A Pioneering Study of Indian Science Fiction

Abstract

163 BOOKS IN REVIEW sixth chapter extends this work on cinema to examine the 1956 and 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers films. The authors surprisingly but compellingly recontextualize plant horror as a little less horrific, showing how the genre “responds to the longer speculative tradition we outline in this book, one that aims at animating the plant—first by revealing that its mechanisms are compatible with those of the universe, then by attributing a vitality to them that cannot be fully assimilated into animal models of life, and later by uncovering the ways in which they usher humans into a new spatio-temporal reality” (146). As with Poe, Meeker and Szabari demonstrate how in the films vegetality “both invades and structures human consciousness” (146) in ways that counterintuitively might be understood as both “terrifying and appealing” (155). The final chapter, “Becoming Plant Nonetheless,” asks what radical botany might have to offer us in the twenty-first century, “as a politically oriented materialism that has long acted to generate speculative fictions” (178). Sf scholars will naturally find this chapter the most directly relevant to the field, as the authors explore “the nonnormative possibilities inherent in vegetal modes of being” in household names such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Jeff VanderMeer (174). Most of this chapter, which concludes the book somewhat abruptly with no separate conclusion, uncovers the vegetality at the center of the SOUTHERN REACH trilogy (2014), again emphasizing how even unsettling weird fiction can gesture to the “transformative potential of the plant for humans” (191), plant horror serving as “part of a posthuman project” (200). Meeker and Szabari conclude that “The greatest force of radical botany today may lie in its ability to help us imagine, think, and visualize ways of disassembling our socially and historically located subjectivities to open them up to forms of speculation that are both local and cosmic” (177-78). Radical Botany is a remarkable and remarkably readable book, the kind we can really only fault—and perhaps unfairly—for what it does not cover. For example, when the authors refer to the writings of botanists Francis Hallé and Hope Jahren, one wonders what has been lost in the omission of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s comparable work, and indeed any other Indigenous perspectives on the plant. So too do the authors speak of a “global vegetal turn” (88) and how the plant body “circulates transatlantically and transnationally” (3), but with the exception of three pages on Han Kang, the authors and intellectual traditions considered here remain overwhelmingly European and American. Even so, the scope of Radical Botany proves remarkably ambitious for its comparative brevity, documenting both a specific “current in French materialist thought” (3) and gesturing toward a grander tradition of speculative plant fiction around the globe.—Timothy S. Miller, Florida Atlantic University. A Pioneering Study of Indian Science Fiction. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee. Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India. Liverpool UP, 2020. xi+192 pp. $120 hc. 164 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) The year 2020 is turning out to be an important one for scholarship in English on Indian science fiction (sf). Two books, Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers, and my own Indian Science Fiction, have been published on the topic, and a third by Sami Ahmad Khan is in the works. There was none before. Consequently, Final Frontiers, along with these other works, makes important contributions to the quickly expanding field of global sf studies—especially in the field of sf coming out of the developing world. Final Frontiers, however, is distinguishable not only for its pioneering quality, but also because of its outstanding examination of the topic: the relationship between technoscience and sf in India in the middle of the twentieth century. Critical works on Indian sf have been increasing over the last ten to fifteen years. The number of critical essays on Indian sf has steadily grown in many leading academic journals (such as Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Extrapolation, Foundation, South Asian Popular Culture) and anthologies (such as Hoagland and Sarwal’s Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World [2010], Lavender’s Dis-Orienting Planets [2017], and Chattopadhyay, Mandhwani, and Maity’s...