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ABSTRACT
This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre in climate fiction. More specifically, she discusses her cli-fi under the umbrella of three major concerns: their realist settings in a near future, the affirmative depiction of technology as agent, and the representation of climate as a complex system. While the interview focuses largely on Singh’s cli-fi forays, it places these recent efforts within her career trajectories as both a noted science fiction writer and a professor of physics at Framingham State University. Besides discussing the politics and aesthetics of her stories that encompasses both humans and nonhumans, the interview also discusses how her pedagogy shapes her imaginative engagements with climate change and the geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For an evaluation of Singh’s place in Indian science fiction, see Suparno Banerjee, Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020.
2 Vandana Singh, ‘Delhi’, in Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (eds), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004, pp 79–94.
3 Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2018; Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, New Delhi: Zubaan, 2014.
4 Singh, Ambiguity Machines; Vandana Singh, ‘Arctic Light’, in Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and Anita Roy (eds), Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2018, pp 133–143; Vandana Singh, ‘Entanglement’, in Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer (eds), Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, New York: William Morrow, 2014, pp 352–397; Vandana Singh, ‘Mother Ocean’, Current Futures, 7 June 2019. Available at: https://go.xprize.org/oceanstories/mother-ocean/; Vandana Singh, ‘Shikasta’, in Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich (eds), Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Stories, Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University Press, 2017, pp 207–242; Vandana Singh, ‘Widdam’, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January/February 2018, pp 6–38.
5 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; Vandana Singh, ‘The Unthinkability of Climate Change: Thoughts on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement’, strangehorizons, 21 August 2017. Available at: http://strangehorizons.com/issue/fund-drive-special-2017/.
6 Singh, ‘Unthinkability’, np.
7 Singh, ‘Unthinkability’, np.
8 Singh, ‘Unthinkability’, np.
9 Narratives of eco-apocalypse, Wenzel writes ‘can effect a gentrification of the imagination … ’. They are examples of ‘weak utopianism of a future’ with a ‘desire for privilege intact’. At its most reductive, they are instantiations of a ‘future inferior, in which “Third World problems” (and people) will have arrived in the First World … ’. See Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, New York: Fordham University Press, 2020, pp 32–35.
10 Singh, ‘Unthinkability’, np.
11 Donna J Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
12 Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw, ‘Introduction: The Rising Tide of Climate Fiction’, Studies in the Novel 50(1), Spring 2018, p 5.
13 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, p 157.
14 Craps and Crownshaw, ‘Rising Tide’, p 5.
15 Singh, ‘Entanglement’, p 363.
16 Singh, ‘Unthinkability’, np. In a recent essay, she identifies ‘paradigm blindness’ as a key feature of educational systems influenced by the Newtonian worldview. Such paradigm blindness, she writes, ‘is predicated on the division of disciplines into watertight compartments that rarely interact with each other; another is the identification of the educational realm with formal institutions cemented in rigid structures and practices, rather than a conceptualization of education as an organic entity that learns with and from human societies and the rest of nature on an ongoing basis … ’. Vandana Singh, ‘Liberating the Captured Imagination’, Great Transition Initiative, May 2021. Available at: https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/pedagogy-transition-singh.
17 Singh, ‘Unthinkability’, np.
18 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 154.
19 See James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look on Life at Earth, London: Oxford University Press, 1979, p 360.
20 A good early example of the use of complex systems in Singh’s oeuvre is the novella Distances. I thank the reviewer for reminding me about this. Vandana Singh, Distances, Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2008.
21 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 146.
22 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p 2.
23 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 295.
24 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 295.
25 Also see Val Plumwood, ‘Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death’, Environmental Values 17(3), August 2008, pp 323–330.
26 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 362.
27 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 316.
28 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2015, p 25.
29 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p. 290.
30 Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (eds), Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017, p 2.
31 Singh, Ambiguity Machines, p 317.
32 Vandana Singh, ‘Beyond Hope and Despair: Teaching Climate Change’, Tor, 21 February 2018. Available at: https://www.tor.com/2018/02/21/beyond-hope-and-despair-teaching-climate-change/.
33 Vandana Singh, ‘To Drill or Not to Drill?: A Dilemma in the Context of Climate Change in the Arctic – STIRS Student Study’, Association of American Colleges and Universities. Available at: https://www.aacu.org/stirs/casestudies/singh.
34 Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016, p 18.
35 ‘Interview: Vandana Singh, Brenda Cooper and Joey Eschrich on “Widdam”’, Fantasy and Science Fiction, 7 February 2018. Available at: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/2018/02/07/interview-vandana-singh-brenda-cooper-and-joseph-eschrich-on-widdam/.
36 ‘Richest 1 Percent Bagged 82 Percent of the Wealth Created Last Year – Poorest Half of Humanity Got Nothing’, Oxfam International, 22 January 2018. Available at: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year-poorest-half-humanity#:~:text=Eighty%20two%20percent%20of%20the,new%20Oxfam%20report%20released%20today.
37 Ursula K LeGuin, ‘Books Aren’t Just Commodities’, The Guardian, 20 November 2014. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech.
38 ‘New Analysis Reveals that Indigenous Peoples and Communities Manage 300,000 Million Metric Tonnes of Carbon in their Trees and Soil – 33 Times Energy Emissions from 2017’, Rights+Resources, 9 September 2018. Available at: https://rightsandresources.org/en/blog/new-analysis-reveals-that-indigenous-peoples-and-local-communities-manage-300000-million-metric-tons-of-carbon-in-their-trees-and-soil-33-times-energy-emissions-from-2017/#sthash.bt3ZO9c7.dpbs.
39 See Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2015. Shekhar is Santhal.
40 Singh, ‘Beyond Hope’, np.
41 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
42 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979, p 27.
43 Suvin, Metamorphoses, p 27.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amit R. Baishya
Amit R. Baishya is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. His monograph Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival was published by Routledge in 2018. He is also the co-editor of a collection of essays titled Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019).