Mother Ocean

by Vandana Singh

The background of the story is a dystopia showing the effects of climate-change on South Asia, but most of the story takes places in the Indian Ocean, which also shows the effects of climate-change, and is about the interactions between one young woman and a blue whale.

ILLUSTRATED BY Jing Jing Tsong
Read for free on Xprize's website.

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and currently lives in the Boston area, where she is a professor of physics at Framingham State University, and a science fiction writer. Although her Ph.D. is in particle physics, in recent years she has been working on the transdisciplinary scholarship of climate change, focusing on innovative pedagogies. She has collaborated with the Center for Science and the Imagination three times, twice on climate change–related projects. Her first collaboration (a story for Project Hieroglyph) led to the start of her academic work in the area, resulting in a case study of Arctic climate change as part of a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, for which she traveled to the Alaskan North Shore in 2014. She was also a participant in a re-enactment of “The Dare,” as part of the Year Without a Winter Project, and has contributed a story to the upcoming anthology (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2018). She has been an invited panelist for the National Academy of Sciences working group on interdisciplinarity in STEM, and has taught in and/or co-led summer workshops on climate change for middle and high school teachers.

Vandana’s short fiction has been widely published to critical acclaim, and many of her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best collections. Her North American debut is a second short story collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press) that was No. 1 on Publisher’s Weekly’s Top Ten in Science Fiction when it came out in February 2018, and earned praise from Wired, the Washington Post, and the Seattle Times, among others. Locus Magazine’s Gary K. Wolfe refers to her as “one of the most compelling and original voices in recent SF.”