Other Fictions
The Other Sci-Fi. American Book Review, 32, 2 (January/February 2011), 3.
Uppinder Mehan
I recently had an opportunity to hear the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in conversation at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, TX (October 2010). She has deservedly garnered much praise and critical attention for her novels (Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun), drama, poetry, and short fiction. In addition, she has also devoted much of her time to conducting writing workshops for young writers in Africa. Given her close ties to the contemporary writing scene in Nigeria, I asked her if she could tell me about the state of contemporary Nigerian science fiction writing or at least writing that blurs the distinctions between realism and fantasy as in the works of Ben Okri and before him Gabriel Okara. Her response was that she was not aware of any, fair enough, but she added that she wasn’t sure of the necessity of such writing, “Isn’t realist fiction enough?”
Where to begin responding to such a statement? I don’t believe Adichie is advocating that no other kind of fiction need be written or read. I assume she is simply stating her preference for a certain kind of writing that she finds sufficient for her needs. Realist fiction certainly isn’t enough to capture the multifariousness of lived and imagined reality – it hadn’t been enough for the centuries before prose and it certainly has not been enough since. (Looking at sales figures, realist fiction certainly is not “enough” as publishers will tell you). Given the forum at the Texas Book Festival, Adichie may not have had the proper environment in which to offer a more considered response; perhaps, speaking in a more intimate setting she would have taken the time to think more about her response and, at least, have acknowledged that “realist” writing is often the preferred technique for writers who need to convince their readers that what seems fantastic to them is rather ordinary for the characters in the world of the fiction.
I know next to nothing about her personal life but it strikes me that she is representative of a type of writer who is working under a kind of false consciousness brought about by the twin forces of political and cultural imperialism/colonialism. The “realist fiction” that Adichie prefers took over the market in the 19th century both in imperial centers and in the colonies as well. And while we may bemoan the lack of an audience for the literary novel, it certainly has a large institution supporting its production and consumption: the liberal arts college. The colonial and postcolonial writer enters the larger metropolitan market (in the Anglophone world) through publishing giants such as Heinemann and Longman who favor more of the same kind of writing that sells. It isn’t only the marketplace, however, that promotes such realist fiction from the former colonies (most well-read people would be hard pressed to name a writer working in a “non-realist” mode other than Salman Rushdie or Arundathi Roy who has sold well).
Writers who would identify themselves as belonging to cultures that have been colonized by imperialist powers tend, on the whole, to focus more on a re-examination of the roots of the continuing damage caused by centuries of foreign exploitation and destruction. Little thought is given in the fiction to imagining the future or exploring other genres. Over the last few years, though, a largely unremarked explosion has taken place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy writing.
Nalo Hopkinson, Archie Weller, Tobias Buckell, Andrea Hairston, Celu Amberstone, Anuradha Marwah, Sheree R. Thomas, Vandana Singh, Steven Barnes, Nnedi Okorafor, Karen Lowachee are just a few of the writers who have started to explore possible futures, experiment with generic conventions, expand the boundaries of “acceptable” literature produced by the subjects of colonial processes. In the focus section of this issue of ABR a number of these writers have come together to comment on each others’ work.
Satwik Dasgupta’s review of Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet begins by providing the political backdrop for understanding the fiction’s extrapolated high-tech India. The novel manages to juggle quite well an enormous number of thematic issues, a key one being the “Indian-ness” of future technology – both Gandhian non-violence and the notion of dharma find a home in the technological debates Menon’s characters begin.
Anil Menon himself offers a review of the remarkable debut novel by Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Stylistically, the novel has been described as a meeting between steampunk, Nabokov, and Neal Stephenson. Menon begins by connecting it to the arch fiction about colonial enterprises, Shakespeare’s Tempest. He finds in Palmer’s work a rare combination of a novel of ideas, Victorian melodrama, and mythological sophistication.
The author of Black Light, The City of Love, and Signal Red, Rimi Chatterjee reviews Escape by Manjula Padmanabhan. The novel is a projection of the contemporary misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes in an India that has fulfilled the dreams of its fundamentalists by closing itself off entirely from outside influence. Padmanabhan’s fiction lays bare all of the pieties that nationalists earlier, and opportunists politicians more recently, have heaped on traditional families and values.
Steven Barnes who himself has published almost two dozen science fiction novels offers a review of Nnedi Okorafor’s first novel, Who Fears Death. Barnes focus is on the blurring between the fantastic and the technological in a post- apocalyptic Africa in which Okorafor’s novel is set. It isn’t too great stretch to extend the exploitation visited upon Africa in the preceding centuries into the future. Okorafor, however, manages to create characters who endure, which is remarkable in itself, but also attempt to make their world better.
All the novels reviewed here offer something that has been sorely lacking in contemporary literature, other visions. These other fictions unsettle the accepted epistemological and ontological issues regarding the west’s others. And doing so while at the same time making a genre their own.
