(edited by) Vinayak Varma
I think I’ll just gush, because this, I guess, is what the entire “kid in a candy store” feeling is like! But to begin with, I have to confess I didn’t read the first 20 pages! It was quite a coincidence that a book with this title mysteriously arrived without them. That meant that I missed the Manjula Padmanabhan story, and dove haphazardly into the Srinath Perur one. Jerry Pinto made me gaze up at the stars again with a delightfully profound take on “outer space and inner space” – a phrase that Vandana Singh uses in the last story in the book.
Zac O’Yeah manages to catch Bluru’s little idiosyncrasies superbly and had me cackling away for quite a while. And then Rashmi Ruth Devadasan does the same to Chennai (?) with a dose of zombies. Vinayak Varma, who needs to be thanked separately for stitching this all up together, does a neat border town story with sniper shots at saffron and creation!
And there’s a (translated) J.C Bose story. Oh yes, the very same, and a fascinating back story (actually stories) on how this work came to be. I have never been much into comics (though recently Kavalier & Clay did make me think deeply on the subject) but Sunando C’s few pages of work were fascinating! A walking Taj Mahal, and telekinesis – Indrapramit Das’ imagination is evident. Shalini Srinivasan gives us a dose of reality – a parallel one, that is. And to end it all, Vandana Singh writes a brilliant story involving dimensionality (I was reminded of Liu Cixin’s sophons)
What made me love the book was the sheer diversity of texture and context. All the stories have an equal grounding in some part/aspect of India as they do in science/speculative fiction. And it’s almost as if the writers have let themselves go at it in total abandon. Delightful and amazing indeed!
P.S. Loved it so much that I sent it to three unsuspecting folks!
One thought on “Strange Worlds! Strange Times!”