Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (New Dimensions in Science Fiction) - Hardcover

Khan, Sami Ahmad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786837625 ISBN 13: 9781786837622

Publisher: University of Wales Press, 2021

Synopsis

India is mutating - and its Science Fiction (SF) with it. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj is a critical catalogue of contemporary India's anglophone SF, a path-breaking work that flits between texts, vantage points and frameworks. An alternative to a male Eurocentric perspective of SF, this study avoids essentialising definitions and delves into how the world of SF (text) intersects with that of the writer/reader. Fusing paradigms of Science Fiction Studies, South Asian Studies and Postcolonial Studies, among others, the book explicates how India and its SF negotiate one another. It evolves a 'transMIT thesis' to analyse how mythology (M), ideology (I) and technology (T) contour Indian SF and its fictional reimaginings. This study identifies the manifestations of divine beings within SF (as differing epistemological categories), locates the modes of marginalisation within Indian popular imagination (as altars of alterity), and then proceeds to analyse how newer technologies engage with socio-political anxieties in (and through) SF.

About this title

About the Author

Sami Ahmad Khan is a novelist, academic and documentary producer. Sami is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to the University of Iowa, and holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. His future-war debut Red Jihad won two literary awards, and his second novel Aliens in Delhi garnered rave reviews; he has taught at IIT Delhi, Jindal Global University and JNU, and presently discusses life and literature at GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786837625
• ISBN 13: 9781786837622
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272