Vandana Singh's Blog

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.

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.

On to 2023!

Note: Above Picture credit: Ryan Lash, TED

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 an NGO called AID (Association for India’s Development) 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.

IF YOU ARE MOVED BY THESE STORIES PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO AID’S WATERSHED RESTORATION PROJECT!

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?

Take, for instance, myth.  Speaking entirely from a non-religious perspective, what’s the use of these impossible stories?  In our times mythology is often dismissed as a hodge-podge of incorrect explanations for natural phenomena.  But the role of myth is much more than an attempt to explain thunderstorms or eclipses.  In ages past, mythical and fantastical stories recounted people’s hopes and fears in relation to the vast universe they inhabited.  They were an expression of the human relationship with nature, when the boundaries between the two were blurred.  They seem strange and quaint to us because in   modern times we have lost connection, not only with each other but with the natural world — to our cost.   

Thus it is perhaps it is not too surprising that so much of imaginative literature has been relegated to children’s fiction, and that even when it is written for adults it is not taken seriously by the literary establishment.  That is, of course, the literary establishment’s loss, but it is also ours.  Unless teachers in schools and colleges include speculative fiction in their course work, unless they treat it with respect, how will students discover and delight in it?  This neglect is a great pity because both children and adults need the literature of the imagination.  So much of modern realist fiction is divorced from the physical universe, as though humans existed in a vacuum devoid of animals, rocks, and trees.  Speculative fiction is our chance to rise above this pathologically solipsist view and find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning, in the greater universe. 

But also, speculative fiction has a revolutionary potential that is perhaps unique. 

Why do I say this?  Because imagination — that faculty that expands the human mind to the size of the universe, that makes empathy possible (you have to have some imagination to put yourself in another’s shoes) — also allows us to dream.  Science fiction and fantasy posit other paths, alternative futures, different social arrangements as well as technologies, other ways that we could be.  Before we do, we must dream.  So Rokeya Sukhawat Hussain, dreaming of the liberation of women back at the start of the twentieth century, writes her utopia, Sultana’s Dream.  So Ursula K. Le Guin, imagining a peaceful anarchic community, writes The Dispossessed.  As Sahir Ludhianvi said, “Ao ki koi khwab bune, kal ke vaste.”  Come let us weave dreams for tomorrow’s sake.  The so-called Third-world is undergoing vast and unpredictable changes, and the world at large — for we have only one world, after all — is beset by war and environmental catastrophe.  By engaging our imaginations and making up ingenious thought-experiments, by asking “what-if” questions and attempting to answer them, speculative fiction allows us to question the path we are on today, to live out possible futures before we come to them.  What if books were banned? asked Ray Bradbury, and gave us one possible answer in Fahrenheit 451.  Walter Miller penned a bleak account of a post-nuclear-holocaust world in A Canticle for Leibowitz.  While speculative fiction has not yet fully realized its transgressive potential, dominated as it has been by white-male-techno-fantasies, Westerns and the White Man’s Burden in Outer Space, there is still a strong undercurrent of writing that questions and subverts dominant paradigms and persists in asking uncomfortable questions.  No other literature, to my knowledge, has written with so much passion about human beings embroiled in technological and social change, from race and gender issues to nuclear war, to genetic engineering. 

Yet there is another aspect to speculative fiction, which is also the place where the two distinct sub-genres of fantasy and science fiction meet.  While the literal story has its own charm and interest, the characters or tropes in the story often have symbolic or metaphoric value.  Symbol and metaphor, according to such thinkers as Carl Jung, are part of the language of our unconscious minds.  So good imaginative literature, in being many-layered, appeals to us at many levels, including the deepest tiers of the human mind.  (Perhaps this accounts for the persistence of myth across the ages.)  I had said earlier that speculative fiction is about what cannot ever be, or what cannot be as yet.  But it is also true that when it uses symbol and metaphor in certain ways, speculative fiction is about us as we are, right now.  This may be the case even if the story is set on another planet, in another age, and the protagonist is an alien.  Because haven’t we all felt alien at some time or another, set apart from the norm due to caste and class, religion and creed, gender and sexual orientation? 

Underneath all this is the fact that good speculative fiction is fun.  Of course much of what is “merely” fun is dismissed by the establishment, as though “fun” is necessarily synonymous with “frothy and shallow”.  But good speculative fiction can be fun and meaningful at the same time.  I’m not talking about the acres of garbage that constitute 90% of science fiction and fantasy (and probably 90% of mainstream realist fiction as well).  I’m talking about the grain in the chaff.  Here I mean “fun” not only in the sense of enjoyable, but also in the sense of play: both in the sense of playing like children, and in the sense of theatre, with the universe as grand stage.  This might result in an intellectually satisfying play of ideas, whether scientific or philosophical, or a hilarious expose´ of human nature, or both — think of Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada tales, for instance.  Art as play-time, in its deepest and most literal sense, all at once.  That untranslatable Sanskrit word “Leela” comes to mind.  

Emily Dickinson famously said: Tell all the truth but tell it slant.  Reality is such a complex beast that in order to begin to hold it, comprehend it, we need something larger than realist fiction.  Enter speculative fiction, with its aliens and magic and warp drives, set against the backdrop of the universe itself.  At its bedrock, despite the strangeness of the setting, we recognize familiar things: love, rage, struggle, wonder — our selves, disguised, but there.  After all, the Mahabharata, for all the marvelous story-telling, is also the battle that rages within each one of us. 

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 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). 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.”

Onward!

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.

In the great six-book saga of Earthsea, which is to modern fantasy what, perhaps, the Mahabharata is to epic literature, there are many gifts for the reader.  One of them is the landscape – so beautifully detailed in words and maps that it lives as vividly in my imagination as the great epics I first heard as a child. Another is that most of the characters in the books are brown – not in any overt way, but because it is, well, normal in that world.  That representation matters can hardly be overstated – I am thinking of Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek, and how she inspired generations of African Americans to take up science, and/or the pen.  But unlike Star Trek, Le Guin went beyond tokenism to present genuinely different perspectives arising from different cultural moorings.  Her upbringing as the daughter of one of America’s most famous anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber (an experience she recounts in fascinating detail in her essay collections), enabled her to be aware of the multiple ways different social groups structure themselves and their worlds.  Eventually she was instrumental in bringing down the walls around the almost exclusively male, boys-with-toys shoot-em-up club that was golden age science fiction.

I didn’t discover her through the Earthsea series, however.  I came to her work late, in my early thirties.  I had always loved SF, having devoured, by the age of ten or eleven, Asimov, Clarke, a number of Hindi tall tales and some truly awful Tom Swift novels.  Later, there was Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which showed me that science fiction could be literature.  But in my late teens I abandoned the genre for reasons that remained unclear to me for years.

My brother had been insisting for some years that I read a book called The Dispossessed  by a writer called Ursula K. Le Guin.  When I finally picked it up, I was a mother in my early thirties, living near Portland, Oregon, trying my hand for the first time at writing with a view to publication.  I had always told stories, thanks to the vociferous demands of my younger sister when she was little, a skill I had already started practicing for my daughter.  Science fiction seemed a natural fit for someone with a physics Ph.D., so I had returned to the genre, although with some trepidation.  When I closed The Dispossessed with what must have been shaking fingers, a new universe lay open before me, and I was overcome by feelings I could not articulate.  Soon after, I read the first three books of the Earthsea series.  It gradually became clear to me that what I was feeling was a homecoming – that science fiction was my country too.  That the futures, trajectories and philosophies imagined in the books of Asimov, for example, were not the only choices at hand.  The possibilities were endless – not merely in terms of external markers like skin color, but in alternate ways of being, social relationships, worldviews.  Here was the true revolutionary potential of imaginative fiction.

I was born in a free India, but the country was only 15 years free when I was born.  I had the benefit of being raised in a family with an open intellectual tradition; I had relatives who had been freedom fighters, and my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles encouraged us to ask questions and seek learning.  I had grown up reading great Hindi writers like Premchand, who questioned social norms like caste and class.  Later, in my teens I was part of an environmental justice action group in India that helped me see first-hand how the lives of the rural poor were intimately connected to the environment, and to state and social violence.  In this context we were able to question the dominant paradigm of development.  But I first became conscious of the need to decolonize that last frontier – the mind – while journeying through the worlds of Ursula Le Guin’s imagination.

I tell this story because I want to emphasize that Le Guin, by presenting worldviews, and indeed worlds, as constructs, provincialized the default Western traditions as merely one of many possibilities.  Other writers had been dreaming up other planets and gadgets and gizmos since the birth of SF.  But the heroes were for the most part, white and male, and they thought in ways that reflected the birth culture of their writers. Westerns in space.  The language and plot lines of colonization.  Even writers sympathetic to the fate of the colonized – I’m thinking of Ray Bradbury’s beautiful Martian Chronicles, a meditation on colonization – rendered their alien wives as one-dimensional servers of dinner and emotional support.  What Le Guin did was to take down the walls around the imagination, and to set us all free.  To shift the paradigms, the conceptual constructs by which we make sense of the world, is no small thing.

Soon after reading Le Guin, I had a chance to meet her at a writers’ conference in Portland.  There was a mini writers’ workshop, conducted by her, Molly Gloss and Tony Wolk. She turned out to be a small, sprightly woman with an intensely intelligent, yet kindly gaze, and a rapier-sharp wit.  Waving away our fannish adulations, she insisted we call her Ursula. After the workshop she encouraged me to write to her, and to apply to a writers’ retreat, Flight of the Mind, in the Oregon forest.  She thought a writers’ critique group would help me, and Molly said she would introduce me to a friend of hers.  So began my first writers’ group, and my journey as a writer.

I did go to Flight of the Mind in 1999, after we had moved away from Oregon.  Six days with some sixty women, in the middle of the great temperate rainforests of Oregon was an unforgettable experience.  I was one of twelve who had signed up with Ursula – we would walk across a bridge over the river to Ursula’s cottage, sit on the floor in a circle, and talk, and do writing.  Gradually our awe at being in her presence gave way to ease.  There was a lot of laughter.  We wrote, critiqued, went for walks through the woods, and ate vast quantities of food.  My memories of the time are filled with the sound of the river (a constant backdrop to our conversations) and an unforgettable trek through the woods with Ursula.  The forests of Oregon are magical indeed – we discovered an enormous tree stump in the shape of a dragon during our wanderings.  Ursula was our guide to this world – she knew the plants and the birds, and the huge, moss-covered trees.

Languishing in a suburban desert (literally and metaphorically) in Texas some years later, I had collected a few rejections, which, however personal and nicely worded, were still rejections.  I was in a difficult personal situation, had been exiled from academia for almost a decade, and my family was thousands of miles away in India; my only joys were my daughter and writing.  Perhaps it was time to give up writing for the world, and simply scribble for myself.  In the midst of this crisis I gathered up my courage and wrote to Ursula.  We had already exchanged a few letters by this point.  I mentioned that I didn’t think I had it in me to be a writer – you know, the kind who writes for everyone, not just herself.  Ursula asked me to send her a sample of my latest.  So I did.

It was her crucial encouragement at this low point in my life that led to my first short story publication, followed by a children’s book that came out first in India and then the US (for which Ursula wrote a blurb) and ultimately a steady trickle of science fiction and fantasy short stories.  Every once in a while Ursula would ask to read my latest publication, and send back comments and congratulations.  For a great doyen of the field to take notice of an obscure Indian writer-wannabe in the vast sea of America was no small thing for the writer in question.  Her loyalty to her craft was such that any praise given was praise earned, and her advice was always sound and to the point.  I learned from her, for example, the importance of reading one’s work aloud, and how that enables one to become sensitive to the sound of language, to the rhythm and flow of sentences.  Her fine book on the tools of writing, Steering the Craft, is one I still recommend to new writers.

Over the years my correspondence with Ursula shifted from paper to emails,  Our exchanges, though infrequent, were always interesting.  We talked about writing, but also about our mutual interest in non-human others.  We talked at length about climate change (my academic work having moved to that area), the significance of the term Anthropocene (she had been invited to a conference on the subject by Donna Haraway), the meaning of happiness.  We discussed the tendency of modern humans to succumb to the techno-fix, even for complex issues like climate change.  I think it was clearer to her than to most people that  technology by itself can never solve anything (it is more likely to create new problems) if the underlying paradigm remains unchanged.  But also, modern technology can be a distraction and an addiction; that we have a lot to learn from indigenous peoples, and from other species, is apparent in her work, from essays to fiction.  Probably one of her most underrated novellas is one called A Man of the People in the collection Four Ways to Forgiveness.  Set on the world of Hain, which has the longest history and the greatest technological sophistication of any world in the galaxy of her imagination, it brings to life a pueblo culture that one might call low-tech despite the presence and availability of high-tech.  To me this illustrates the possibility of technology arising from and serving the needs and values of the culture, rather than the other way around. We are so familiar with modern technology as the instrument of power, changing and arranging our lives without our participation and consent, that we can’t imagine what it would be like to not live this way. I think Ursula saw earlier than others the kinds of dangers that behemoths like Amazon and Google pose to the world – the arrival of the corpocracy and the undermining of democracy and the artistic imagination.  Her fiery speech at the National Book Awards ceremony in 2014 is testimony to that.  They must still be beating out the flames from the walls.  “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

As Timmi DuChamp notes in her tribute, Ursula Le Guin possessed a quality that places her among the greatest of writers and seers – a moral imagination.

I got to see Ursula for the third and last time in January 2014.  I had gone up to Portland for an academic conference, and we had lunch, Molly and Ursula and I, at a very nice restaurant.  We talked about everything in the universe and more.  Later, we took pictures with my camera, but there was something wrong with it, so only one of the pictures materialized, a lovely one of Ursula and Molly.  I remember us standing at the edge of the street in Portland; there was snow in the cracks on the sidewalk, a row of cars parallel-parked, and the bare-armed trees lining the narrow road.  We were laughing in the afternoon light, saying goodbye, and the snow-topped visage of Mt. Hood was somewhere in the sky, although I can’t remember if it was visible from that particular street at that moment.

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When, in 2015, the Science Fiction Research Association invited me to be one of their three keynote speakers, I chose to speak about the relevance of one of Ursula’s most famous short stories “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”  I had a certain interpretation of it in the light of what I’d learned about climate change and the history of science, and I was nervous about revealing half-baked ideas before a bunch of literary scholars.  I also wanted to end my talk with a wolf howl. So I emailed Ursula and aired my thoughts, which she validated and complicated for me.  “Howl if you feel like it!” she wrote.  She told me she had hooted like Great Horned Owls, in the Library of Congress.  So, of course, I did.

The last time I heard from Ursula, last year, she hadn’t been very well; she said that she would not always be able to respond to my emails, but they were still welcome.  During the year I sent a couple of missives.  Then,  on January 23, 2018, I heard the news of her passing the previous day.

In the Earthsea series, there are two great ruminations on death.  The Farthest Shore is the first one, and the last book, The Other Wind is the second.  In the Farthest Shore, Cob, an old mage who fears death, has made himself immortal, but only at the cost of life itself and the balance of the world.  The hero Ged makes a great journey across the seas and islands of Earthsea, seeking the place from which to restore the balance.  Eventually he and his companion find themselves in land of death – ‘the dry land,’ separated from the place of the living by a stone wall, where the stars never move and lovers pass each other like strangers in the streets. Here they find Cob, who declares that his body will not decay and die. Ged says to him: “A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies.  Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life…. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself.”

The struggle that ensues is not the stuff of sword-and-sorcery, but a struggle to overcome fear, to be complete in the world, to be free.  By freeing Cob, at great cost to himself, Ged restores the balance of the world.

To me this is one of the finest illustrations of the power and relevance of imaginative literature.  Consider our present world – the madness of the potentates, the corporate coup d’etat of nations worldwide, the taking apart of the planetary systems that sustain life on Earth.  I wonder if behind all the machinations of the super-rich and the escapes and addictions and imperatives of modern industrial civilization – if behind all these phenomena lies a pathological fear of death, and of suffering.  Death and suffering are fearsome indeed, but would you sell the green earth and the sun and the stars to be free of them?

In the last book of Earthsea, Le Guin returns to the land of death to unbuild the last wall.  By the end of the book, the dead, condemned for so long to walk in a pale imitation of life endlessly through the streets of the dry land, are set free. They are free to be sunlight and leaves and water, to return to the great cycle, the dance of the cosmos.

I’m turning the pages of The Other Wind, trying to find the quote I am remembering, because my words fall short of what I want to say.  In Tehanu’s words, then, near the end of the book –

“… when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.  I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do.  All that I might have been and couldn’t do… to the lives that haven’t been lived yet.  That will be my gift to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

Thank you, Ursula Aunty (as you used to sign your emails to me) for your gift to the world and to me.  I will look for you in the sunlight and the wind, and in the faces of people at the next great uprising. See you on the Overfell, in Earthsea.

Links to Remembrances: 

Molly Gloss is interviewed and you can also hear some earlier recordings of Ursula here. 

A remembrance from Julie Philips, who is writing a biography of Ursula Le Guin, and who also wrote this article in 2016.

I would add “Always Coming Home” to her essential novels, but this is a pretty good start.

Matthew Cheney’s tribute. 

An earlier article from The Nation about why we need Ursula Le Guin.

Here is a tribute I wrote to Ursula on her 81st birthday back in 2010 on my blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.