionary process will begin again with another Big Bang. Imagine the Big Bangs, Big Crunches and evolution going on in an infinite number of parallel universes.

All this brooding brings to mind the last lines of a poem by physics genius Richard Feynman: “I, a universe of atoms,/ An atom in the universe.” Could our universe be having similar thoughts about its existence among infinite universes? Only God, or the God Delusion, knows.

Dilip Raote is a journalist and sci-fi buff

The missing

In 1896, Jagdish Chandra Bose wrote a bilingual science fiction story, Nirrudeshar Kahini (The Story of the Missing). The main narrative is in Bangla, but the scientific material is in English. The story is about a man who calms a storm at sea by pouring a bottle of hair oil on the troubled waters.

Hair oil? Yes. In 1891, Hemendramohan Bose, an entrepreneur, created the Kuntalini Puruskar Short-Story Competition. It was open to all, with only one condition. The stories had to refer to his Kuntalini hair oil in some essential way. Bose submitted Nirrudeshar Kahini, won the prize, thereby joining an illustrious pantheon of past winners like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Mankumari Bose and Probhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay.

The story offers another reason for the hair oil. The male narrator explains that due to a protracted illness, he has lost most of his hair, except for a few “islands”. Before he embarks on a recuperative sea voyage to Ceylon, his daughter gifts him a bottle of Kuntalini hair oil.

The oil may or may not have been hair-raising, but Bose’s story was a brilliant beginning for desi sci-fi. It was tongue-in-cheek and quoted snippets from the Scientific American. It anticipated chaos theory’s butterfly effect, where tiny changes in initial conditions can have profound global effects. Perhaps Bose was sensitised to the phenomenon from his remarkable work on the measurement of tiny changes in plant growth.



Bose’s story had all the elements that would characterise western sci-fi in the 1930-1950s (the so-called golden-age): an idea-centric plot with not much emphasis on characterisation or style, a secular world-view, the suggestion that science could solve almost any problem, and an author with professional expertise in science. These were new things in Bose’s time.

Unfortunately, some hundred years later, we see similar stories. The robots are Asimovian robots, time-travel is Wellsian time-travel and mad scientists are desified Frankensteins. The problems are technical problems and not social, cultural or emotional ones. Often written by well-meaning scientists and engineers, their social conservatism gets reflected in the stories. Science is assumed to be pan-cultural and objective, independent of establishment values or vested interests.

Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952) is credited for the first literary use of the chaos theory’s butterfly effect, though J C Bose’s Niruddehser Kahini anticipated the phenomenon 56 years earlier

As in Bose’s time, hair-oil entrepreneurs and prize competitions are few and far between. Desi sci-fi is published either by the Children’s Book Trust, assorted childrens’ magazines or the occasional young author anthology. Most of the stories written for children are nauseatingly bland, didactic and bow-tied with a safe moral.

Bose was justly proud of his story, and included a rewritten version in his collection Abyukta (1921). The second version is solely in Bangla. The descriptions are more filled out, the pace more leisurely. The name Kuntalini hair oil was changed to Kuntal Keshori. But Bose also unraveled his most significant achievement by giving the hair oil a supernatural origin. He added a back story for the hair oil, involving a balding lion, an English Circus manager, and a sanyasin who conjures up the formula in a dream. The reason the hair oil calms the storm has nothing to do with science and everything to do with magic. Perhaps Bose had been gripped by nationalistic fervor. The 1921 version is more about an oriental using native magic to befuddle firang science than about the effect of small actions.

In a later version  J C Bose removed the science of the effect of small actions fromNiruddesher Kahini and replaced it with reasoning drawn from magic

This retrogressive mysticism is also seen in desi sci-fi. Vedic crystals, mantras and reborn sages are standard desi ropes. We have stories where aliens can be contacted by broadcasting “OM” sound waves because as the Indian scientist explains in the smash-hit Koi Mil Gaya, “it is a Hindu religious word containing all the vibrations of the Universe”. The future is mostly a matter of discovering the glorious (Hindu) past. The future in these stories is not invented or made, but revealed. Pradip Ghosh’s novel A Long Day’s Night (2002), a fine realist story about an IIT-Kanpur professor’s day-long struggles to fix an expensive American spectroscope, offers an example of this strange predilection; at the novel’s end, the author uses the professor as a mouthpiece to present a thermodynamic defense of pre-determination.

After Bose’s great story, we missed an opportunity. But we’ve begun to regain lost ground. The true inheritors of Bose’s 1896 story are works like Amitav Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome, Lokenath Bhattacharya’s The Virgin Fish of Babughat, Premendra Mitra’s short fiction, films like Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi and S P Jananathan’s Tamil movie E. Some of our best speculative stories come from Urdu and can be sampled in the works of authors like Surendra Prakash, Khalida Asghar and Hasan Manzar. There’s also a new generation of writers. Perhaps there is, at this very moment, a future Bose scribbling away at what is missing.

Anil Menon is a science fiction writer