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.
A Handful of Rice
When the late writer and editor Jay Lake asked me several years ago to write an alternate history for an anthology, I agreed, but failed miserably. Jay was always kind to me and forgave me. The problem was that I just couldn’t pretend history hadn’t happened the way it has. At the time we were not so beset by fake news and ‘alternative facts’ but even so, it went against the grain to write a counter-historical. So when more recently Ann VanderMeer asked me to contribute to a Steampunk anthology that would challenge the Victorian complacency and colonialist blind spots of much of run-of-the-mill Steampunk, I dug the few paragraphs I had written out of an old file, and began to wonder if some kind of story could be resurrected from the ruins. I don’t know exactly how it came to me that writing a story in which the British hadn’t conquered India would be an enormously freeing thing, allowing my imagination a vaster canvas than I had known. What an experiment in decolonizing the mind! Close on the heels of this revelation was the idea that the spec fic element of the story would be my imaginative extension of the ancient art and science of yoga/ prana vidya. The research – into the Mughal empire and its dying days, the key tenets and practices of prana vidya including some of the more obscure ideas – was riveting, to say the least. I still didn’t know how the story would unfold, but I could see Vishnumitra, the point of view character, clearly in my mind, and I knew I could trust him. And yet – that discomfort with the unhistorical in the current era of fake news is such that I don’t think I’ll write another of these.
Peripeteia
I really don’t know what this story is about. Or rather, I know, sort of, but I can’t put it in words, except in the words of the story. It came because I was invited to contribute to an anthology called The End of the Road, and I happened to be thinking about world lines, which are roads of a sort. And this peculiar character walked into my head. Maybe someone can tell me what the hell I was thinking.
Lifepod
I wrote this short piece for a commemorative volume of a science fiction studies journal called Foundation; it was later reprinted in Bill Campbell’s monumental volume on Afrofuturism and beyond, both great honors. Again, one of those stories for which the opening scene came to me, of a woman waking up in the belly of a living spaceship, surrounded by fellow humans in stasis, having to find out who she is and where she is going. Her memories were confused by the ‘thought-clouds’ of those who slept, so I was confused too, but things became clearer near the end.
Oblivion: A Journey
This wasn’t intended to be about the Ramayana at all. It started with my reading Pablo Neruda in translation, a line that went “Perhaps, perhaps oblivion,” and I saw a world called Oblivion, and a character who was neither man nor woman. I had no idea who this person was and why they ended up on the planet Oblivion, so I had to let the fellow tell me. And I was surprised to find that the story was about a kind of Ramayana, and revenge, and monsters we fight, and monsters we turn into, and all that sort of thing. Mike Allen first published this story in his anthology series Clockwork Phoenix and it has been reprinted in multiple venues since then.
Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra
Ever since I wrote a three-piece story about future mythology that was published in Strange Horizons (Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age) I have been haunted by the anthologist who roams the future galaxy, collecting these tales. Who listens to and compiles these stories? The answer that came to me was truly surprising – a resurrected 11th century poet called Somadeva, along with his far future companion, Isha. I had heard of Somadeva’s enormous compilation, the 18-volume Kathasaritsagara, and had once, as a graduate student in the US, come across it in the stacks in the university library. Reverentially holding each volume, in the semi-dark, hushed silence, thumbing the pages that had likely not been turned for decades or longer, the long-dead voice spoke to me. I did not know then – in those years before I became a writer – that Somadeva would come back to me as a storyteller in one of my own compositions. Writing back to one’s own people after two centuries of literal and psychological colonization is a wonderfully freeing act. Since then I’ve written another Somadeva fragment or two but only one of them is published so far.
Are You Sannata3159?
I don’t like horror; it gives me sleepless nights. Occasionally, very reluctantly, I write it. This is one of the stories I ask people not to read if they have delicate stomachs, because it felt awful to write it, and yet I was strongly compelled to do so. On a re-reading some years after writing it, it felt tolerably satisfactory as a story (I am never really happy with how my stories turn out). So the impulse that compelled me wasn’t that off. This is the only really dark story in this volume and can be safely avoided.
Contrary to what some reviewers have said, this story is not a disguised plea for vegetarianism. Although I am a vegetarian who occasionally eats fish (a fishy vegetarian, in other words) – the story is about systems that oppress and destroy. I have a major problem with factory farms – perhaps one day we’ll wake up to the fact that the mass-enslavement and torture of millions of sentient beings deprives us of any pretensions of morality and ethics. I don’t have a problem with meat-eating when the human doing the hunting is part of a sustainable cycle (as with Native peoples in the circumpolar region and elsewhere) or when meat is a small part of the diet (healthier for people and the planet) and where animals can live more or less normal lives instead of being incarcerated in a gulag. Far more damage is done to animals by the modern industrial lifestyle through its rapacious use of resources, destruction of habitats and climate change (and factory farms) than is done by those who hunt to live. I suppose this story fails because of the number of people who don’t get the somewhat subtle point I am making – the story is not about meat as much as it is about systems that the poet Sahir Ludhianvi famously turned away from through his immortal lyrics (“yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai?”). But it is also a love story, and a story about innocence, and perhaps, maybe, a kind of triumph at the end. Nick Gevers and Peter Crowther edited the unique anthology in which it was published – The Company He Keeps.
Indra’s Web
When I was invited by MIT’s Technology Review to contribute to their first collection of near-future SF, I was delighted. They gave me the topic of energy, which is already close to my heart given my academic background. The research for this story was rewarding for its own sake – mycorrhizal networks (finally I got to write about them!) and smart grids, and alternate cities, and futuristic urban planning and constructal theory and biomimicry. But no story is a story without characters, and since this one had to be short, I was forced to limit it to the main character Mahua, and her grandmother. There was a man in her life who built a device to visualize possible futures, but he fell prey to word limits and was ruthlessly excised. The resulting story still worked as a short piece because of the character of Mahua, looking back at her work (while still immersed in it) while she’s still relatively youngish, trying to make sense of things. She can see patterns all around her and is haunted and blessed by this ability, honed through her training, and yet like many of us, she does not see what she doesn’t want to see with regard to the most important relationship of her life.
What really surprised me about Mahua was that later on in 2018 I was invited to write a near future story for an anthology of Indian SF edited by Tarun Saint, and she walked into it as the main character, seventy three years old. Now I got a chance to know her fully, to introduce the man she loved (a rather unusual relationship) and lost, and how she found him again, in a manner of speaking. The story is called “Reunion,” and came out in the first Gollancz book of South Asian Science Fiction, edited by Tarun Saint and Manjula Padmanabhan. It was inspired in equal parts by sorrow at the passing of Ursula Le Guin, the great wise woman of spec fic who meant a lot to me personally and otherwise (we had an email conversation about technology and society back in 2015 that was at the back of my mind when I wrote this story) – and by the work of an old friend, Ashish Kothari, in the area of community conservation and environmental justice. Which is why my rediscovery of Mahua is dedicated to them both.
Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
This story is one of my quilts. What I mean is this. I have a bunch of files in which I write down random thoughts, scenes, characters, settings, events – more or less as the mood takes me, about anything and everything. I make sure that my internal editor is on vacation during these moments. In time, the paragraphs sometimes start to speak to each other. I’ve written a few stories this way – taken five lines from October 4 and combined them with the 3 sentences from June 25, and added and edited a few other things, stitching the whole to make a story. Ruminations is one of these patchwork quilts. It started with my wondering about the birah-geet tradition in Indian music, and humming some examples of these, and suddenly there was Birha, the main character, with her alien musical instruments that are called poeticas. There she is, an old woman living in a small stone house at the foot of the hill, looking back at a long life, working, waiting. But for what? I had to write the story to find out. John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed magazine published it.
Sailing the Antarsa
I had been playing with a story idea in which space exploration was not motivated by colonialist impulses – and wondering what that would look like. So I wrote this story for an anthology of feminist space opera edited by Athena Andreadis, who very kindly invited me, and gave me some marvelous feedback that helped evolve the story. I had to find out what kind of culture might come up with an entirely different reason to explore space, and therefore what its value systems, its mythology, might be like. The main character, Mayha, walked into the story at a moment of leaving her people behind, seeing her world get smaller and smaller as she was swept away into space. As I started to write the story, the ideas began to take on flesh and blood and steel and strange forms of matter. Our protagonist leaves her world on a very unusual ship, along a very unusual kind of cosmic river, to find out what happened to their cousins, generations ago, who went to another world, where they fell silent. I got to do some inventive particle physics here, but clothe it in the language of wonder (or so I hope) and it was intellectually and emotionally exciting. The life-forms in the story, particularly the devtaru, haunted me for a long time after the story was done. Looking back years later, I would have written some parts differently, but the backbone of the story is what it was meant to be.
Cry of the Kharchal
About a decade or so ago, I stayed for a couple of nights at a ‘heritage hotel’ in the desert state of Rajasthan, India. The hotel was a reconstructed fort from 500 years ago, built to look like it had appeared back then. Perched on a steep, arid hill, the fort was a bewildering maze of courtyards, corridors, and ramparts at different heights, and each room was different. There is something about place that is very palpable sometimes, and this place spoke to me. Being in Rajasthan, I could not but remember its most endangered avian denizen, the kharchal or Great Indian Bustard. As a child I had once encountered it in a fair in Delhi, and the bird had come up to me to look at me through the glass partition. I still vividly remember that curious, intelligent gaze. The kharchal flew into my imagination as I sat down to write this story, and stayed there. The legend of the queen of Chattanpur that is in this story is one that I entirely made up – no such story or personage exists, to my knowledge. But the kharchal and its precarious situation are all too real. The story first appeared in Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke.
Wake-Rider
I wanted to write a short space opera with lots of heart-pounding action, but one with some depth. I saw before me a derelict spaceship, adrift, and a young woman in a tiny vessel, eyes wide with tension, up to something that was clearly against the law. It was plain she was a rebel of some sort. But who was she? It came to me in a rush that she was a character in a long multi-storied saga I had told my daughter over bedtimes and months and years when she was small – except that in those old stories, this woman was about middle aged, and had helped bring down a great totalitarian space-age ruling power. In this post-colonial era she lived a quieter life, becoming more legend than a flesh and blood person, surrounding herself with a bunch of eccentric characters. They had hair-raising and often very comical adventures that were nonetheless to do with serious things – like freedom and responsibility, loyalty and truth, exploration and danger.
So I ended up writing a rather serious story of this great woman protagonist when she was young and just starting out as a rebel. There will be more, I think, including the tales I told my daughter long ago. They won’t all be serious.
John Joseph Adams published this at Lightspeed.
Ambiguity Machines: An Examination
This story was inspired by a dream that a young friend, Jacob, told me he had dreamt, many years ago – a very strange one that involved a machine, among other things. I have a vague recollection of his telling me that when you looked into the machine, you’d see some kind of image. His account stirred in me the wish to write a chain of stories about strange machines. And at first there were just these three stories that needed to be somehow one story. In a later incarnation the triptych acquired the framing device that the story now has. I can’t explain it any more than my young friend can explain his dream. I did huge amounts of fascinating research on each place until I could feel the details of the landscape. I read histories, listened to the music of these multiple places (discovered Tinariwen, the incredible desert rock group from Mali), read the poets, wandered the landscapes with the help of Google Earth and my imagination. And when there’s enough of the right mix of information and time, the stories seem to write themselves.
Ann VanderMeer accepted this story for tor.com.
Requiem
In 2013 a novella of mine called Entanglement came out in a rather unique anthology from Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination – Hieroglyph. The novella was about climate change and it was set in multiple places around the world (the first attempt on my part to write a ‘global’ story). One such setting was the Arctic Circle, where, in the story, a lone Inuit woman scientist was living on a boat, observing methane outgassing from the Arctic seabed. Writing her story brought back to me an old fascination I’d had with the far north. So when I happened to win a program award for an academic project in 2014, I naturally chose climate change in the Arctic. It turned out to be much easier to go to Alaska than to Northern Canada, where my character is from. I did tons of research and consulted multiple experts before, during and after the trip, and am therefore in debt to a number of generous and knowledgeable people. I learned that the Native people of the North Shore of Alaska are often ignorantly lumped with the Inuit of Northern Canada, but the former refer to themselves as Eskimo and the latter do not. I learned of the thousands of years of history and culture, and the importance of the whale. During my travels I had the chance to speak with scientists, Elders, educators, and a whaler. It was an unforgettable ten days. I spent about a year working on a transdisciplinary case study for undergraduate education centered on climate change and the indigenous people of the North shore of Alaska at the cross-section of climate physics, society, culture, ecology and economics. It was published the following January. I am still learning about the great circumpolar places and people in what will be a lifelong endeavor, part of a rekindled fascination with indigenous cultures and ways of knowing. But it would take time to turn my experiences into fiction. The opportunity came with Requiem, four years after my trip. This story is original to the collection.
Tags: writing
Antariksh Yatra 
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