"Capping the anthology is [a cli-fi tale,] a climate fiction story about the language of Gaia herself – which in itself is worth the price of admission – by the author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, Vandana Singh, ''Reunion,'' which is at once a [cli-fi] meditation on where the future of cities and urban living lies in the context of a sustainable future and set in a climate-world world where Mumbai has become an archipelago.
What does ''kalpabigyan'' mean?
Dr Arin Basu in New Zealand tells me:
[[ It's "Kalpabigyan" (Kalpa == "fantasy", "bigyan == "Science"), ........this means "science fiction", a term coined in Bengali by the author and sci-fi writer Adrish Bardhan. Kalpabiswa Kalpabigyan is
and
T Ravi Chandran a professor in India on Facebook tells me Dan Bloom ......''Kalpa refers to (in Hindu and Buddhist tradition) an immense period of time, reckoned as 4,320 million human years, and considered to be the length of a single cycle of the cosmos (or ‘day of Brahma’) from creation to dissolution. The word implies something that is dystopian.the length of a single cycle of the cosmos (or ‘day of Brahma’) from creation to dissolution. The word implies something that is dystopian.
South Asian based writers and South Asian based writers living overseas in North America and Europe are a hotbed of brilliant cli-fi story writing, as well as writings in all the related genres and together, whether in Bombay or Boston, capture by the Bengali word "kalpabigyan (encompassing literature that is "science-dependent," "science-based," "science mystery" and "science"), and there have been many brilliant anthologies from writers in the region or born in the region and now naturalized citizens of other countries in other regions of the world; the latest entry to the field is Gollancz's new Book of South Asian Science Fiction, edited by Tarun Saint, the subject of a fascinating review by the blogger's friend Mr Gautham Shenoy in ''Factor Daily.''
Adrish Bardhanis credited with coining "kalpabigyan." BUT... Mr Shenoy finds fault with one element: it only features writers from the "partitioned three" (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), with no contributors from "Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or the Tibetan Community in exile." Shenoy has called on Gollancz to revisit the book as a series with contributions from these other nations and literatures. He writes" To paraphrase the title of my favourite Billy Paul song, “Am I South Asian enough for you?” He adds: The answer would be ‘No’. For one, the anthology features only writers from the ‘partitioned three’: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The editor, Tarun K. Saint, says in his introduction that they weren’t able to reach out to writers from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or the Tibetan Community in exile. One hopes that The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction is not a one-and-done publication, but just the first volume of many. So, subsequent anthologies could include stories from the aforementioned countries (and mayhap including even Afghanistan, each of which surely have a history of speculative literature of their own with many of them having a thriving contemporary SF scene, not least Sri Lanka) as also stories, not just from authors who write in English such as Samit Basu, Indrapramit Das, Sukanya Datta to name just a few, but also by writers such as Jayant Narlikar, Sujatha, Naiyer Masud and many others whose stories are written primarily in regional languages such as Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese, etc., so that The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction grows into something true to its name and becomes for speculative fiction from the subcontinent what Gollancz’s SF/F Masterworks is for the genre as a whole.
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