The People Who Are Protecting The Planet Are Often The Most Marginalized - Amit Sengupta In Conversation With Vandana Singh

Interviews

The people who are protecting the planet are often the most marginalized – Amit Sengupta in conversation with Vandana Singh

Born and raised in India, Vandana Singh is a science fiction writer and a professor of physics at the Framingham State University, Boston area. Her most recent work is a collection of short stories, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories(Small Beer Press and Zubaan books), that was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and earned critical acclaim from multiple publications, including the Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly and the Times Literary Supplement. A former particle physicist, she has been working for nearly a decade at the intersection of climate science and other disciplines, including climate justice. She has also written children’s literature in Hindi and English.

By Amit Sengupta

August 31, 2019

You are an acclaimed science fiction writer. How does science fiction reflect the bitter or optimistic realism of the times? This is a great question. There is a general impression that science fiction is about the future. That may literally be the case for some stories, but, inevitably, imaginings of the future reflect the concerns of the present day. Science fiction has come a long way (but not long enough!) from its roots as literature inseparable from colonialism. It is no longer the exclusive literary tool of Americans and West Europeans. There are people from different countries – India, Nigeria, Brazil, for example – or from marginalized groups – Dalits, Native Americans, or women – who are using and modifying the tools of science fiction to write literature that challenges imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and thereby also influencing the mainstream. Science fiction’s potential as revolutionary literature lies in its use of ‘what-if’ questions…