Star Warriors of the Modern Raj

POSSIBILITY

Khan, Sami Ahmad. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology in Indian Science Fiction. New Dimensions in Science Fiction series. University of Wales Press, 2021. Also distributed by the University of Chicago Press.[1] Available as an e-book.[2]

From the publisher's blurb:

[...] Star Warriors of the Modern Raj is a critical catalogue of contemporary India’s anglophone SF, a path-breaking work that flits between texts, vantage points and frameworks. An alternative to a Eurocentric perspective of SF, this study avoids essentialising definitions and delves into how the world of SF (text) intersects with that of the writer/reader. Fusing paradigms of Science Fiction Studies, South Asian Studies and Postcolonial Studies, among others, the book explicates how India and its SF negotiate one another. It evolves a ‘transMIT thesis’ to analyse how mythology (M), ideology (I) and technology (T) contour Indian SF and its fictional reimaginings. This study identifies the manifestations of divine beings within SF as differing epistemological categories, locates the modes of marginalisation within Indian popular imagination as altars of alterity, before proceeding to analyse how newer technologies engage with socio-political anxieties in and through SF. [...][3]

Praised highly by Brooks Landon, whose judgment we strongly respect, who stresses the books value "in its focus on twenty-first century Indian SF in English" and, among other virtues, its examination of "the intersecting paradigms of mythology, ideology, and technology – intersections always at the heart of SF."[4]

Part IV is on technology.

RDE, finishing, 29Jun21