And when that day will come, the day of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why that is a secret.

That day did come, the day when apartheid became history.  It was worth the wait.  I’ve realized, after thinking about this for some months, that a certain kind of waiting has to do with love.

When there is longing for something or someone that is truly and deeply loved, there is also a willingness to wait for as long as it takes.  Whether it is freedom, or a loved one, or an idea – if you love it enough, you can wait a lifetime.  The old Bard realized it in one of his sonnets:

Love’s not Time’s fool, tho’ rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come

Love knows not his brief weeks or hours

But bears it out even to the edge of doom..

This waiting is not passive, however.  It doesn’t mean that life can go on as usual, because in order to bring about that meeting, between person and person, or country and freedom, or idea and mind – in order to enable it to happen, you have to transform.  Sometimes painfully.  When I realized that, I had been writing myself a monograph on the subject of life’s apparent paradoxes.  One paradox was this: you wait best when you are not focused on that end result.  Even though all you are doing might be oriented toward it.  Like in so many things, process is important; the end result, however fervently desired, is only a possible positive side effect of right process.

The ancient Indians said that more poetically in the Bhagavad Gita:

Karmanye Vadhikaraste, Ma phaleshu kada chana,

Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani

Easy to say – if you have the slightest familiarity with Sanskrit, the syllables roll gorgeously off the tongue.  Incredibly difficult to practice.   Very roughly (as far as I can recall) it means: “you have the right/ authority to perform your action, but you do not have a right to the result.  Do not consider yourself the cause of the result, and do not be attached to inaction.”

It is hard to buy this notion in a goal-oriented culture.  For instance not long ago a matter came up at work that was disturbing to me  — I took a certain public stance and followed it up with an event.  I had hoped for a certain result, but not expected it, given the forces at play.  And in fact that result did not come to be.  But my stance, and the action I’d taken, came from what I thought was right, and it was done for its own sake.  Yet there were so many people who didn’t get it.  I heard, again and again: “Why are you doing this?  It’s not going to change anything.”  I had to explain in words of two syllables or less that sometimes it is appropriate to take action, independent of whether it helps advance a certain goal or not.  Because that action is the right action, because it is your dharma.  (Here I interpret the word dharma in its broadest way, non-religiously as ‘sacred duty,’ i.e. what you think you must do in compliance with your moral compass).  The pervasive, apparently common-sensical goal-oriented approach to life, while often useful, can sometimes be harmful if it is exclusively our way of thinking and being.  But it is a part of corporate culture that is deeply ingrained in us.

There will be times when the waiting doesn’t bring what one desires, as Faiz says so well:

Yeh daag daag ujala, yeh shab gazeeda sahar

Wo intezaar tha jiska, yeh wo sahar to nahin

…

najaat-e-deed-o-dil ki ghadi nahin aaee

chale chalo ki vo manzil abhi nahin aaee

This blemished light, this night-stung dawn

Surely this is not the dawn we waited for

…

It is not yet time for the liberation of eye and heart

Let us keep going, our destination is yet to come…

How neatly and eloquently these lines of Faiz speak across time, culture and language to the quote from Paton with which I started!

So here goes.

1)  Diffractions: On Science, Emotions, and Culture, Part 1, where I pose the question as to why so many scientists are embarrassed by emotions.

2) Part 2, where a mere physicist discovers the explorations of anthropologists in… physics labs

3) Part 3, where I start with a poetic quote from Richard Feynman and end by growling at Descartes.  Actually I end with a quote from Bell on new ways of seeing.  And hoping for a new way or ways to thinking about, doing, teaching and learning science.

More soon!

When I was around ten years old my family moved from New Delhi to the town of Patna, in Bihar, for two years.  Patna was a small, untidy, sprawling little town (relative to Delhi) and the area where we lived consisted of large, old-fashioned houses set among enormous gardens.  We stayed with my grandparents, and a little way from their house you could see fields.  Sometimes my brother and I would wake very early and go on a trek through the fields, pausing to watch a farmer and his bullock drawing water from a well, or looking at pond life in a ditch filled with rainwater.  In the evenings there would be kids playing cricket in the big maidan in front of the house, and my brother and I would be there too (it was in those days that I developed my now-lost skill as a fairly fearsome spin bowler).  Some of the pariah dogs that lived in packs in our neighbourhood would join in, especially if we were playing football (soccer).  Pariah dogs are descended from the earliest domesticated dogs — they are a tribe unto themselves, and live parallel lives with humans in towns and cities in India.  They are also beautiful, intelligent animals — you can see some really nice pictures here. 

One of these pariah dogs was a brown and white dog of noble bearing whom we called Moti (the word sounds like “more-thee” without the ‘r’, and means “pearl”).  As he was a regular on the football field, we became friends.  He would come over to our house if he wanted a meal.  Sometimes he would walk me home if I was late returning from a friend’s house.  There was a boy who lived next door who was friendly with Moti too, but he wanted Moti as a house-dog.  So he trapped the dog for three days in his house, spoiling him, feeding him delicacies and playing with him.  But at the first opportunity, Moti escaped.

I still remember the scene in the front garden of my grandfather’s house.  It was getting on for twilight, and the frogs in the lotus pond in the garden were beginning their evening song.  My brother and I stood on one side of the lawn, the boy-next-door on the other, and Moti in between us, wagging his tail politely.  We had tried to argue with the boy that Moti wasn’t used to being a house pet, that he should have the run of the fields, but the boy was adamant.  So, in a scene reminiscent of the showdown between the young Buddha and his cousin 2600 years ago over the incident of the swan, we were going to let Moti decide.

The boy called to the dog with a new name he had given him.  My brother just said “Moti.”  Moti walked in a leisurely fashion toward my brother and me, and sat down by us.  The trial was over.

After we moved back to Delhi, we would return like homing pigeons to my grandparents’ house every summer, and every summer for many years, Moti was there to greet us.  He was an amazing animal.  I’ve had the privilege of having other dogs in my life, each different and special in his or her own way (including some whose aim in life was to do nothing but snooze on the sofa, Moti’s polar opposite), but I’ve never forgotten Moti.  My friendship with him was one of many I’ve had with animals over the years.

In India, even in a city of several million humans, like Delhi, animals are everywhere.

In the morning you are woken with a chorus of bird song (although, sadly, there are few house sparrows in Delhi any more).  Since apartments and houses are rarely sealed off from the outside world, the open window lets in sounds of pigeons cooing with manic overtones, mynahs cackling in the bushes, parakeets feeding noisily on the neem trees.  Birds come into verandahs and balconies of people’s homes and make their nests, or take shelter in winter.  Apart from the resident pariah dogs there are cows and buffaloes, pigs and donkeys, and the occasional camel or elephant.  All this is mixed in with the sounds of innumerable car horns and bicycle bells, echoing in the cement canyons of the city.

Throughout my childhood and grown-up years I’ve always been conscious of the non-human presences around us — trees, fungi, birds, insects, snakes, muskrats, dogs.  Not only are they a constant source of fascination and delight (and discomfort and fear, too, sometimes) but I learned early on that we live in an interdependent web of life, that every living creature plays a role, that we are only one of a bewildering number of species living on this planet.

So it was surprising and disappointing to me, as I grew up (and still is) that these 99.9999…% of Earthlings didn’t figure much in our modern-day consciousness, from economic policy and city-planning to literature.  As far as literature was concerned, if I wanted to read about non-human living things, I would have to look for them in a special section of the bookstore.  Pick up any regular piece of fiction, and you’d be guaranteed to find in it not one animal or plant that would play any role other than backdrop, if that.  (There are wonderful exceptions, like the books of Barbara Kingsolver).  It seemed as though humans were so intensely obsessed with their own concerns that they didn’t “see” other life-forms, let alone recognize their significance.

I have come across this oddly blinkered view in other circumstances. For instance in almost every TV science fiction show I’ve seen, the ship that travels across space is a sterile, hospital-like environment where you rarely see a plant or animal.  Even the living ship Moya in the show Farscape is strangely devoid (as far as I can tell) of other denizens living symbiotically within her.  Yet we know that each living organism is an ecosystem — as attested by anyone who’s suffered a disturbance in the balance of their intestinal flora due to sickness or antibiotics.  (Part of it is that we have this modern icky attitude toward germs, as though all germs are “the enemy” and health is a state of being germ-free — tell that to the mitochondrion).  For a ship that goes on long, interstellar journeys, it makes sense to create an ecosystem inside it, to assure oxygen and a fresh food supply, among other things.  The one book I’ve read where this is beautifully worked out is Molly Gloss’s stunning generation ship story, “The Dazzle of Day.” 

Here’s another example.  In the U.S., where I currently live, I see a lot of dead animals on the road, the victims of hit-and-runs by cars and other vehicles.  The technical term for these is “road-kill.”  Now I’ve been driving a car for about twelve years (I started late) and while I have had near misses with squirrels and raccoons and all, and can understand that one can have an accident once in a while, I’ve so far never hit an animal.

I’m speculating here but I wonder if the fact that there is a dead squirrel on the road in front of my house at least twice a week means this: that people don’t “see” living things other than people and dogs and cats.

So what I’m suggesting is this: just as there are and were “The Women Men Don’t See” as immortalized by James Tiptree Jr. and others, there are also the “Other living things humans don’t see.”

It wasn’t always like this.  If you look at old stories in any culture old enough to have an antiquity, there are animals in them galore.  These animals might talk or behave in other strange ways, but they are there.  So are trees and mountains and rivers.  They have a voice and a presence.  Humans in these stories constantly interact with other species.

In India this is still true in places.  The environmentalist Valmik Thapar, who narrated the excellent Nature Series India: Land of the Tiger, maintains that various animals are not yet extinct in India because of religious sentiments.  Despite the huge population pressure, people have a philosophy of co-existence with other creatures, which, although a Hindu sentiment, is not limited to Hindus in India.  I know that farmers whose fields are marauded by monkeys traditionally put some food aside for the monkeys so that their fields can be safe. They might drive off the monkeys but the thought of killing them wouldn’t cross their minds.  My mother always puts some grains out for birds and ants because they, too, must eat.  In Hinduism, animals and trees have souls as well, and are therefore our fellows.  Although it certainly does not follow that animals are always well treated in India (if only it were that simple) this attitude, according to Thapar, has gone a long way in preventing any more extinctions than are already happening.

But today this attitude is eroding.  The enormous economic boom in India has meant dire poverty for the rural poor, and besides, the country’s planners are still in the mind-set where they think they have to play catch-up with the West.  So, for instance, my friend the environmentalist Ashish Kothari informs me that there are probably not many more than 1500 Indian tigers left in the national parks (poaching for the Chinese market is a major reason).  And the Indian government, in its determination to catch up to the West, is rabidly intent on building mega-dams, which are known to have massive environmental consequences, including the displacement of tens of millions of people — Ashish tells me that for the North-East along, about 160 large dams are being planned.   This insanity occurs despite massive people’s movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which has slowed but not stopped (so far) the government’s love affair with large dams.

Well, why should we care if species are going extinct on a mass scale around the world?  If habitats for people and animals are vanishing?  Why should writers of speculative fiction, in particular, care?

I believe that the current environmental crisis we are in is a direct result of our exiling the rest of nature from our lives and our consciousness.  That just as being blind to the oppression of women creates conditions where this oppression continues unchecked, being unable to “see” other creatures allows us to go about blindly and stupidly destroying the ecosystems on which we depend.  There are fully 20% of the world’s mammals facing extinction because of us.  These are just the mammals — one shudders to think about the fate of less glamorous species.  The tragedy is that as we tear apart the web of life, we destroy the basis of our own existence.  To not recognize the connection between us and other species, to see nothing outside of the box in which we’ve placed ourselves, is to suffer from a sort of mass autism.  The consequences — for us and for all other living things — are dire.

Part of the problem is also that we are caught in false dichotomies, such as “economic progress versus conservation.”  I’m happy to say that environmental groups like Kalpavriksh in India believe and have always believed that it is only through the participation of village communities that conservation can happen, and their work has shown the truth of this assertion.  In India there are places where villagers have set up their own wildlife sanctuaries.  The wisdom of “ordinary” people (at least ordinary people whose reality isn’t defined by TV) has proven to be an important ingredient for positive change in India.

To be able to see other living things as entities in themselves rather than in terms of their usefulness or threat to humankind, requires a giant paradigm shift.  We’ve been used to thinking about animals as inferior species who didn’t quite make it; people even assume the point of evolution was to create us.  We have the arrogance to call ourselves Homo Sapiens.  But research as reported in recent issues of New Scientist confirms that the differences between humans and animals are not as enormous as we’d thought.  From what I’ve read there and elsewhere, male mice compose songs to female mice, other mammals exhibit compassion, chimps can be mean, parrots really do understand a large part of what they are saying.  Here is a quote from writer Henry Beston (1888-1968):

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.   Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.    And therein do we err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.   In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”  

Biologist E. O. Wilson believes that humans have biophilia, an innate affinity with nature.  This makes sense to me.  I think modern urban culture denies this connection to other living beings.  To talk seriously about animals as independent entities, or about our relationship with a dog, or a tree, is to invite ridicule.  That stuff is for children.  The naturalist Gerald Durrell says in one of his books that any concern for other animals is regarded as sentimentality, taken about as seriously as the ravings of a dowager duchess over her pet poodle.  As a result, people don’t articulate what they might feel about their companion animals or other species in general.  The level of this silence and denial was brought home to me one cold February some years ago.

My dog Jasper had died a couple of months ago, at the age of fifteen.  His death hit me really hard.  I realized, as I was going through the grieving process, that there was no custom of honoring the lives of our animals in public.  Humans have memorial services.  Why not one for a beloved dog?

So I talked to my friends, the local Unitarian Universalist church opened its doors, and a bunch of us organized an inter-faith public memorial service for the animals we had lost.  Although we didn’t advertise it widely, I was amazed at the response.  A man turned up, a well-to-do doctor who was utterly broken by his dog’s death.  At his synagogue he had not been allowed to say the Kaddish prayer for his dog, so he was looking for a place where he could honour his memory.  Another elderly man came to talk about a dog he had had in his childhood.  He’d been carrying around that sense of loss for decades.  A young vet broke down, saying she had to euthanize so many animals at the end of their lives — for good reasons, but she had never had a chance to express her grief.  Strangers embraced each other and people wept unrestrainedly.  It was as though all the masks we wear in public, all the little social deceits and attempts to impress, all that was gone.  It was amazing.

A paradigm shift in our attitude toward other species is a prerequisite for change.  Speculative fiction writers are practitioners of the art of imagining alternative scenarios — what would be the consequences of imagining a different relationship with other species?  Which works of fiction have done that?  (One that comes to mind is Ursula K. Le Guin’s extraordinary Always Coming Home).  How would such works contribute to the shift in world-view that we need?

People are imagining alternatives in other fields.  For instance urban geographer Jennifer Wolch of the University of Southern California proposes an alternative to the traditional conception of the city: Zoopolis.  (The essay is well worth reading in its entirety. The writer and critic Claude Lalumiere first brought the concept to the attention of the SF word through his essay Toward Zoopolis, which I can no longer find on the web.).   To explain the concept, I can do no better than to quote from Wolch herself:

To allow for the emergence of an ethic, practice and politics of caring for animals and nature, we need to renaturalize cities and invite the animals back in, and in the process re-enchant the city.  I call this renaturalized, re-enchanted city zoopolis.  The reintegration of people with animals and nature in zoopolis can provide urban dwellers with the local, situated, everyday knowledge of animal life required to grasp animal standpoints or ways of being in the world, to interact with them accordingly in particular contexts and to motivate political action necessary to protect their autonomy as subjects and their life spaces. 

So a Zoopolis is a city where, for instance, one would build around wetlands or animal migration routes instead of razing them down.  People would find ways to cut down as few trees as possible, and to live in a way that is sensitive to “animal standpoints.”  There are places that are actually attempting to redefine cities in this way, at least to some degree, such as the town of Harmony in Florida.

I want to live in a Zoopolis.  It would be a place with no (or very few) “roadkills” and where you couldn’t casually raze an entire forest down (as happened behind my house over the last few months).  It would be a place where people ate a mostly plant-based diet, where you could walk to most places, where you wouldn’t have to go out of town to take a walk in the woods or observe other species.  There would be moss growing on roofs, and my wild, shrub-filled front garden would not arouse the ire of neighbours.  There wouldn’t be any perfectly manicured lawns with the little yellow stickers indicating they’ve been sprayed with pesticides, and wildflowers would bloom everywhere.

I want to see Zoopolises in speculative and other fictions.

Before the realization comes the dream, the conception.  Before that comes a willingness to develop the ability to “see.”  I know the difference between “seeing” and “not seeing.”  When I walk my dog Bandit, sometimes I’m in a hurry, or preoccupied by something, and I notice nothing around me.  I return home all stressed out about the millions of things I have to do.  Other times I walk more slowly, and I open my awareness to the presences around me — the trees, in their various slow-dance postures, the rustle of small creatures in the bushes, a squirrel watching us warily (my dog’s reputation precedes him), a bright-eyed rabbit in the long grass.  A bat, an increasingly rare sight in my part of New England, swoops in the air above and I wonder what the world looks like to a creature with sonar.  I’m aware of whole sagas taking place in the beds of moss between tree roots, where water bears live their extraordinary lives (read this remarkable book if you are curious).

A paradigm shift of this sort would require not only looking ahead, but digging into our past, to times before we humans became so divorced from the world.  I suspect that each tradition (religious or otherwise) will have something to offer to this new consciousness.  There’s John Muir, and St. Francis, and more recently Gerald Durrell from the West (although I claim Durrell as a fellow Bihari since he was born in my home state in India) along with legends of the Green Man in Europe, Baba Khidr in the Middle-East.  There are ancient verses in the Hindu texts wishing peace for every living thing.  There’s the story of Yudhisthir in the Mahabharata and how he was led to heaven by a dog.  In all these we might find inspiration to imagine other ways of being in the world, other ways of living our lives.  But I will leave you with a succinct one-liner from another person who happened to live in my home state many centuries ago: the Buddha.

As a bee takes the essence of a flower without destroying its beauty and its perfume, so let the sage wander in this life. 

So here goes.

I really wanted to like this book.  I have loved some of what I’ve read of KSR’s work, and I wanted this to be as wonderful an experience for me as others have reported it was for them.  And indeed there are some cool things about this book.  Unfortunately my enjoyment of them was ruined by certain aspects of the book that I frankly found appalling.  But as far as I know, in the general uncritical adulation, hardly anyone has pointed out some of the things that make this a less than stellar work.  So I am sticking my neck out in full anticipation of having it chopped off.  Because some things need to be said.

In 2312 we have humanity spread through much of the solar system, having made habitations out of moons and planets through terraforming.  Humanity has become, through various genetic and cybernetic enhancements, giddily diverse in terms of body types and sexualities — smalls, talls, rounds, hermaphrodites and so on — and many carry personal quantum computers in or outside their bodies.  KSR’s sense of place is, as evident from some of his other works, absolutely and wonderfully evocative — the book has among the most beautiful opening paragraphs I’ve read in the genre.  I could rave about the gorgeous inventiveness of placing a moving city-on-rails on the planet Mercury, designed to stay on the night side through the motion provided by the expansion of the rails on the sun-side.  I could go on about the spacecraft that are hollowed out asteroids (‘terraria’) complete with an animal-and-plant-rich habitat.  I could wax ecstatic about the wonderful intellectualizing, the transformation of infodumps into poetic “Extracts.”  But others have done that, so I note these only in passing.

One of the main characters is something of an irritant – a stereotypical American teen at age 137 – a mostly-woman of Chinese descent, who is one of the privileged spacers.  There’s nothing wrong with having a protagonist like this, except that for the grand task that she chooses to undertake, she doesn’t seem quite believable.  She realizes that in order to decrease the probability of terrorist attacks from (as she suspects) Earth, which is a ‘development sink’ with massive ecological issues (global average temperature rise of 5 C) and resulting sociological chaos — there can be no tolerance for continuing poverty and misery due to want and injustice.  She talks with the other major character, a far more mature Saturnian called Wahram, about the need for revolution on Earth.  And the chapters set on Earth, where Swan Er Hong and Wahram attempt to make things better, are the weakest in the book.

Swan and Wahram are privileged spacers, and as such, unsurprisingly speak and act thus, although Wahram is more sensitive.  Yet by not challenging their view in more than a half-hearted way, the author slips into a colonialist rant that threw me right out of the book.  So the two spacers land in North Harare, a new country in Africa, and they have this massive machine called a self-rep that goes through abandoned neighborhoods and demolishes them, leaving pre-fab homes in the local style in its wake.  The two off-world innocents are then puzzled at the apparently pointless antagonism that breaks out among communities and in other locations, such as the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, where a self-rep is blown up for no apparent reason.  In one scene Swan takes control of a sabotaged self-rep and saves it from destroying the settlement, and is arrested by the local government.  “We’re trying to help!” Swan says at one point, in utter frustration.  The poor are shown to be ungrateful, irrational, and incomprehensible, and it is pounded into us that things are such a mess on Earth, and so complicated, that no wonder nothing really seems to work.  At one point Swan Er Hong “abuses” a Harare woman and Wahram is so upset that he might end up disliking Swan that instead of intervening on behalf of the woman, he leaves — not just the scene, but Africa.  You might think the author is simply showing us how incapable the two spacers are of getting out of their privileged world-view.  But the fact that the spacers simply abandon the whole housing-for-the-poor scheme, thinking maybe their approach was too blunt after all, and merrily carry on to another project, serves to underline any lack of serious engagement with issues of poverty, let alone revolution.  Africa in particular has been made such a mess by European powers (not to mention the American slave trade — and forget about what’s happening in Algeria now) — that any first-world headshaking and sorrowfulness at the lack of gratitude because they were ‘only trying to help’ makes one either retch or seethe with fury.  Colonialism is not even mentioned, however, as could have been done in one of the book’s many Extracts.  Can you imagine running some kind of massive development project without a knowledge of (or respect for) local history, culture and politics?  These privileged spacers don’t even have the excuse of not having access to information, considering that one of them carries a particularly encyclopedic quantum computer in her head.  The point is, the poor they are trying to help, to raise to revolution so that they – the spacers — can be safe from terrorism, don’t matter.  They aren’t people.  They are a monolithic mass of misery, beyond help.

Swan Er Hong and Wahram prefer to run away from problems they don’t understand, abandoning the Africa project to the locals (although Swan wants to return to housing at some future point) and they decide completely arbitrarily that the next step is time to return the animals to Earth.  Endangered species thriving in various space terraria are sent to Earth  to rain down gently in aerogel capsules without (mysteriously enough) any governments detecting this process (let alone being consulted, another example of arrogance), which involves the return of thousands of animals all over Earth.  While the scene of wolf and caribou returning to North America is quite moving, I was left rather puzzled.  With the 5C warming and the increasing ecological issues, why is this a good time to bring the animals back?  And how is it connected to the protagonists’ original goal of brewing revolution on Earth?  It turns out that not all natives appreciate the return of the animals — Swan feels the need to lecture to Earthlings about animals being our ‘horizontal brothers and sisters.’ An admirable sentiment, which I share, but again it speaks to a colonialist ‘let me tell you what’s good for you’ spiel that I find I am unable to stomach.  And the animals also seem removed from us, despite Swan’s trek with wolves, which has some genuine poetic moments.  It seems that spacers recognize their beauty and value, but despite Swan’s protestations, they are not brethren.  The spacers in general seem to have no actual emotional bond or interdependence with other species.

In Canada, incidentally, we get to see some of the locals as people, through scenes in a bar, with Swan and Wahram drinking with Canadians.  Apparently this is simply not done when the privileged do-gooders go to Africa.  Mix with the locals?  Figure out what their thoughts and desires and world-views might be?  Nah!

(In an earlier part of the book Swan does go to China, the land of her ancestors, but spends most of the time there kidnapped and drugged).

Overall, the book shows a deep disrespect for the poor and disenfranchised.  In India alone there are (as counted by an environmentalist friend of mine) at least a thousand local environmental movements, initiated and maintained by the rural poor.  In my own experience of the Chipko movement in the Himalayas as a teen, I saw illiterate women speak up, take the lead, and launch a movement that not only protected the local forests but transformed their societies.  Just because newspapers owned by giant conglomerations don’t report on them, it does not mean that these movements don’t exist and don’t have an impact.  (Check out, for instance, the site of the National Alliance of People’s Movements for a certainly-not-complete longish list).  If you want to hear what poverty is really all about, and how to actually speak truth to power, listen to even a few minutes of ‘rural reporter’ P. Sainath’s impassioned expose, “Globalizing Inequality.”  In the book, Swan and Wahram approach various agencies working on development issues but they never even attempt to talk to people, or engage with, or study people’s movements, let alone access information readily available on the internet today.

It is worth mentioning also that despite its apparent imaginativeness on the subject of human sexuality, gender and variations thereof, the book seems to idealize heterosexual mating, although between hermaphroditic beings.  (Come on!)  The romance between the two main characters, even independent of sexuality, does not come across as believable.  There’s no fire between them, I suspect because at least one of them rings hollow as a character.

There is another deep problem with the book.  It is a philosophical problem and perhaps all of what I’ve pointed out above are symptoms of a common malaise.  This is that despite all of the gee-whiz wonderful inventiveness and expansiveness of the book, it ultimately represents to me a colossal failure of the imagination.  The philosophical underpinning, the invisible paradigm, is basically the frontier mentality of Old America.  True, the non-Earth worlds that are settled by humanity are (with one exception) empty of other life, so that one might argue that there is nothing wrong with terraforming those worlds for human needs (although it is important to point out in this critique of the book by E. Yanarella that there are other views on  the subject of terraforming, which, if even partly represented in the book, would have made it deeper and far more interesting).  But let us concede that there are no moral issues with terraforming unoccupied worlds.  Here’s my problem with it.

The language and attitude of the people doing the terraforming is still colonialist.  The way they speak of resources in the context of terraforming: nitrogen from Titan, this from that, rather reminiscent of the post-industrial-revolution view of the world as a list of resources, silks from China, bauxite from here, oil from there is just one case in point.  The baldly stated notion that that humans are “meant to inscribe ourselves into the universe” is not that different from the kind of ideology that justified the British plunder of India, or the French and Dutch mangling of Africa — manifest destiny on a solar system scale.  Earth is bound by history and nothing gets done, so humanity escapes to space, builds a variety of little utopias free from want (there’s always nitrogen from Titan if you want to fix your atmosphere) – the ultimate escapism.  Since the language and philosophy and attitude of these far-future spacers is still the same old same old, I find it hard to believe that capitalism has been shifted to the margins, and that a more just, less exploitative system is possible in that future.  A colleague of mine, an environmental philosopher, argues that a people’s underlying philosophy guides how they act, as much as economics does.  And if your underlying philosophy is messed up remnant of an unjust system of thinking, you’re going to do something terrible somewhere, sometime.  Consider for instance the rather cavalier and barely contested attitude to the presence of indigenous life on the moon Enceladus in the book, presented as an aside.

Overall there is a peculiarly staccato feel to the book.  Everything is chunked up and oddly disconnected.  Swan Er Hong has lost her home city to terrorism, and mourns the loss, but we don’t actually experience the loss through her eyes in any real way.  She’s disconnected from memories, from a social network, and even her travels across the solar system have a jerky quality to them.  Wahram is part of a multi-partner family community called a crèche, but we don’t see him emotionally attached to it, or thinking about it, let alone shaped by it.  The main characters in the book zip around the solar system without a thought, in fact quite casually, as though it really doesn’t take much energy to move (and move mass) over such enormous distances.  The plot, too, is all over the place.  First you get a tour of Mercury, the Saturn system, and Venus — then suddenly Earth is seen by the protagonists as the possible source of terrorism – then the Venusians (Chinese-descended Indian-name-adopting) are discovered to be the actual bad guys, at which point Earth is promptly forgotten about, other than warranting a few mentions in meetings.

Speaking also as someone with a scientific background, I need to say this: that the book does not critique the enterprise of science.  It seems to posit the untenable view that science and scientists can solve everything.  (If only!  But life’s more complicated than that).  I love science with a passion myself, which is why I am critical of some of the ways it is done, how it is used and misused, that it is filled with the masculinist baggage of its origins, and the contradictions that allow it to be appropriated by power.  I also point out the arrogance of the scientific enterprise — its relationship to colonialism and capitalism are not easily dismissed.  The book takes a dewy-eyed view of technological advance that is deeply problematic to me.

By the way there is also the strange non-mention of future India.  I found it really odd that a country with a huge technological base, space-faring ambitions and the world’s second-largest population only merits mention by absence.  So for instance the Mars settlement is dominated by the Chinese but because they have some kind of adolescent issue with their home country, they take Indian names.  There’s the random blowing up of a self-rep in Uttar Pradesh, as mentioned.  There are several references to an opera about Gandhi called Satyagraha, but any kind of alternative world-view on politics/development, let alone a Gandhian one, is conspicuously absent.  There is an Indian character, a young man named Kiran, who is a particularly two-dimensional character, whose main function appears to be to discover something that leads to the discovery of the bad guys.   He seems to have no history, or sense of connection to anything or anyone, or anything else that would render him a person.  This is a future in which India might as well have not existed.  And I say this not out of some kind of misplaced nationalism but because a country of over a billion people that has a space program and a huge amount of scientific talent is a bit hard to ignore in any extrapolation to a realistic future – even a mention would suffice.

To sum up then: some of KSR’s earlier works show a deep sensitivity to how ordinary people, including ordinary scientists live and act.  But this sensitivity seems to be limited to white American or European men and women.  Despite his critique of power as demonstrated in many books, when it comes to an international or interplanetary stage, he cannot speak truth to it.  His vision appears to be mired and limited by the very world-view that the powerful of today and tomorrow strive to perpetuate.  The colonialist view of the world is not a thing of the past.  There are consequences to ignoring or being ignorant of the humanity of the poor and disenfranchised.  There are consequences to having a scientific-technological viewpoint that sees the world in disconnected little (or big) chunks.  Imagine this rather terrifying oh purely imaginary scenario:

Somewhere in a corporate boardroom, oil company executives are feeling the pressure to switch to green energy.  There are already R&D programs under way in those areas, but surely there are ways to capitalize on the situation and make even more money.  Perhaps a graduate of a top US university comes up with this brilliant plan: disinform the public and pay the lawmakers so that any meaningful legislation on global warming is stalled.  Continue to find new sources of oil, including mining the Arctic sea-bed, so that even more CO2 goes into the atmosphere.  Delay the possibility of change while developing massive geoengineering/ terraforming projects on the side.  Suppress world-wide people’s movements such as the ones going on in India against CO2-spewing coal-fired power plants being built by multinationals.  Especially suppress news of such movements so that citizens of powerful countries continue to harbor racist and colonialist prejudices about the global poor.  Let things get to a point where catastrophic temperature rise seems inevitable, with perhaps a few dramatic disasters that cause a few million deaths, preferably of people in developing countries. (That’s just collateral damage).  Get scientists worked up to a point where their ignorance of other alternatives including social movements leads them to say to the public that geoengineering/ terraforming is the only way to save the planet.  Never mind that complex systems like global climate are not entirely predictable in the sense that even certain small changes can have wildly disproportionate results.  The point is that this way, governments and taxpayers will pay a ton of money to these people to save the earth.  Now this might mean that certain other people, such as the millions in the tropics, will have to die, but they were never important to begin with.  (Remember the poor are a monolithic, hopeless mass of suffering, they are beyond help, right? as we’ve just read in 2312).  So the corporations and their lackeys, the scientists who’ve bought into their propaganda, get to be heroes and save the world!  And make a killing in the process, pun intended.

Books like 2312 contribute to such a scenario becoming reality, because they reinforce comfortable prejudices and belief systems instead of challenging them.

(For the record, I do think that geoengineering could be a last, desperate resource, and deserves some R&D independent of vested interests, and I agree that changing lifestyles, let alone mindsets, paradigms and world-views, is remarkably difficult — but I don’t think we should give up even before we’ve begun.  Think of how unthinkable some social movements were before they became successful.  Where is the science-fictional imagination when it comes to this sort of change?)

I ended 2312 with a feeling of deep betrayal.  Not only because KSR has been one of my favorite writers (Pacific Edge is one of my favorite books) but because it was a reminder, a kick in the posterior of my complacency — of a few hard truths.  The fact that the SF community in the US and probably elsewhere, despite the presence of a few individuals with mindsets to the contrary, is deeply uncritical of works by writers who have crossed a certain threshold of popularity — that issues that beset much of the rest of the world today are not even on the radar of people who read and write in the genre — that not only do xenophobic books win awards but even works by otherwise deeply thoughtful writers that contain unexamined colonialist or other problematic attitudes do not get called out for it – these are true enough, sadly.  But most of all I am shaken by the reminder to us writers that power can corrupt, subtly or otherwise, even that which should be free — the imagination.

*

Note: My ever-erudite friend Steve points out (as someone innocent of the book who has read my rant above) that the attitudes I describe are more correctly attributed to American Exceptionalism than to old-fashioned colonialism.  For instance, he says, “…it does explain why the spacers don’t understand other cultures. They have the US mindset, which is (as Tom Wolfe said) they think an Englishman would talk just like an American, if only you woke him up early enough in the morning. The kinds of people you are talking about are just invisible to them. “Women organized to protect local forests? Interesting. If only they’d had GPS drones and high bandwidth internet think of what they could do. I know, let’s set up some repeater towers across the Himalayas to make that possible. Here’s a good spot. Once we clear the trees we’ll have coverage of the entire region…”

I still remember the announcement that Mary Ann Mohanraj made way back on a South Asian women’s listserve — that she was planning to start a speculative fiction ezine with some friends.   That was before I was published, but I got up the courage to send them a science article and a poem  (both were published; the poem went on to be runner up for a Rhysling award).  Two published stories later, I sent Strange Horizons a rather unusual fiction piece, with a lot of trepidation.  To my utmost delight it was accepted.  It was called Three Tales from Sky River: Myths For a Starfaring Age, my first pro sale.  I still remember feeling for the first time like a writer — a giddy feeling indeed.  Later the story got an honorable mention from Gardner Dozois, the first time that my name was printed in one of the august Year’s Best volumes.

I continued to read and delight in the ezine — it was publishing work by newer writers as well as established ones, and it tasted (in a manner of speaking) adventurous, different, and richer than the other offerings, print or otherwise, that were then available.   After Mary Ann handed over editorship to others, the ezine continued to flourish, driven by committed volunteers based on a model that your average banker would have laughed at all the way to the golf course.  But it worked, and it is still working.  There are reviews, and stories, and columns, and poetry, and a blog, and it makes for fine, thoughtful reading that stirs the imagination and the intellect.

My old Strange Horizons story was about tales from a future age, but said nothing about the futuristic tale-teller.  Over the years his voice kept haunting me until I saw him in my mind and discovered his name: Somadeva, a wandering poet and collector of stories from 11th-century India.  He then told me his story, which was published (where else?) in Strange  Horizons in 2010.  A year later it was reprinted in the Hartwell and Cramer Year’s Best anthology.

Then I got to be a columnist for SH in 2011-2012, covering science and environment, a role I thoroughly enjoyed, not least for the learning it enabled me to acquire.  Strange Horizons is the ezine I read all the time, although I often only have the time (in my overworked life) to read it in snatches, stolen moments between stirring the pot on the stove and grading papers.  But I read it.  It’s published stories by my favorite writers, and by complete unknowns whose work was and is a delight to discover.  It’s reviews connect me to what other writers are doing.  Its poetry transports me.  Its columns and articles are always interesting, and its blog keeps me in touch with what’s happening in the spec fic world.  It’s the means by which I remind myself, even in the middle of a busy semester, that I am a writer.  It is my connection to the spec fic world, a mooring rope, a reminder of places and paradigms beyond the mundane.

Strange Horizons is having a fund drive at the moment.  If you like speculative fiction and want to support an ezine run by volunteers that pays professional rates to its writers and presents fine work every week, go over to http://www.strangehorizons.com/ and support them!

I was born and raised close enough to the equator that the change of seasons was very gradual, and leaves did not all at once drop their leaves.  Many trees stayed leafed throughout winter.  The seasons edged, blurred and bled into each other, with the exception of the monsoons.  The monsoons!  After the mad, crackling heat of summer, the great armada of clouds assembled in the sky and loosed the torrent upon us, as suddenly as a magician’s snap of the fingers.  The coming of the monsoons meant instant relief, an abrupt lifting of the spirits.

Here in North America the seasons change nearly as suddenly.  Autumn is one of my favorite times, because it is not so cold yet, and there is a stark beauty to it that I can perhaps appreciate better now that I am myself in the autumnal stage of life.  But it also comes with a kind of melancholy that can descend abruptly.  One is not gentled into autumn here.  Leaves turn color and fall very quickly, and temperatures drop, so once again we know the struggle of mind over mattress, the difficulty of getting out of a warm bed, the shock of bare toes on a cold floor.  After all these years here I am not quite used to the sudden onset of autumn, the abrupt drop of temperatures and spirits, the hint of winter’s breath around the corner.  The change is too soon, too cruel.  This child of the sub-tropics seems unable to get used to it, although in past years I have always muddled through to the point where the beauty of the fall season becomes apparent: the colors of the leaves fallen against the dark asphalt are startlingly brilliant, and at last one can behold the fractal beauty of bare branches against the sky.  Death is in the air, death of the year, death of the old.  There is no hint yet of the renewal that follows winter, only the apprehension of cold and snow, and the turning inward, the cocooning of thoughts and rooms and fragile beings against the coming chill.  The sun, always so faithfully high in the sky of the tropics, is a low, skulking, sullen being, ember rather than bright fire, reluctantly bathing us in unearthly, beautiful, inadequate light.

In the fall I want to start building my winter nest, my burrow where I could hibernate through the long cold, or at least sleep through most of it like the bears.  But I am not a bear, alas.  I am a human who must venture out, and work, and grade papers, and give exciting lectures, and have responsibilities that preclude a winter sleep.  I feel myself as crisp and fraught and solitary as the leaf still trembling on the tree-branch, filled with apprehensions about change and gravity.  Perhaps there is only hope in the unreliable wind, which might, while blowing me to oblivion, show me places I have not seen before.

Who, you may ask, is Vladimir Ouch?  None other than the thistle growing near the door of my little house.  I have seen it grow from a prickly little thistlet to a spiky wonder taller than I am.  It was named in collaboration with friends who also enjoy a non-Euclidean way of viewing the world.

When you’ve named something, it is hard to uproot it.  I have a soft spot for thistles to begin with.  They are prickly, and to most eyes, ugly, and yet they produce flowers that are extravagantly purple and beautiful.  We saw a moth-like beast nestling in the swirls of one flower — the mothy one was colored just like a wasp, in dark brown and yellow (“Batesian mimicry,” whispered my daughter).  I am waiting for the local goldfinches to discover Vladimir, since I’ve seen them before on thistles.  Idly I wonder if the gold-and-brown creatures of the air have a special relationship with Vladimir Ouch.   Do they particularly like purple?  Does Vladimir exude a secret scent discernible only to such beings?

My neighbor’s garden is a complete contrast to mine.  His lawns are manicured, his bushes neatly trimmed, and you can smell the pesticide on spray-day even if you are a few blocks away.  Not a single dandelion raises its head on that lawn.  My garden has a shaggy shrubbery in the front, and the lawn behind is innocent of herbicide and pesticide.  This summer the rains have turned the front garden into a jungle, which is something I have to deal with quickly before it becomes impenetrable.  My idea of a garden is certainly much less civilized than my neighbor’s, but a jungle  is a bit much.  Sadly (or gladly?) I have neither the time nor energy to be a hardworking gardener, like certain of my friends.  :-P

The trouble is that being an academic and a writer can be a disadvantage, in that it enables creative excuses.  I find myself interested in the greenstuff that comes up after the rains.  I enjoy the uncommon, unacknowledged beauty of the weeds, their defiant, celebratory, nonconformist existence.  I get curious about their lives.  Without lifting a trowel I find my creativity, not my hands, stained with green.  Here’s an extract from a work in progress.  The protagonist shares only two things with me: being female and being lazy about her garden (or fascinated by its wilderness potential, whatever you prefer).

Sometimes stories just need to brew.  Knowing that, I set it aside.  This month I have had the good luck of editors asking to see my stories, so I picked up this one, brushed the metaphoric dust off it, and tried to make something of it.  No luck.  The deadline being Tuesday, I decided to give up on the damn thing.

Then I happened to look at my friend Anil Menon‘s erudite and always enjoyable blog, where he mentions the translation of a story “Sheesha Ghat” by an amazing Urdu writer called Naiyar Masud.  I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, so I did.  It was very compelling and rather strange, the kind of story that stays with you long after you’ve read it, partly because (like the real world) not everything makes sense.  Relationships and events are implied, hinted.  It is magical realist but in a completely Indian way — although in a way I haven’t seen before. .

Well, I enjoyed the story, and thought no more about mine.  Thinking I would write to the editor who had sought a story from me the next day, and apologize for the non-delivery, I went to bed.  I woke up in the morning knowing exactly what I needed to do in order to finish the story.  The events and a crucial secondary character just showed up in my head as though they’d been always been there.   .

Now my story is quite different from Naiyar Masud’s.  But something about ‘Sheesha Ghat” opened the locked door in my mind, behind which the rest of my story was waiting. This has happened before, when I’m stuck.  I haven’t figured out what it is about the story I’m reading that resonates with my own story because it isn’t style, or plot, or character.  ”Atmosphere” is close, but that doesn’t do it either.  In fact the stimulus or key that opens the door isn’t even necessarily a story — it might be a song, for instance, or a melody.

I’m just grateful that the rest of my story has been revealed to me.  it is stranger than I thought it would be.  I still don’t have it completed and I can’t say for certain it is going to be a good story, but it has substance now.  Tomorrow I finish the first draft.

Writing is such a mysterious process.  It is often a lonely process but at the same time, it isn’t, because we are always haunted by the voices and imaginations of others.

Anil and I both have introductory essays in this volume: here’s an extract from mine: 

I first heard the Ramayana when I was very little.  From time immemorial, the epic has been carried down through the generations as an oral tradition.  I heard it from my mother and my paternal grandmother; the Amar Chitra Katha comic books came much later.  My grandmother was particularly fond of the Bal Kand in the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, which describes in beautiful verse the childhood antics of the young hero, Ram, and to this day I can sing or recite parts of it. 

It was my grandfather — a man of great intelligence, sensitivity and integrity, who first gave me a hint that there were multiple Ramayanas.  He loved many aspects of the ancient texts, particularly the Upanishads, and was the first person to inculcate in me an appreciation of the sounds of poems in Sanskrit, especially the Geet Govind.  Yet he did not hesitate to criticize when he had good reason to do so.  (One of the great freedoms of Hinduism is surely the lack of a Big-Brother-style religious police to prevent you from having your say).  I remember him raging about some sections of the Manu-smriti, or pointing out an absurdity in the Vishnu Purana.  Once he told me that there were many versions of the Ramayana, and that some versions contained interpolations that were clearly anachronistic, containing references that belonged to times later than that of the original story.  I didn’t think much about it then, being in my pre-teen years and distracted by cricket and climbing trees, but I remembered this later when I came across references to Ramayanas from the point of view of the villain, Ravana, and from Sita’s vantage point as well.  Now I think of the Ramayana as a kind of palimpsest, a tapestry in multiple layers, a creation of many voices through the ages, an entity always in the making, and thus always alive. 

This comes out from the wonderful Zubaan Books in New Delhi, any day now. 

Also of interest, Locus Online’s Roundtable on SF in translation includes short pieces by Anil and me as well as many other fascinating contributions.  

I wonder if that makes more sense in a short story, where one is restricted by word count and so perhaps every word has to count.  Epics such as the Ramayana, and even more so, the Mahabharata, are filled with fascinating excursions and delvings that explorations that aren’t necessarily vital to the ‘main arc’ of the story.  While they certainly flesh out the world of the story, they are clearly there for their own sake.

Similarly, reading Moby Dick, I find that its notorious ramblings and expositions are oddly pleasing.  They might slow the action, but I like taking the time to stare at a painting on a wall through the eyes of Ishmael.  I like the fact that at any moment in the story, that moment is the most important thing.  The person, the painting, the dining room of that time and place is what there is.  There is an almost Zen-like quality to this kind of writing.

Life is like that too — full of objects and people and occurrences that have no relevance to the main plot, because, guess what, there is no main plot.  We choose to draw out this thread or that from the tapestry, giving us the illusion of a sequence of characters and events and meaning, but it is only one thread in the tangle.  Art need not be compelled to imitate life — but let there be some works at least that burrow into the tangle and mix up the threads for the joy of it.

I’m working on a short story now that is mostly a series of ramblings, and I’d like to see if I can, in a small, modest and likely inadequate way, imitate what the fat, epic-like tomes do.  Throw in lots of irrelevant detail, rejoice in it, and see what happens.  Hopefully the reader will get a story where it is his/her choice to pull out this thread or that one, and play with it as a kitten might play with a ball of wool and a half-knitted sweater.