New Horizons: The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction | review by Stephen Theaker

This ambitious anthology collects science fiction from the Indian subcontinent (home to about 1.7 billion people) and from the global diaspora. As well as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there are contributors living in Scotland, Iceland and the USA, and the editor himself was born in Kenya. Unsurprisingly, then, it offers a wide variety of stories, presented in what Manjula Padmanabhan’s foreword self-deprecatingly calls ‘a bouquet of styles that are endearingly – perhaps even irritatingly! – local’.

Tarun K. Saint’s highly detailed and informative introduction might be best saved for reading after the stories, but it provides a useful historical overview of the genre in the region, and is likely to send the reader after other books mentioned, such as (for this reviewer) the utterly charming Professor Shonku stories of Satyajit Ray. Saint explains that the genesis of the anthology, as set out in a concept note to potential contributors, was to explore ‘a sense of disturbance with the situation in contemporary South Asia’, and to explore the power of science fiction to ‘generate alternative visions of the future’.

If, as the editor suggests, this aspect of sf has yet to be fully appreciated on the subcontinent, this anthology makes an admirable attempt to redress matters.

There are twenty-three stories, four poems and a prescient series of extracts from a longer work, The Twenty-Second Century by Rahul Sankrityayan, dating from 1923. Six items are translations, twenty-two were written in English. The copyright acknowledgements list only nine, so most would seem to be original to this anthology.

They explore issues such as post-colonialism, religion, colourism, partition (a trauma explored in the editor’s own ‘A Visit to Partition World’), bureaucracy, class, American and British cultural imperialism, sewage management and police corruption (amusingly satirised in Harishankar Parsai’s ‘Inspector Matadeen on the Moon’). They don’t on the whole go very far into the future, and rarely visit space, tending to explore a recognisable world.

The mistreatment of women is a frequent theme. ‘A Night with the Joking Clown’ explores the effects of Male Hypertoxic Syndrome and extrapolates the exploitation of women to its ultimate end. Giti Chandra’s ‘The Goddess Project’ imagines android goddesses created (or perhaps summoned) to fight back against such oppression. In ‘We Were Never Here’ by Nur Nasreen Ibrahim the women just up and leave (although the only sf element of that one seems to be that it posits ninth and tenth waves of future feminism, without explaining what they are).

Despite the serious intent, it’s far from a humourless book. ‘The Man Who Turned into Gandhi’ by Shovon Chowdhury is the quirky story of a chap who loses his hair and teeth, becomes ambidextrous and can no longer eat chicken or wear clothes. Transformed into Gandhi, he finds out how the hero of the independence movement might be treated if he reappeared now, and delivers lengthy lectures to his wife. ‘You used to talk very little,’ she says. ‘It was one of your few good points.’

‘Dreaming of the Cool Green River’ by Priya Sarukkai Chabria is another satire, and a highlight of the book, introducing us to the Chief Sanitizing Archivist, who in theory collects Objectionable Art and Ideas so as not to offend HurtMobs, but in fact is creating copies so that she can sell the originals.

The New Horizons bit of the title has been added for UK publication, perhaps to stress that these are mostly new stories. For me it was almost all new horizons: the only name I recognised was Vandana Singh, who contributes the flowery final story, ‘Reunion’. I must have missed Anil Menon back in Interzone #216, but his story here is a good one: ‘Shit Flower’ concerns a ‘computational immunologist’ who taught sewage control computers to understand jokes as a security precaution. Surprisingly moving, given its faecal subject matter.

That the anthology was originally produced for an Indian audience is perhaps reflected in the absence of a glossary for untranslated words and phrases. This can be a bit frustrating when they are crucial to understanding the story, but Google was usually able to help.

New Horizons is an entertaining book that offers a generous selection of locations, viewpoints, issues and styles. Don’t expect the censorship of Bollywood films: these address adult themes in an adult world. It does a lot of different things and it tends to do them very well; this review could only fail to encompass them all. This anthology feels like a labour of love, and with respect to Manjula Padmanabhan, readers should find it stimulating rather than at all irritating.

Note that this review was written in January 2020, based on an advance review copy, and originally appeared in Interzone #286. The book's UK publication was then postponed to 2021. Any changes made to the book during the intervening time won't be reflected in the review.