3 Review(s)

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.