In an attempt to revive this blog – in part because I want to respond to some dreadful things happening in the world that I am as yet unable to articulate – I am posting some earlier material that has been lying around. Here is the first of them. Some years ago I wrote a bunch of story notes for my 2018 collection Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories. Here’s the piece.
Ambiguity Machines: Story Notes
Most of the time I don’t set out to write a story with a particular message, intent, or plot. The story starts with an image, usually of a character who may or may not be human, and a landscape of some sort. Sometimes there are vague hints of the middle or the end, but no notion of how to get there. In order to learn more about the characters, and indeed, to know what happens next, I have to write the story. I am under no illusions that the story notes below will be of interest to many people, but I do find it fascinating to read story notes from other writers. And it would be nice to have a record for myself that I can look back on later. So here goes.
With Fate Conspire
When she walked into my head, she was only a woman of poor birth with an enviable self-possession, even fierceness – a woman with a certain rare ability, who, as she describes it, was “of no more importance than a cockroach.” The story ended up involving one of my favourite songs, Babul Mora, composed by the Nawab of Awadh when he was exiled by the British – with its indescribable yearning for home expressed metaphorically as a bride leaving the natal family – so the story became a kind of time travel. Now time is always fascinating to physicists, and since we know time is not Newtonian, we get to play with it. Through this story I got to talk to some of my favourite historical characters – apart from the Nawab, also Rassundari, a housewife of no account in mid-19th century Bengal, whose autobiographical extracts I had read in translation many years ago in “Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present” (eds Tharu and Lalita). It was inexpressibly moving. Academically I was already becoming interested in climate change and reading up on climate physics, which is very much in the background in this story but vital to the plot. And so… With Fate Conspire, which first appeared in Solaris, edited by Jonathan Oliver.
Rather to my surprise, my little TED performance piece from the TED Countdown conference on climate change last year (October 2021 in Edinburgh), which was released in June 2022, has over 1.4 million views. Of course, the lack of a Comment feature means that I don’t know whether the point I am making with this story-fragment is at all clear. But I am hoping that the long story I’ve written for the Climate Imagination Project at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination (of which story the TED piece is a fragment) will help put it in context.
I haven’t had time to write about my attending the TED conference last year. It was a revelatory experience to see how elites in the West construe the problem according to their (mostly unconscious) guiding metaphors. My sense was that there was (among many) genuine sincerity and concern, but widespread paradigm blindness, a term that I am finding more and more useful in both fiction and my academic work. There were some really good talks, but most of the talks did not challenge the deeply problematic dominant paradigm. The surreal experience of a conference during the pandemic (before vaccines, and conducted with great competence in terms of logistics) in a city that was one of the centers of the Industrial revolution, related to my own history through colonialism – continues to reverberate. It made me interested in how people of privilege construct their realities, and informed the long story I wrote for the Climate Imagination project. The story, along with those of my wonderful fellow fellows from around the world, will be out later this year.
In other updates: I’m working on an academic book (on climate, what else), designing a couple of new courses that will hopefully run, and am about to submit two pieces of short fiction. In the summer of 2022 I had a mini-Cambrian-Explosion of creativity and wrote drafts of six short stories, published one (see “Left to Die” in Clarkesworld) and hope that the remaining will see the light of day this year. I also worked on two academic pieces that will be out this year as well.
Women in mustard field, Jharkhand. Photo Credit: AID
I am a writer of speculative fiction; you might say I deal in dreams and nightmares. When I address climate change in my work, it is as a doorway into the complex of crises that confront us: rising inequality, mass extinction of species, nitrogen cycle imbalance, and, of course, climate change. Climate reductionism is dangerous, because it implies that we just have to fix carbon emissions and all will be well. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The best way to understand that – even for a writer of imaginative fiction – is to pay attention to reality. I mean, specifically, the real world of marginalized communities where apocalypse has already come to stay. It is here that we can take the true measure of the great engine of modern industrial civilization. It is here that our most entrenched middle-class assumptions and entitlements are challenged.
Through a volunteer driven movement called AID (Association for India’s Development) that partners with with grassroots groups throughout India, I get to listen to the voices of the unheard. So in the hope that you will also want to hear what they have to say, and perhaps support this work, here is an account from a povertized, desertified region of the Indian state of Jharkhand.
Life used to be difficult for Sauhar Singh and his wife, Makhni Devi. The only way for the middle-aged couple to afford one meal a day for their family was to work in the stone quarries of the region. What was once a vast, unbroken expanse of forest in Jharkhand is now a desert of stone and mica quarries, overhung by dust clouds that can be kilometers long. The forest used to be a source of food, fodder and traditional medicine for the villages of the region, but when it was destroyed, the water table dropped, agriculture failed, and villagers lost their way of life, their means of sustenance and their independence. They became dependent on daily wage labor in the quarries to survive.
It is not just middle-aged small farmers who have become enmeshed in stone quarries and mines. Child labor is a horrific reality in India’s mines. Stone quarries swallow young people and old alike, condemning them to diseases like silicosis. See, for example, Precarious Labour in Stone Quarries of Eastern India, a short documentary. The construction boom in India and the endless middle and upper class hunger for Western-style living result in sacrifice zones like these. Real estate developers and the cement industry are partners, along with the mining mafia, in the rise of stone quarries. Many of these quarries are illegal. They contaminate water sources and make life hell for those who live in the area. Working in these quarries without protective gear, people breathe in stone dust as they crack stones to feed into the crushers. As Madhusree Mukerjee documents in a photo essay in Birbhum district in West Bengal, these quarries destroy communities, forests, life, and hope itself.
Stone quarry in Birbhum district, West Bengal. Photo Credit Madhusree Mukerjee
But in Sauhar Singh’s village in Jharkhand, something has changed. I look at a photograph of two women standing in a field of mustard flowers in bloom. Many people in the village have left the back-breaking work in the stone quarries and returned to agriculture. Sauhar Singh and Makhni Devi grow potatoes, tomatoes, brinjals and more. Now there is enough excess produce that they can sell the surplus. Their grandchildren are able to go to school.
What has enabled this miracle is the revival of the local micro-watershed. Through AID, the communities of the region have received guidance and support from hydrological experts, as a result of which they have built farm ponds and check dams to conserve water and prevent erosion, and engaged in ecological restoration of the local forests, including the preparation and distribution of seed balls of native trees. As the forest is being restored to health, the water table is rising, allowing several families in the village to leave the quarries and return to agriculture. The communities’ traditional relationship with the forest is being revived. Through all this, the former daily wage laborers are finding their self-respect and pride in being able to take care of their own lives.
We are working with partners on the ground in several districts of Jharkhand in watershed restoration. The communities’ concerns guide the work, and their active collaboration is essential. The transformation has been extraordinary – in one place, the water table rose ten feet. While challenges are different in different places, it seems clear that addressing the availability of water for people and ecosystems through community collaboration is – for lack of a better term – a nexus solution. The revival of the forest supports biodiversity and – through enhancing the carbon sink, addresses climate change. Sociologically we see communities becoming self-sufficient, able to free themselves from dangerous work in the quarries, gaining food security and able to consider education for their children, including girls. Neighboring villages are seeing these changes and eager to participate.
Photo Credit: AID
From this reservoir (above), barren and dry for 25 years, to this (below):
Photo Credit: AID
Talking to our partners via Zoom across the planet, I am struck by the intelligence, eagerness and resilience of the people of these communities. There is laughter and humor, creativity and strength. It is humbling and uplifting to be among them. Friends who spend months in these villages report a renewed hope and determination in the face of rising odds. As climate worsens, as destructive ‘development’ runs amok, as mainstream society continues to devour Earth’s resources with exponentially increasing hunger, I find in these stories of resistance and change, renewal and regeneration, reason to believe that another world is possible.
Note: At the request of several people, I am reproducing below the afterword I wrote (at my then editor, Anita Roy’s urging) for my first short story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (published by Zubaan, New Delhi in 2008 and reprinted in 2013). Although today, in 2021, I would write it somewhat differently, perhaps add and emphasize some things, I stand by the key ideas expressed in it. (And I’ve added, for a bit of colour, a slapdash bit of art I did on Paint while I was thinking about an alien landscape. I make no claim to being an artist, however.)
A Speculative Manifesto
By Vandana Singh
At the dawn of time, the first humans told tales about ten-headed demons, flying chariots, and gods wielding thunderbolts. The earliest writings in almost every tradition are part of what we call imaginative literature or speculative fiction today. The modern descendants of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Mahabharata are the genres of science fiction, and fantasy, including various sub-categories like magic realism, alternate history and slipstream. They are all stories about what cannot ever be, or what cannot be as yet. Such are tales set on other planets, or on rocket-ships; such are stories filled with impossibilities like faster-than-light drives and magic wands, and people who turn into animals.
But humanity has grown out of its childhood, as each of us grows out of it as individuals. Why not discard the old myths, legends, tall tales, and their modern counterparts, as we discard other childish things? Why not leave them for the children? Aren’t grown-ups supposed to read realistic fiction? What good are these wild tales, anyway?
I have the honor of being one of four international writers as part of the Climate Imagination Project of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, in collaboration with the upcoming UN Climate summit COP 26 in November of this year. My colleagues are: Libia Brenda, a writer, editor, and translator based in Mexico City; Xia Jia (pen name of Wang Yao), a speculative fiction author and associate professor of Chinese Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University; Hannah Onoguwe, a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, in the Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Read more about them here!
Since we are charged with creating, through fiction, ‘positive’ climate futures, and because ‘positive’ is used in so many senses, I want to interrogate the term ‘positive’ here, in the light of the new and unsurprisingly dire UN Climate report, IPCC AR6.
Above: Global Warming from 1880 to 2020. Animation by NASA
What does it mean to even talk of positivity at a time like this, when people less privileged than global urbanites are already experiencing various degrees of apocalypse? As Barbara Ehrenreich so eloquently articulates in this animated video, the term is loaded. “Be Positive” has been used by authoritarian governments to suppress dissent and distract from their failure to deal with real problems. When the second wave of the pandemic hit India, government leaders pushed positive thinking even as the crisis revealed the lack of proper planning and preparation. A hollow ‘Positive thinking’ is a luxury afforded to the privileged, who are insulated through wealth and power from the worst effects of pandemics and climate change. At best, such positivity is delusional in a world of vaccine discrimination, melting ice sheets, deadly heat waves and disappearing species. At worst it is cruel in its dismissal of the real suffering of real people and nonhuman species, and harmful because it distracts from meaningful action. This kind of empty positivism may well be how politicians and billionaires anaesthetize their consciences in order to sleep at night, as a source of comfort, an alternative to taking a good, hard look at themselves in the mirror. I want no part of that. I’d rather be a thorn in the side of such people.
The kind of ‘positivism’ I want to talk about in the context of climate fiction is much more in line with the ‘optimism of the will’ attributed to Antonio Gramsci. The kind of positive future I want to imagine does not shy away from real problems of the world, nor does it look beyond or around them. Instead, it engages with real problems in an imaginative way. Our present is already dystopic for billions of people and millions of other species. We can’t usefully imagine ‘positive’ futures without first acknowledging this, without attempting to walk through – not around – the valley of despair and suffering with all who are forced to do so by the powers that be. What dystopian stories do is to walk into this valley and stay there. While dystopias are often necessary as warnings and wake-up calls, an overabundance of them can stifle and constrain our thinking by evoking fear and despair. Fear is useful and necessary, but when we are stuck in it, it can paralyze us into inaction; worse, it is hackable, as one might ascertain from the rise of populist authoritarian leaders around the globe. A certain kind of fear response seems make us more likely to give up our power to others, to seek ‘strongmen’ to lead the nation, or to surrender agency to technobillionaires.
So what I would consider ‘optimism of the will’ in the context of climate change, biodiversity loss and our various other social-environmental crises would be to use the power of speculative fiction to do the hard work of imagining ways to engage usefully with our current crises. To avoid becoming pointless escapism or heartless dismissal of stark reality, such an approach must be grounded in place. After all, climate change is a global phenomenon, but it manifests locally as changes in temperature, precipitation, and the like. Abstractions like a target of 1.5 ⁰C global average surface temperature are important and necessary in certain contexts, but used carelessly they can obscure the fact that some places will be quite a bit hotter than others even with such an average being maintained globally. Similarly, the term ‘net-zero has been co-opted to allow business as usual – if you are an industry emitting carbon dioxide, no problem, you just have to offset your emissions by planting trees (no matter that a plantation isn’t a forest and trees take time to grow) or capturing carbon through still-unproven technologies. Or, you can go for the brilliant illogic of the US and the EU that promotes burning forests as a net-zero technology. You can always hide carbon excesses through global accounting tricks. Then, net-zero becomes a smokescreen that allows the very same socio-economic structures to continue to exist that caused the problem in the first place. You can pollute here, and claim to offset emissions over there.
Hence the importance of place, localness and community control over resources. It’s not that local and global are in opposition here – both are important, and we must connect one to the other. Because we are in a planetary crisis, I believe we need stories from multiple places, with multiple voices so that we can make connections across scales. Imagination inspired and aided by reality can be a powerful instrument. Consider for example what communities around the world are already doing, in their distinct geographies and cultures, to deal with their problems. There is a lot that speculative fiction writers can learn from real people. Consider Parvati Devi, a woman from an impoverished village in Jharkhand, India, who, along with several other women, regenerated their degraded forest over twenty years of protection and care, thus regaining some measure of water security in a land desertified by forest destruction for development projects. The women who saved their forest have no formal education, and live hard lives. There is no doubt that they have multiple reasons to weep, to mourn, to suffer, and they do. Yet when I got the chance to speak to Parvati Devi (she had to travel 5 kilometers to speak to us via a borrowed phone) she was passionate, articulate, ebullient, determined. This is, to me, what climate action should look like – communities deeply engaged with crisis, drawing upon collective intelligence, mourning, grieving, celebrating and working through problems together, informed by a generous, empathetic, courageous way of being in the world.
Above: Parvati Devi with other village women in Jharkhand. Photo Credit: S. Mukherji
A misalliance between the complex, nonlinear nature of climate reality and our simple, mechanistic frameworks of thinking is likely to encourage false solutions and false optimism. Mainstream paradigms can be challenged by the ideas and actions of people marginalized by modern industrial civilization, which may give rise to new and better ways of working through the apocalypse. This is one reason why Indigenous epistemologies are so crucial. Some of them point to an entirely different, even revolutionary way of being in the world, see, for example Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay on an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity, or Kyle Whyte’s notion of Time as Kinship. In my new to-read book pile are such works as ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World,” by Tyson Yunkaporta, Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling), Whale Snow: Inupiat, Climate Change and Multispecies Resistance in Arctic Alaska by Chie Sakakibara. In all these readings are currents of possibility, and a kind of ebullient, restorative, joyful positivity that can only be wrought by those who have walked through, and are still walking through the hell of colonialism, precarity, and climate impacts, and surviving.
One of the great comforts we have is that there is no lack of people with good ideas who are active in the world. Parvati Devi isn’t an exception – there are hundreds of such initiatives led by so-called ordinary people all over India and the world. The denial of their intelligence, creativity and agency is one of the biggest mistakes that the privileged of the world can make. Top-down approaches are likely to fail without the crucial information and action that comes from the ground up – the former must be informed and animated by the latter.
This is why I am glad to note that the description of the Climate Imagination project specifies stories about “collective action, aided by scientific insights, culturally responsive technologies, and revolutions in governance and labor.”
After a hiatus of way-too-long, I am reviving this blog in defiance of increased time pressures and commitments. Greetings, world! Let me begin by linking two recent video interviews of mine, one with Dip Ghosh of Kalpabiswa along with Debajyoti Bhattacharya and Soham Guha, and the other with Ishita Singh at Mithila Review. Both in July 2021, the second year of the Covid 19 Pandemic, and the nth year of horror for climate change, biodiversity loss, increasing social inequality and other disasters. I had more time with the Kalpabiswa interview, so we had questions from the audience, which I always appreciate. The Mithila Review interview was also rich with deep and thoughtful questions from Ishita, but I regret I did not have time then to engage with the audience.
It is always a pleasure to engage with fellow enthusiasts in India on speculative fiction. I write for the world, but my ‘home audience’ is central. Any imaginative richness I possess has been engendered and nurtured through my growing up and young adulthood in India, and continues to be informed by my multiple entanglements there. To have these lenses with which to venture forth into the world – and the cosmos – has been a priceless gift, in writing and in life.
It is difficult to put into words what I am feeling at this moment, at the death of a great writer and a great human being. That Ursula K. Le Guin happened to have taken an interest in me and my work is part of why my grief is personal, but not entirely. She was a generous human being and a kind mentor who took interest in the works of multiple authors, so my story of our association is, I am sure, not unique, except, perhaps, in the particularities of the interaction. We met three times, (once for six whole days during a writing retreat), and we corresponded about a couple of times a year on average. But in my life she had a disproportionate effect, and it is safe to say that I would not be the writer or the person I am without the deep and abiding influence of who she was and what she wrote.
So what follows is an account made somewhat incoherent by the aftershocks of grief, for which I apologize in advance.
Well, I’d read about bower birds since childhood, and later about paintbrush-wielding elephants, but the former seemed to be the sole example of deliberate manipulation of the surroundings to create beauty. Until I saw BBC’s Life Story – here’s a clip from it, a video of a stunning piece of mathematical art created by a puffer fish. One more nail in the coffin of human specialness! Although I will put us on the top for destructive potential.
The puffer fish’s remarkable performance reminded me of an article I’d read recently, about mathematics as performance and play, with particular attention to sea slugs – but I suspect one can argue that all of nature is performing what we might call mathematics, or at least that mathematics is one of the things nature performs, embodies, articulates, along with art.
How very fortunate for us humans not to be alone as artists and mathematicians!
It is a dark night in December, a cold and dreary New England night. I am returning to this blog after a long absence, because the times we live in – such dark times! – compel even as reluctant a voice as mine to declare itself. To breathe is to be alive, but to inscribe with electrons on a screen is to be alive a little more loudly. So to speak.
So, to speak.
The thoughts going through my head are like a herd of reindeer on a frozen tundra. Questions arise. How does one survive this life? How do you reach out when the doors are shut? What separates truth from untruth? How do you know when something is true, or not true, or something in between? How do I know, hunched against the winter cold in a little wooden cottage, that there is anyone in the world outside? There are hints and intimations – an airplane flying overhead, the distant traffic on the highway making the road sing in a deep, soft, low tone. The creatures of the night all know to be silent, but I wish they would say something, just for conversation. An owl’s hoot would be a friendly thing to hear through the double-paned window, at least if one is not a rodent. But right now the existence of the world outside seems strangely hypothetical.
So I will take a few random steps outside my cottage and into this blog, simply putting one foot – one word – in front of another. You can follow the trail if you wish, or not, whoever you are. Assuming you exist of course.
Winter break is a day away now, and it is both welcome and unwelcome. So let me pick up the first crumb on the path – look, it’s a book, a tome. It’s called The Restless Clock, by Riskin. The first chapter is a treat. I didn’t know that Europe was populated by mechanical saints and toys and trickeries during Medieval times! No wonder the Newtonian paradigm with which we are still afflicted took such a hold! Another book – Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble – begins like a roll of multicolored wool – but the strands are woven together in strange ways – as I read the first chapter, I feel I am being woven into the book, into the strands. And there’s Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter. I imagine words being made into dough, shaped into stories, and the thought makes me hungry. For words and bread. Words are my matter too, as are equations. Certain equations are as beautiful as poems. A conversation with an astrophysicist reverberates in my mind, and I am distracted for a moment by blazars. Separated from an article of clothing by a mere vowel, these extraordinary celestial objects represent Nature at her spectacular and melodramatic best. Supermassive black holes in a feeding frenzy – only my late dog at his food bowl would be a worthy rival.
A prolonged exposure to undergraduate papers perhaps has a deleterious effect on the mind. There are so many huge and terrible things happening on our beleaguered planet, and amazing things too – but I am robbed of speech of those things for this moment. I will get to them soon, but not before the job is done. I wonder to what extent the job at hand has kept us sane, kept us from acting, kept us acting, kept us with or from each other. Right now for me the job at hand is a source of utter exhaustion but also the fire before which I warm myself before it is time to stare, once more, into the dark.
Just a note to say I have revived my sabbatical blog, which has to do with my other life (inextricable from this one). I took a sabbatical last year to learn something about Arctic climate change. Since then climate change has only got worse, carbon dioxide emissions are increasing, and as the world burns, the powers-that-be are focusing their energies on finding more fossil fuels to burn, such as in the until-now pristine Arctic. (See the breaking news about Shell’s drilling, which has just commenced). I can’t just stand on the sidelines and wring my hands in despair. I continue to learn, and investigate creative ways to communicate on the issue and to act in ways that make meaningful change. The revived and updated blog is one small step in that direction. It is a repository of thoughts, comments and updates on climate, and also includes my scientific-travelogue-style account of my Arctic trip in April 2014.
"I'm a writer of speculative fiction, which includes science fiction and fantasy. I love this genre for its imaginative richness, its vast canvas, and the sophistication with which its best practitioners wield their pens..."
~ from About the Author: Vandana Singh
Antariksh Yatra 