Vandana Singh in the TLS

Fri 6 Sep 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

This lovely review seemed worth highlighting — Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines was reviewed by Michael Saler in London’s Times Literary Supplement:

“Vandana Singh’s science fiction . . . highlights the interplay between scientific and mythic narratives, focusing on the ways that ‘stories make the world’. A physicist in the United States, Singh was raised in India, where she was attracted by traditional legends as well as science. Several of her tales ruminate on the self-critical representations of science and the manifold meanings of myth. In one, an eleventh-century Indian poet famous for his collection of folklore has been resurrected in the future by a scientist who records alien legends, allowing Singh to compare poetic and scientific responses to oral tales. She shows that neither science nor myth are sufficient on their own, as her characters discover when they are misled by reductive empirical descriptions or beguiled by fairy-tale desires. Singh instead champions complex systems, in which discrete parts influence each other in unpredictable ways. She combines seemingly opposed categories, such as tradition and modernity, human and animal (or machine), the urban and the natural, and – most frequently – myth and science. Each yields facets of a more capacious reality that gradually unfolds within ingenious plots, which extend from earth in the near future to alternative histories and gleeful romps across time and space.”