Category: Science Fiction
Publisher: Hachette India
Rights: World rights available
These twenty-four stories represent Manjula Padmanabhan’s science fiction shorts, from 2024 to 1984. All but five have already appeared in print, in books or magazines. They range from the cheeky Talkers to the creepy Adaptation, from the lightly philosophical Empty Glass to the wryly mythological Other Woman.
The stories appear in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent – The Pain Merchant – and ending with A Government of India Undertaking. Strict chronology has been altered slightly in order to space out darker tales between milder ones.
Only a few of these stories qualify as “hard” SF of the time-travel and bug-eyed monsters kind. Flexi-Time, for instance, features mysterious aliens who have apparently taken over the Earth without clearly revealing themselves. The story is told from the perspective of a mild-mannered Indian scientist who is chosen by the aliens to be their interlocutor. What might have been a standard space opera becomes instead a light-hearted study of cultural stereotypes here on earth.
Humour and social commentary run through several stories. In Upgrade, for instance, recently widowed Mrs Ganapathy is introduced by her well-meaning grand-daughter to a robotic caretaker. The machine is meant to take the place of the family members who all live far away. The dénouement is amusing but the story points directly to the all-too-real crisis of loneliness and isolation amongst the elderly everywhere in the world. In Gandhi Toxin, a distant relative of Mahatma Gandhi’s creates a serum that causes “toxic” levels of pacifism to break out in the world, causing severe anguish to tyrants and despots.
In its own way, the collection brings together many different strands of the author’s life who thinks of herself as a cultural hybrid, on account traveling the world with her diplomat parents, as a child. Happy to be rootless, she lives in the US with a part-time home in New Delhi.
The author: Manjula Padmanabhan