Stories for the Anthropocene

Gigi Ganguly’s collection of speculative fiction, Biopeculiar, heightens our awareness of the climate-change-threatened natural world.

The implicit threat in all the tales in the collection is climate change. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock

I once spent some time in the Finnish countryside, just as the dregs of winter were being drained. My daily walks to the nearby lake revealed how the season turned, with brown fields turning into chequerboards of green, punctuated with yellow dandelion flowers, almost overnight, and evenings echoing with the raucous honking of returning geese. What had seemed a passive, bleak landscape became the stage for furious, seething life—competing, fighting, mating. The awareness of the natural world took on an edge.

Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World

By Gigi Ganguly

Westland

Pages: 196

Price: Rs.399

This heightened awareness underpins Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar, a collection of 22 stories. Subtitled “Stories of an Uncertain World”, it has been brought out by If, Westland’s new imprint specialising in speculative fiction. The implicit threat in all the tales here is climate change. Apart from one novella, the stories average around eight pages, which means that Ganguly, in a style somewhat reminiscent of Manjula Padmanabhan, works with rapier-like flashes: there is a swift set-up and then the payload is delivered.

Alternative histories

Every now and then, Ganguly uses the building blocks of science fiction, such as generational starships or colonisation of a distant planet. And also magical realism, with desi tadka thrown in. In “The Golden Bird”, an alternative history is unrolled where the East India Company captures a telepathic dragon called Nur with a “wingspan so vast it could shelter two elephants on either side”.

The dragon eventually ends up in Delhi zoo, and we see her through the eyes of an enchanted schoolgirl. Ganguly combines the description of the dull, bureaucratic workings of a school visit to a zoo with flashes of vivid colour. “Cocoon”, which features friends on an excursion to a silkworm factory in Jangalmahal, could be straight out of a Satyajit Ray story from his “Khagam” period. The longest tale is “Corvid Inspector”, which plays out like a police procedural featuring the murder of a crow and a raven investigating officer. It has a buddy cop movie dynamics, but with our feathered friends. Ganguly has fun with the formula, with the usual hard-drinking, substance-abusing male lead haunted by past violence replaced here by a raven who rubs ants on his wings to get that “fix”.

There are recognisably Indian or Western settings but also strange vistas and alien landscapes. Character names can be recognisably Indian like Mrinalini or Poltu or Darpan but also Dr Fwish, Loursge, or Jawk.

Cutting-edge SF

Speculative fiction (SF) is all about finding unexpected vantage points, and Ganguly does that by showing us new professions for new worlds. For instance, in “Head in the Clouds”, we follow an aged cloud herder who realises that one from his flock is missing and begins to investigate a cumulo-napping. There is a bevy of talking dolphins, otters, bees, and polar bears, some within a vague framework of rational explanations (a weapons test causes human consciousness to enter an otter), and some not. This is cutting-edge SF but also the latest in a line, gesturing at a tradition going back thousands of years to the Panchatantra.

While explaining why ecology should be a central concern for philosophy, the thinker Michel Serres said: “We are beginning to understand that all our institutions clearly and globally are experiencing a crisis going far beyond the scope of normal history.” In such a crisis, that extends even to literary objects and devices, writers like Amitav Ghosh have declared that the “bourgeois novel” is now obsolete. The critic McKenzie Wark, however, asserts that “some of the best responses to climate change, or the Anthropocene more generally, are science fiction”.

Just as greenhouse gases burn themselves into history, into tree rings and ice cores, perhaps this crisis will also write itself into the literary strata.

Speculative fiction (SF) is all about finding unexpected vantage points, and Ganguly does that by showing us new professions for new worlds. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

The sense of “estrangement”, so beloved of SF readers, a process wherein the familiar turns strange and the alien becomes ordinary, is presented here through non-human points of view: nature, sea, insects, and so on. Humans are peripheral, or actively hostile: “We behaved like we owned earth, when in fact we were like the plaque that slowly builds up and eats away at the enamel,” as a character who has fled a desecrated planet says in “Solastalgic”.

In the raven cop story, the titular corvid muses: “While the birds, rats, cats, and butterflies—the rest—have a basic idea of how human society works, the humans have no idea what goes on in a world where they are not the focal point.” In stories like “Ceaselessly Sea Follows”, which gives the ocean’s perspective, Ganguly attempts to deny humanity’s agency over the story. This decentring perhaps leads to a narrative where, in the words of writer Elvia Wilk, “[l]andscape is not a threat, but a possibility, perhaps the only possibility”.

Ganguly’s collection presents the possibility of a kind of fiction that mirrors our world as one cycle of time unspools and another starts, as oceans rise and birds fall dead from the skies in heatwaves. It is a kind of fiction that is good at adapting—agile, swift moving, jumping from bank to bank, always seeking dry land, fleeing the storm. As a polar bear intones while escaping the melting ice caps in one of the stories: “Survival. No matter what.”

Jaideep Unudurti is a freelance journalist and graphic novelist.