Love, virtually: about a scene from Spike Jonze’s Her

End-of-year and beginning-of-year lists can be dreary things, but recently I saw an online poll that didn’t restrict itself to “Name your favourite films”. It asked supplementary questions, aimed at building a conversation about movies and contemporary life. Among these: what was the most striking or emblematic image (or scene) you saw in a film last year?

Even this question is reductive in its own way – it is hardly possible to “rank” all the memorable moments from films I watched in 2014. But Spike Jonze’s futuristic Her has a scene that has stayed with me over the past 12 months. It involves two people in an intimate situation (watch it out of context with the sound turned off and you think you can guess what is going on), but unable to interact at a human level because a machine is overseeing and directing what they do.

That makes Her sound like a horror film, and indeed the opening title appears in a serrated font, in a neon white against a black background, with a creepy soundtrack. It is tempting to see the “her” of the title – a conscious, intelligent Operating System called Samantha, with whom a man named Theodore develops a deep emotional bond – as a predatory ghost in the machine, a version of the girl crawling out of the TV screen in Ringu. But this film is not so easily classified. It can be described as a bone-chilling romance (there’s a poster blurb for you) between a man and a machine, but in another sense it is a love story between two operating systems or facilitators who make life easier for others by simulating emotion. (Theodore is human all right – nebbish, a little lost in person – but his job involves writing intimate letters on behalf of other people who don’t know how to express themselves.) It is also a version of the Pinocchio tale ("what is it like to be alive in that room just now?" Samantha asks from her virtual plane) and a logical step forward in this sense from Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. And it is about how relationships, and attitudes to relationships, are changing in a tech-dependent world.

In the bleak scene I’m talking about, Theodore agrees to an arrangement where a real-world woman fills in as the operating system’s “body” so that he and Samantha can at least come close to making physical love. If this strange ménage-a-trois is to work, it is important that Theodore doesn’t address the human woman Isabella directly, or even acknowledge her reality; she must remain a passive medium. Dazed by the weirdness of the situation, though, he forgets this: when Isabella arrives at his door, he reflexively starts talking to her, introducing himself, and the look she gives him is that of a deer caught in a firestorm. For a few seconds – before he remembers to give Isabella the apparatus that will enable Samantha to “plug in” – here are two flesh-and-blood people who have no idea how to deal with each other because there is no machine between them, shepherding the encounter. This is awkward taken to a whole new dimension.

All this is happening in 2025. It's puzzling to find a film set in the very near future; that isn’t how science-fiction usually works. But part of the point is that technology is now altering our lives and behaviour more rapidly than ever before. A couple of decades ago, artificial intelligence was still a distant, theoretical enough concept for us to feel we couldn’t seriously be affected by it on a daily basis. Today, smart devices and Apps have anthropomorphised “personalities”, including human names and voices, and one is aware that a lot more may happen in 10 years.

Watching the threesome scene, I thought of human-facilitator-human relationships of the present day: about the gap between chatty, over-familiar interactions on a social-media page (between people who might not know each other well in the “real” world) and the more tentative conversations that might occur if those same people happen to run into each other offline, exposed without their facilitators. But it is easy to play prophet of doom, to make noises about how technology is building cocoons and disconnecting us from each other. So perhaps I should also - in the New Year spirit - note the film's brighter passages, such as a scene on a beach where groups of people are lazing about, chatting, sun-bathing, their gadgets (temporarily at least) ignored. Or blink-and-miss moments like the one where Theodore, walking down a road, sneezes and a woman nearby says a quick “Bless you”, and it comes as a surprise to find that in a world where people are always chattering at their operating systems, old-fashioned displays of etiquette are possible too.

[From my Business Standard column]

Clifford Simak, an army of phones and a new skirmish for our times

Reading this news item about cellphones being set to outnumber human beings somehow reminded me of a 1950 short story titled “Skirmish”, by the great Clifford Simak. (It is included in this brilliant science-fiction anthology, and in a few other collections.) Briefly: the story is about a newspaper reporter named Joe Crane – your average Joe – who discovers that small, machine-like aliens from another planet are scouting earth with the intention of “freeing” their brethren – the earth machines that are being controlled and held in slavery by humans. The problem for Joe, as he slowly begins to piece things together, is that he alone is in possession of this information and has no tangible proof of it: if he tried to take it to the authorities, he would be laughed out of the room, treated as a drunk or a potential psycho.

Even as he tries to figure out why he was the chosen one for the aliens’ reconnaissance, and weighs the limited options available to him, the walls are closing in; his typewriter has acquired a mind of its own – always a bothersome development for a writer with deadlines – and is turning out reports that read thus:

A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity, […] asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city. A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its “owner”, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.

The machines-vs-humans theme has of course been very popular in sci-fi for decades, including recently in the Terminator films. But there is a raw, uncomplicated immediacy in this Simak story, which is so often the case with science-fiction of the 30s and 40s, written by brilliant young visionaries who weren’t taken seriously by “literary” writers, for magazines with such names as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction and Fantastic Adventures, and in a world where technology was primitive by our standards. In a foreword to the anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, Isaac Asimov noted how strange it felt when he was asked to write a serious opinion piece about the possibility of Moon-colonization for a "respectable" publication (the New York Times) when, just 25 years earlier, “the colonization of the Moon was strictly a subject for pulp magazines with garish covers. It was don’t-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk literature. It was don’t-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush literature. Most of all, it was escape literature”. The sense of wonder, Asimov said, was going out of sci-fi by the late 1960s because so much that had once existed purely in the terrain of imagination – lurid imagination at that – was coming true, much too quickly.

I don’t know how many sci-fi writers of the 1940s envisioned that just over half a century later a majority of humans on the planet would have access, or potential access, to small, wireless phones on which one could also watch movies or play games; or that there would be BILLIONS of these things around, blinking sinisterly, by the early 2000s. Which brings me to one reason why I like “Skirmish” so much: I sometimes feel a bit like Joe Crane in that story. To put it simply, many of the humans around me have been colonised by their smart-phones and I feel like I’m the only one in the know.

(Mild spoiler alert) Simak’s story ends with Joe realising that the best hope is for him, single-handed though he is, to give the machine-aliens – small metallic creatures that have overrun his house – a bigger fight than they bargained for; to make this initial, testing-the-waters encounter a psychologically costly one that leads them to expect organised resistance from the rest of the human species when time comes for full-scale battle.

His fingers closed around a length of pipe. He hefted it in his hand – it was a handy and effective club.

There will be others later, he thought. And they may think of something better. But this is the first skirmish and I will fall back in the best order that I can.

He held the pipe at the ready.

“Well, gentlemen?” he said.

If you ever chance to be in the Saket vicinity and see a wild-eyed messiah walking down the road with cricket bat in hand and many smashed iPhones in his wake, do come across and say hello.

The time traveller's trail

[Did this for Forbes Life magazine – some thoughts on time travel in literature]

Chris Marker’s great short film La Jetee – made almost entirely of still pictures – ends with a man, a time-traveller, choosing not to seek refuge in a sterile, “pacified” future but to return instead to the war-torn world of his childhood, where he may once again see a face that has long obsessed him. Of course, the whole thing ends in tragedy, and the narrative closes with the frisson-creating line “He knew at last that there was no escape from time…”

That scene touches on the Temporal Paradox – a logical conundrum built into any such narrative – but it is also about the haunting power of memory and the need to relive. These are key components of the best time-travel stories, and they are both present in Stephen King’s sprawling novel 11.22.63. The date in that title is seared into the consciousness of any American above a certain age, and a short blurb would say the book is about a man traveling to the past to try and prevent the Kennedy assassination – but that would be reductive. This tense thriller plays with such ideas as the Butterfly Effect (what if saving the president alters the future in many other ways that can’t yet be imagined?), but I think it came equally from King’s desire to simply revisit the world of his own childhood and to imagine what it might look like to someone who never experienced it firsthand. The protagonist’s first tangible sensation of 1958 is the wholesome taste of beer, and other details build up, with references to advertisements, TV shows, popular culture and the social mores and language of the time. But alongside nostalgia, there is caution against idealising an old way of life.

King’s novel is a recent entry in one of science fiction’s most popular sub-genres, one that went mainstream more than a century ago with H G Wells’s The Time Machine, about an inventor going nearly a million years into the future and discovering (rather like someone watching Karan Johar’s coffee show alongside a Bigg Boss episode) that humanity has branched off into two sub-species, one effete, the other vicious. The social commentary here is occasionally simplistic, but as so often with Wells’s work (The Country of the Blind and The War of the Worlds being other examples), one must remember that he was a pioneering fiction writer operating in a field that had scarcely been touched at the time. Even so, predating The Time Machine by 50 years was another classic that involved a different form of time travel: Charles Dickens’ s A Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Scrooge is shown visions of his past and future – “shadows of what may be” – in the hope that he changes his miserly ways. Like Wells’s story, this is a cautionary tale, but a more intimate, interior one.

A real-life figure who has often been the subject of time travel in fiction is Jack the Ripper, and it is easy enough to see why. The Ripper’s killings were not – by serial-killer standards – unusually savage or numerous, but he was never caught or identified despite operating in a heavily policed area, and so the story lends itself to supernatural renderings, premised around such ideas as invisibility or immortality attained through blood sacrifice; there was even a Star Trek episode, “Wolf in the Fold”, where the Starship Enterprise crew encounters the Ripper as a woman-loathing spirit that has persisted for hundreds of years!

That episode was written by Robert Bloch, whose contribution to Harlan Ellison’s famous anthology Dangerous Visions toys – literally – with the serial killer as an unwilling time traveller. “A Toy for Juliette” presents a delightfully morbid scenario: in a dystopian future, a sadistic young lady awaits as her grandfather brings her humans from the distant past, scared and disoriented people whom she can torture for fun. But what happens when one of these living “dolls” turns out to be more than she bargained for, an anonymous Victorian gent from 1888 carrying a small black bag?

As it turned out, Ellison was so stimulated by Bloch’s story that he himself wrote a sequel to it, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”, which continues Jack’s adventures in the futuristic City, and eventually suggests that even the worst evils of our time may pale compared to what the future brings. But time travel doesn’t have to belong in the realm of futuristic fiction: sometimes, it can be built into the very form of a novel otherwise set in a recognizable world. For instance, F Scott Fitzgerald's novella The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about a man who lives his life backward from old age to infancy, while Martin Amis’s much more complex Time’s Arrow tells the life-story of a concentration-camp doctor in reverse chronology, so that this man – in his own reinterpretation of events – becomes not a murderer but a life-giver, who brings dead Jews to life and eventually creates a new race. Here, time travel becomes a form of expiation or possibly a comment on how people can rationalise their actions. (Incidentally Amis’s book makes an intriguing double bill with Philip Roth’s alternative-history The Plot Against America, in which the Jewish-American Roth revisits the world of his childhood - much like Stephen King did in 11.22.63 - with one crucial difference: the pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh has become US president during WWII.)

Of course, temporal paradoxes can strike even when authors are not consciously setting out to write about them. As I mentioned in this piece, Kavita Kane’s The Outcast’s Queen has the “then vs now” feel of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with the author going to ancient Hastinapura and confronting various characters with her modern wisdom and moral sense. Many such stories are essentially about wish-fulfillment, but then that is the allure of so much fiction anyway. As Salman Rushdie once put it, writing is a way of keeping a hold on the many things that keep slipping, like sand, through our fingers. Perhaps this is another way of saying that nearly all writing is on some level a form of time-travelling.

[Some earlier thematic columns for Forbes Life: popular science, satire and black comedy, true crime]

Professor Shonku and the sceptical scientists

[From my Sunday Guardian column]

Leading scientists and science writers often express irritation with what they see as unscientific, “anything goes” sci-fi writing – stories where outlandish scenarios are postulated just for plot convenience, with no heed to the laws of physics and biology. For instance, J B S Haldane and Stephen Jay Gould have written separate essays on the subject of optimum size in living creatures – the fact that a large change in an animal’s size inevitably carries with it a change in shape or form (if the new species is to survive for any reasonable period). When a creature grows in length while retaining the same basic shape, its volume will grow much more rapidly than its surface area: if it becomes thrice as tall, the surface will increase nine times but the weight will increase 27 times. Because of this discrepancy, any abnormal growth would cause problems in body functions such as respiration and digestion.

In this context, both Haldane and Gould make references to fantasy literature. Commenting on the giants Pope and Pagan from an illustrated edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, Haldane good-naturedly points out that if those monsters were ten times taller than regular humans, their body weight would be a thousand times greater, and their thigh-bones would break. “This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.”

Gould is more cutting. The creators of many science-fiction stories seem to have no inkling of the relationship between size and shape, he remarks. The miniature people of films like Dr Cyclops and Bride of Frankenstein “behave just like their counterparts of normal dimensions – they fall off cliffs or down stairs with resounding thuds, they wield weapons and swim with Olympic agility…and giant insects continue to fly and walk up walls”. But actually, a two-inch person’s experience of the texture of water and air – and the sheer business of moving about – would be very different from ours. And the wings of an insect several feet long would never be able to carry the creature’s weight.

I suspect Haldane and Gould would not have approved of the adventures of Professor Shonku, one of Satyajit Ray’s most delightful literary creations – especially the story where Shonku travels to Norway and discovers that another professor has captured a number of famous people and reduced them to a tenth of their size. But while I respect the concerns of the real-life scientists, the Shonku universe never fails to enthrall me. Even if these stories don’t stand up to the most rigorous tests applied to sci-fi, there’s no question that they are high-quality fantasy writing, marrying imagination and intelligence. The professor’s globe-trotting also gives Ray a pretext to share information – in his usual non-didactic way – about other lands and cultures with his young readers.

The most recent English translation of these stories was The Diary of a Space Traveller, which has 11 stories translated by Gopa Majumdar (who has also done fine work on Ray’s Feluda tales) and one story translated by Ray himself. Included in these narratives are an expedition to Mars, an encounter with a Chinese hypnotist, a colour-changing sphere that turns out to be a tiny living planet, and reflections on what makes a robot truly lifelike. The writing throughout is gentle and humorous, and Shonku’s references to his many eye-popping inventions (an incomplete list is here) ensure there isn’t a dull moment. Anyone who patronisingly suggests that these tales are "only for children" would do well to note the eye for detail and characterisation, as when Shonku says of his simple-minded servant Prahlad:

Sometimes slow and foolish people can show more courage than clever ones, as it takes them longer to work out the need, or reason, to feel scared [...] I remember one particular occasion very well. A gecko had fallen from the ceiling on my bottle of bicornic acid and overturned it. I could do nothing but watch helplessly as the acid slowly began to spread towards a little heap of paradoxite powder. All my limbs went numb at the mere thought of what might happen if the acid made contact with the powder.

Prahlad entered the room at this crucial moment, saw me staring at the acid, grinned and coolly wiped it off with a towel.

Since most of the stories are told the form of diary entries written by Shonku, it frequently happens that the final entry in a story begins along the lines “I’m shaken by what happened yesterday – it’s a wonder I’m alive to relate this tale”, after which the professor describes the climax to his latest adventure. For the thrill-seeking reader, this is a comforting device – it promises excitement but also reassurance that all will turn out well. These tales are fine examples of the talent for fluid storytelling that served Ray so well in his films. I discovered Shonku for the first time as an adult; I envy my Bengali friends who grew up with him.

On Philip K Dick and the "vile" Victorians

[Snippets from my Sunday Guardian books column]

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” goes the famous opening sentence of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Immediately after this the near-delirious narrator sees enormous bats swooping around in the sky above his car and hears a voice screaming, “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” The voice is his own, but he doesn’t know that. Never mind. This is just the start of an unforgettable road trip where the line between what is real and what isn’t soon becomes irrelevant. The labyrinths of the drug-addled mind are so much more interesting than anything Las Vegas can offer – or perhaps it’s all the same anyway.

Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly begins on a comparable note, recounting absurdities in a seemingly calm and collected narrative voice. “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair.” The guy in question, a relatively minor character named Jerry, is addicted to a drug called Substance D (for Death), and after some extensive "research" he's figured out that the bugs are aphids and that they are in his lungs as well. Naturally it makes perfect sense to stand under the shower all day with his dog (who also has the bugs).

The partly science-fiction world of Dick’s novel is populated with dope addicts as well as narcotics agents trying to convict them. But can you really tell one from the other? The agents wear identity-concealing “scramble suits” (which turn a wearer’s body into an amorphous blur) and even their superiors don’t know their real names. Besides, their jobs require them to engage in the sort of substance abuse that can quickly disorient their minds. So what happens when a narcotics agent named Bob Arctor is assigned to spy on the activities of a suspected drug dealer named... Bob Arctor?
 

Arctor is understandably confused by this development, and by the suspicion that the two halves of his brain are concealing things from each other. (If he can’t trust himself, how can he possibly trust anyone around him?) At one point, contemplating his dual role as the watcher and the watched, he wonders, “Which of them is me?” In Dick’s hands even this profound philosophical query is laced with wryness. He was a genre writer – and one of the cult heroes of modern science-fiction – but his best books are every bit as demanding as high-quality literary fiction. They deal with questions of identity, with the paranoia of being an individual in a cold, corporation-dominated world, and the ways in which people interact with technology. If he were alive in the Internet age, I’m sure he would have written some fascinating stories centred on social networking and virtual role-playing.

P.S. In addition to being one of the most imaginative novelists of the last few decades, Dick was astonishingly prolific. As A D Jameson pointed out in this masterful skewering of Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, Dick wrote dozens of far superior “psychological/postmodern/mind-fuck narratives” – and even produced five novels in a single year, 1965, including the excellent The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

****

A straight history and a “horrible history”, best read side by side

One of the best books I’ve read about a historical period is A N Wilson’s The Victorians – a sprawling, magisterial account of seven decades that came to shape the modern world in so many ways. Wilson examines the political, social, scientific and cultural developments of the Victorian era – and their resonance for our lives today – in detail, and his mini-biographies of figures like Robert Peel and Charles Stewart Parnell make a fascinating tapestry. This is the sort of biography that wins highbrow literary awards, gets multiple mentions in “Books of the Year” lists, and is described in blurbs as “a magnificent portrait of an age” – all of which is well-justified.

But now consider another book about the Victorians that is never likely to be feted thus, though it provides its own special insights: The Vile Victorians in the “Horrible Histories” series. The series motto is “History with the nasty bits left in”, and true to form this wicked little book is a collection of unsavoury facts about epidemics, infant murders, gruesome sports and military disasters, mostly related in a faux-scandalised tone; there are stomach-churning anecdotes such as the one about the young Queen Victoria walking by the Thames and wondering about the pieces of paper floating in it. (Hundreds of sewers used to empty untreated waste into the river.)

You start reading something like Vile Victorians in a very particular mood – perhaps you want something that’s easy to flip through, or perhaps you’re in a masochistic mood. And indeed, the tone of much of the book is deliberately mean-minded and the drawings are a little juvenile (though a few are genuinely funny). But it would be a mistake to think there’s nothing to be learnt from it. When I read about “the vile Victorian Dr Meyers” and his infernal Tapeworm Trap (a small metal cylinder which had to be swallowed by patients – eventually resulting in the deaths of more humans than tapeworms), I was convinced it was a made-up story until I looked it up and discovered it was true. There is much good trivia here, even if the presentation is offbeat (to say the least).

At times – as in the short story “The Monster of the Mine”, which illustrates the horrors of children being made to work in coal mines – the book’s tone becomes almost sympathetic. It doesn’t last though. The very next page is about another manifestation of Victorian cruelty to children – by giving them “vile” names like Abishag and Lettuce!

[Some earlier odds and ends from my weekly column: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

No newts are good news: on Karel Čapek’s great satire

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Isaac Asimov is the writer you immediately think of when you hear the word “robot”, but Asimov was barely out of his diapers when the word was first used in a literary work – by the Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from “robota” which means mundane labour of the sort that’s better suited to machines than to thinking human beings, and it’s central to one of the big themes of Čapek’s writing – mass production as a vessel for dehumanisation.

Čapek's 1936 novel War with the Newts can be categorised as belonging to the still-nascent genre of science fiction, but it’s also one of the most incisive political satires I’ve read. This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and even to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways.

Soon secret temples for salamander worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches start bathing in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work, even creating a syndicate for huge engineering projects that will link continents and supposedly create a Utopia on earth. This in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; a German doctor proclaims the “ur-original German Salamanders” to be racially purer than other newts, an obvious reference to political developments of the time.

War with the Newts is narrated mainly in the third person, and in the style of anthropological reportage, but there are many tonal shifts and asides: from transcripts of newspaper clippings to a first-person account of the horrendous experiments conducted on the newts to a hilarious series of quotes from public figures of the time. (“They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this, they agree with men – G B Shaw”. “We can learn a lot from them, especially for swimming long distances – Johnny Weissmuller”.) The longest and most ambitious chapter “Along the Steps of Civilisation” has footnotes that are so elaborate they frequently take up most of the space on the page!

This is a very funny book in parts, and I have to admit that the humour was my first point of engagement with it (don’t miss the use of stream-of-consciousness in the chapter where a shallow young man named Abe - the son of a rich movie magnate - and his narcissistic girlfriend Li encounter the semi-literate newts on a beach). But it's also a far-reaching novel of ideas, a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others, the whimsical ways in which our civilisation – with its many differentiated races, countries, classes and communities – has been organised, and our complete disregard for (or inability to see) the lessons of history.

“Look here, Bellomy,” I said to him, “You are a decent kind of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn’t it go sometimes against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact is downright slavery?”

Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. “Newts are newts,” he grunted evasively.

“Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are Negroes.”

“And wasn’t it true?” said Bellomy. “Check!”

I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps our history has already been played too, and we shift our figures with the same moves to the same checks as in times long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the Ivory Coast, and shipped them out to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out in the steerage. He didn’t think anything wrong with it then, that Bellomy. Bellomy never thinks anything wrong. That’s why he’s incorrigible.

As you can imagine, some of the content is polemical. I don’t think Čapek is attacking any single political, economic or social system (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for example), but War with the Newts can certainly be read as a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become over time. In one significant chapter, a philosopher named Wolf Meynert makes the cynical suggestion that heterogeneity is not conducive to happiness.

Nations, professions, classes cannot live together permanently without crowding in upon each other, getting in each other’s way to the point of suffocation. Either live for ever apart – something that would only be possible if the world were big enough – or in opposition, in a struggle for life and death. [...] We have created a fiction of mankind which includes us and “the rest” in some sort of imaginary higher unity ... It was magnanimous conceit. And for this supreme idealism the human race will now pay with its inexorable disintegration.

The range of ideas covered in this book is dizzying, and difficult to process in a single reading; so sharp and persuasive is Čapek’s examination of the human condition that when hostilities finally break out between the competing species and the Chief Salamander addresses humans with the words “Hello, you men. You will work with us in demolishing your world. Thank you”, it almost seems like a reasonable request. If human beings are diabolical enough to take an innocuous creature and reshape it in their own image – well, they may as well face up to the unpleasant results.

**** 

Speaking of diabolical, the following passage put me in mind of a generation that thinks and writes in SMS/Twitter jargon, as well as the general lack of regard for grammar that one sees even in newspapers today:

Their linguistic abilities showed strange shortcomings...it was with difficulty that they could pronounce long, polysyllabic words, and they attempted to reduce them to a single syllable, which they uttered sharply and with something of a croak...In their mouths every language underwent a characteristic change, and somehow became rationalised into its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is a point worth consideration that their neologisms, their pronunciation and grammatical simplicity were picked up rapidly, partly by the human wreckage at the ports, partly by the so-called better society, and from there these modes of expression spread to the daily Press and soon became general...

P.S. The Czech have a cinematic tradition of low-key satires or allegories, including such fine films as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Here’s an old post I wrote on the latter. And here's a post about John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, a "logical fantasy" that's similar to War with the Newts in some ways.

Biophilia, intolerance, future Ramayanas: Vandana Singh Q&A

An email conversation with author Vandana Singh, mostly about her short-story collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (which I blogged about here)

The title of this collection leads one to expect science-fiction, but some of these stories (“Hunger”, for example) are more concerned with the everyday lives of people who feel like aliens in their own skin. How would you classify these tales?

Really, I don’t classify my stories, I just write them! The story, as it is being written, tells me what it will become and after that it is up to critics and readers to make of them what they will. But in hindsight I admit I write some stories that, while not explicitly science-fiction, have a science-fictional feel to them, in that they make you become aware of the wonder and/or strangeness in everyday things and events. The editors who first published “Hunger” were looking for something that was what they called “interstitial”, that defied boundaries and classifications (ironically enough) and what they liked about this story was that although in one way it was realist, you couldn’t fully understand it unless you were aware of the themes and concerns of science fiction.

There are other stories I’ve written, not in this volume, that can be read as realist fiction but have an undercurrent, or ethos, that is fantastical in some way. And part of it is that this is the way I see the world, as a source of unending wonder, from which we’ve divorced ourselves, so that each reunion is a recognition or remembering of something we’d forgotten.

Strangeness – finding it in familiar things and occasionally in oneself – is a recurring theme in your writing. What do characters such as Divya (in “Hunger”) and Susheela (in “Thirst”) help you achieve?

Divya and Susheela have a kind of binocular vision. They’ve never really separated themselves from the wider world – unlike other people, who live in a closed circle of mostly human making, limited by their jobs and responsibilities, by social custom, by unquestioned cultural limitations, the daily humdrum-ness of their lives, not noticing anything outside of their little cages. These two protagonists maintain some connection with the greater world, a world that is complex, ancient, sometimes terrifying. And what they know, as the protagonist of the story “The Wife” comes to realise as well, is that this wilderness, which is echoed in the geography of the human mind, also holds the possibility of liberation.

You wrote an essay recently about the self-absorption of our species and our refusal to “see” other life-forms. What in your view are the repercussions of this apathy?

I think the current ecological crisis we are in is a direct result of our alienation from what we so distantly call nature (as though it were possible to be outside it). We have the mass extinction of numerous species – among mammals alone, 20-25% of the world’s mammals are in danger of extinction due to habitat loss and other things. We have the collapse of every ecosystem in the world, we have global warming, threatening to destroy not only the human species but possibly all life on Earth. We’ve isolated ourselves so well mentally from the fact that we are subject to the laws of nature, that our fate is tied in with the fate of other creatures on this Earth, that we find these dire predictions surprising, or unbelievable, despite all the scientific evidence.


Imagine now that instead of being obsessed solely with our lives and bank balances, instead of trying to keep up with the neighbours or comparing the largeness of our houses and the number of vacations spent abroad, we were, instead, aware of the greater world, open to its wonders, appreciative of our belonging to it. Imagine that we noticed other creatures around us, and were sensitive to their lives and deaths. This tendency might actually be deeply ingrained inside us, as the biologist E O Wilson surmises – he calls this affinity for nature biophilia – and, in fact, studies show that people are happier in the presence of trees, that greenery and birdsong are necessary for our psychological survival.

Unfortunately consumerist culture suppresses this, trivializes it, or worse, Disneyfies it. So people lose a sense of connection to nature and fill that emptiness with dead things, and wonder why they are unhappy. If we were aware of the natural world of which we are a part, and were open to it and appreciative of it, would it be so easy to clear-cut forests, pollute the air, let sparrows disappear from Delhi?

Does this apathy also tie in with the human tendency for intolerance towards other people who are dissimilar from them (in terms of religion, class or whatever other categorisation)?

I can speculate that the human tendency for intolerance toward other humans is related to our modern distancing from Nature, because their roots are similar: fear, greed, self-absorption, the inability to recognise that another’s fate is tied up with yours. I think one of the things that has become apparent in today’s India is not only the communal divisions but the class divisions, where we become blind to the suffering of the rural poor or the boy with the jharoo on the street corner. We shut out all this in much the same way as we have shut out nature. We are putting protective walls around us, and each time we do this the space we are in gets smaller, until we realise (or not) that we’ve imprisoned ourselves in our own fears.

How do you define speculative fiction? As a reader, what are some of the works that drew you into this genre?

I don’t define it. There are enough arguments about the definition! I can tell you some things about it, however. Speculative fiction has the largest canvas of all fictional forms: the universe itself. Speculative fiction is the oldest form of story – look at the oldest tales in every culture. I like to think of realist fiction as a sub-genre of speculative fiction. Speculative fiction is the place where the imagination ranges freely, where realism is only one option. And in fact speculative fiction allows us to examine reality in a deeper and more powerful way than realist fiction. In allowing us to reinvent reality, it enables us to question things as they are, to indulge in deep social critiques and thought experiments, to answer, as imaginatively as we can, “what-if” questions.

What drew me into it were a multitude of things: hearing the Ramayana and Mahabharata from my mother and grandmother, reading lurid little paperbacks in Hindi about paris and jadugars, reading Asimov and Clarke in my pre-teens, discovering Ray Bradbury when I was eleven and Ursula K Le Guin much later. But also what drew me to it was a desire for freedom, a desire to ask questions, such as: what if things were different from what they are now?

What are the possibilities of speculative fiction in India, given the rich variety of legends and myths that we have?

The possibilities are endless. I think we Indians are naturals at this stuff. I’m not talking solely about myth-making but about our absurd and contradictory tendency to come up with new ways of thinking, to adapt and reinvent tradition, to embrace modernity and question it at the same time, to allow for diversity and contradiction – to appreciate complexity. Think about the ideas that have come from this subcontinent: not just flying chariots and ten-headed demons but Satyagraha and the micro-credit scheme!

Currently the world is becoming increasingly homogenised, mono-culturated, if you will, to create the largest market we have known, merely to serve the needs of small-minded capitalists with limited imaginations. We are continually distracted from what is real and meaningful in the world. Only our tendency to go against the grain, to resist conformity, to risk appearing foolish in order to be revolutionary – in other words, only our imaginations will save us. And we have plenty of that.

Would you ever consider doing, say, an imaginative retelling of an existing story such as the Ramayana or Mahabharata?

I know people have done this, and there is nothing wrong with it. But personally for me I would not rewrite the old stories: I have clear and fond memories of my grandmother’s voice declaiming parts of the Valmiki Ramayana. However, I do enjoy writing variations on the theme in different times and settings. So for instance what I’ve recently done in a story that came out earlier this year is to imagine a possible Ramayana in the future – a man whose world was taken away from him, who models himself on Ram and goes on a mission that takes him on an intergalactic adventure. The result isn’t quite what he imagined. This is only one possible future Ramayana; even the current epic has so many versions, which comes back to the Indian tolerance for multiplicity, for many voices. That is something to celebrate.

[An earlier post about Singh’s writings here]

Notes on The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet

From Vandana Singh's "A Speculative Manifesto", an essay included with her short-story collection The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet:

So much modern realist fiction is divorced from the physical universe, as though humans exist in a vacuum devoid of animals, rocks and trees. Speculative fiction is our chance to rise above this pathologically solipsist view and find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder and meaning in the universe...

...I said earlier that speculative fiction is about what cannot ever be, or what cannot be as yet. But it is also true that when it uses symbol and metaphor in certain ways, speculative fiction is about us as we are, right now. This may be the case even if the story is set on another planet, in another age, and the protagonist is an alien. Because haven't we all felt alien at some time or another, set apart from the norm due to caste and class, religion and creed, gender and sexual orientation?

If you take science fiction seriously, the last few sentences will probably seem like a statement of the obvious. But it's surprising how many people (including some who are sensitive, intelligent readers of other genres) think of sci-fi and fantasy as nothing more than escapism – good for a light break but not really relevant to larger questions about our world. I suspect that to fully appreciate Singh's observation, you need to have a somewhat slanted perspective on the world, and perhaps be a bit uncomfortable in your own skin as well. (And all the better if you think of life as one big absurd mess: in that case, what could be more "realistic" and "relevant" than The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?)

All the stories in The Woman who Thought She Was a Planet involve characters who have access to this tilted perspective and who are aliens in one way or the other, even when they are flesh-and-blood people leading mundane lives: a small-town Mathematics teacher obsessed with the idea of infinity; a lady on the verge of separation from her husband of many years; a Bihari man who takes along a stock of his cherished roasted black gram and sweet suttoo on a Mars mission. Some of these stories aren't sci-fi in any obvious sense. "Hunger", for example, which I liked a great deal: on the surface this is a straightforward tale about a woman hosting a party for her husband's colleagues and their wives, and how the occasion is ruined by the death of a poor old man on the stairway landing. But the interior life of the protagonist, Divya, is what makes this such a gripping story. She sees strangeness in almost everything in the real world around her (though in her dreams she sometimes feels like she's discovered "her home planet", the place where she really belongs). Her 12-year-old daughter is turning into someone – or something – she can't recognise; her husband's promotion has meant moving to a large, sterile house; she is haunted by a childhood memory of discovering that a dozen baby mice had slowly died in her room "while she had been reading her mystery books and sipping her lemonade" (this is one among a few indications of her intense empathy for species other than her own). Looking at a faded black-and-white photo the old man was holding when he died, she can't tell whether its subject is a woman or an animal "or something entirely different".

I thought the one weakness in the story was its ending – the defensive, over-explicatory final paragraph seemed out of place in a fiction narrative, though I liked it on its own terms:

She continued to read her science-fiction novels because, more than ever, they seemed to reflect her own realisation of the utter strangeness of the world. Slowly the understanding came to her that these stories were trying to tell her a great truth in a very convoluted way, that they were all in some kind of code, designed to deceive the literary snob and waylay the careless reader. And that this great truth, which she would spend her life unraveling, was centred around the notion that you did not have to go to the stars to find aliens or to measure distances between people in light-years.

This recurring theme – that all of us can be aliens in certain contexts – is a little overstated through this collection in general, but one has to remember that these stories first appeared in different publications at various times before they were collected here; a certain amount of repetition is understandable.

Another of the collection's highlights is "Delhi", a fine imaginative work about a man whose brain is wired in such as way as to enable him to experience "temporal coincidences – produced when one part of the time-stream rubs up against another and the two cross for a moment". This means that as he walks the streets of Delhi he might encounter apparitions from the past or the future, and briefly speak with them; or envision a futuristic Lower Delhi ("Neechi Dilli") where the poor, the criminal and the dispossessed live underground, in the now-abandoned tunnels of the Metro. I also recommend "Infinities", "The Tetrahedron" (which, like Arthur Clarke's "The Wall of Darkness", draws on the possibilities of the Mobius curve and dimensions that are inaccessible to us) and the title story. All these are worth reading for Singh's examination of her characters' inner lives and their encounters with parallel universes/multiverses – whether in the form of a giant portal in Delhi with invisible gateways that open out over the Thar desert, or a shadowy farishtaa glimpsed from the corner of one's eye.

(Earlier post with links to some of Vandana Singh's essays here)

New ways of looking at the world

Carrying on from the short post about Arthur C Clarke...some of us were watching Superman II on TV a few weeks ago, and during the scene where General Zod and his villainous associates make their way towards Earth (a glowing blue-green orb suspended in space), we joked about how cool it would be if spatial relationships altered when a person went into outer space – so that the earth turned out to be only, say, three or four times bigger than a basketball while we retained our original dimensions. Then we would be giants, effectively Gods: we could reach out and touch the globe, maybe spin it around, stick a finger into one of the oceans and imagine a cluster of tiny whales nibbling ineffectually at it; or poke about the land mass that represents the US of A (it wouldn't be labeled of course, so one would have to be careful not to mess up Canada or Mexico) and enjoy the feel of a superpower trembling beneath our hands.

I thought about these fancies again when I heard about the passing of Clarke. Some people who haven't experienced science-fiction think it must be solemn and academic, full of complicated jargon; equally, some people I know think it’s flippant and irrelevant. This is a pity, because the best work in the genre mixes playfulness of form with some very weighty ideas - ideas that are very relevant indeed if you believe that it's important to keep questioning conventional wisdom. Much like good fiction can help us step outside of ourselves and see through the eyes of people who are very different from us, good sci-fi can depict the world itself in a new light, exposing the triviality of some of the "grand" ideas that govern our lives (more than one astronaut has pointed out that once you've seen the blue-green orb from a spaceship, it becomes difficult to take artificial borders between countries seriously). There's a nicely symbolic quality to the movie image where an astronaut in space appears to be nearly the same size as the planet he is reaching out to.

Thinking of the mind-expanding qualities of sci-fi reminds me about the other unquestioning assumptions we make about our planet. I remember first realising (on a conscious level at least) that the manmade concepts of "north" and "south" are arbitrary and irrelevant only when I read about it in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. On this link, there are "upside down" maps that have Australia and New Zealand on top and Scandinavia in the southern hemisphere. According to this model, Kanyakumari is at the head of India while Kashmir lies in the extreme south (what would this do to the north Indian condescension towards "southies"!). These maps seem bizarre and wrong at first glance, and even when you accept that they are just as valid as the ones we have grown up with, they aren’t as aesthetically appealing (this probably has to do with our conditioning) - but they provide a fascinating new way to look at the world, and a much-needed mental shakeup for all of us. I want to order one of them now.

(Click to enlarge)

Clarke's short stories

Arthur C Clarke has left. Coincidentally, after making the 2001: A Space Odyssey reference in my last post, I flipped through some of my favourite Clarke stories, including "The Sentinel", which was the seed of the 2001 script. I haven't read any of his longer works but I'm a big fan of his short stories - when I first encountered them many years ago, they opened my eyes to the ways in which good science fiction can engage with our world more closely than laboured, fact-obsessed non-fiction (this sounds paradoxical, but anyone who's opened themselves to the genre will understand). Also, its incomparable ability to put our lives in perspective and to hold up a large cosmic mirror in which we can see the pettiness of some of the concepts we've created (patriotism, for instance). None of this means that Clarke is insensitive to the minutiae of human lives, or to our deepest feelings: his beautiful, sentimental "Dog Star", about an astronaut having to part with his beloved dog when he goes to live on a lunar observatory, is about the closest any short story has come to moistening my ever-dry eyes. (It's also one of a few examples in Clarke's work of a rational mind struggling with an experience that borders on the supernatural, and never coming completely to terms with the scientific explanation.)

Here are some of my other favourite Clarke stories, all of which are good starting points for a reader new to SF. Among the more serious ones: "The Wall of Darkness", "Out of the Sun", "The Forgotten Enemy", "The Star" (one of his most acclaimed pieces, with a genuinely frisson-creating twist), "The Shining Ones" (a nice riff on the "Squid" chapter in Moby Dick) and "Dial F for Frankenstein". Among the humorous stories, "History Lesson" (minor spoiler: you'll never look at Donald Duck the same way again), "A Slight Case of Sunstroke", "Let there be Light", and "Reunion". There are dozens of others - you'll find them all in this book.

The boywunder revelations; Q&A with Samit Basu

The Unwaba Revelations is out, completing the Gameworld Trilogy begun by little Samit many, many years ago. I was at his book launch on Wednesday (where he screened a few short videos that he had put together himself - a montage of his influences, ranging from Japanese pulp fantasy of the 1950s to the Amitabh-starrer Ajooba) and was stricken when he loudly told the audience “I think of Jai when I write porn” (no, not providing the context here). Revenge will have to wait; meanwhile here’s a short, informal Q&A I did with him for the Sunday Business Standard.

What’s an unwaba?
It’s a chameleon – borrowed from a similar creature in the Zulu tradition – that performs a sutradhar role in my book, commenting on the action, telling the characters what’s going to happen. It’s a stand-in for all writers, really.

Is this your preferred animal? If you had a daemon/animal spirit, what would it be?
A walrus, but mostly because of the size and the tusks.

You’ve just turned 28 and you’ve already finished a trilogy of fantasy novels that runs to nearly 1,500 pages. Are you hungover?
Haven’t had time to be. I finished this book eight months ago and since then I’ve been neck-deep in other projects, so I haven’t even been able to think about how much I’ve written so far, the size of the trilogy or things like that. It’s only at book launches where I see the three books piled up one on top of the other and think to myself, “I could kill people with these big fat things.”

How satisfied are you with the trilogy now that it’s finally over?
As an SFF fan, I’ve been disappointed with the third volume of almost any trilogy – authors tend to use convenient escape routes and not to see things through. I’ve tried to avoid those pitfalls and on the whole I’m happy with the way it’s ended. I probably had the least fun writing Unwaba (the first book was the most fun), but in my view the writing is better than in the early books. There’s lots of stuff crammed in there, as you know – battles, many different characters and types of characters – and resolving all of it was difficult.

Has fantasy writing in India changed much since The Simoqin Prophecies was published in 2003? Any promising new writers in the genre?
The landscape has changed in that more publishers are looking at fantasy now – the same way the graphic novels market opened up when Sarnath’s (Banerjee) Corridor was published. The science fiction/fantasy writers I’ve seen seem to be following the traditional SFF route of doing short stories first, rather than jumping head-first into big books or series’. But there is some very promising talent: I was editing a sci-fi anthology recently and was impressed by the stories submitted by Indrapramit Das and Swapna Kishore – they’ll both probably produce novels at some stage.

You’re working on projects with Duran Duran (the popular 1980s band) and director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys). What are those about?
Those are comics I’m scripting for Virgin – the Gilliam one was based on one of his many radical ideas that couldn’t be filmed. I can’t say too much about them at this stage – they’re nowhere near ready for publication – but it’s been a good learning process.

Incidentally, I also want to start writing Bollywood films soon. And there’s a book I’m doing for Tranquebar, but don’t ask me about it.

How do you find the energy to work on so many projects simultaneously? Do you get time for a social life? Not counting cocktail-party book launches.
The multi-tasking has been fairly insane – there have been long stretches of staying shut up in my room. But eventually I hope to clamber up to a platform where I can do one thing that I really want to do.

There is a social life, but it’s restricted to a few close old friends. There isn’t much generic partying – my daily life is pretty much like what you’d imagine any busy writer’s life would be.

The most annoying question a journalist has asked you?
“What’s your book’s USP?” I mostly just splutter in reply. It’s also amusing when people challenge me to say something that will convince them to read SFF. It’s done in the campus-interview style – “Sell yourself (and your genre) to me”. The only answer I can possibly give is, “If you don’t want to read fantasy, don’t read it.”