{"id":15746,"date":"2021-06-27T11:44:55","date_gmt":"2021-06-27T06:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=15746"},"modified":"2021-05-14T11:36:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T06:06:39","slug":"strange-worlds-strange-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2021\/06\/27\/strange-worlds-strange-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Worlds! Strange Times!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(edited by) Vinayak Varma<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!\u00a0
P.S. Loved it so much that I sent it to three unsuspecting folks!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a time when I used to only read Indian fiction, because I found it more relatable. The only genre that was an exception was science fiction. And now, we have an Indian sci-fi anthology. From a walking Taj Mahal to zombies in Chennai, it has amazing diversity of context and actual storytelling. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[370,6004,6007,6009],"tags":[6408,6409],"class_list":["post-15746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-favourites","category-fiction","category-science-speculative-fiction","tag-strange-worlds-strange-times","tag-vinayak-varma"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15746"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15836,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15746\/revisions\/15836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}