27 Science Fiction as a New Genre

Prof. Kunal Chattopadhay

About this chapter

• This chapter aims to assist the student into looking at how new genres are formed in popular literature, taking science fiction as a case study
• It also attempts to look at a range of sub-genres of science fiction
• It looks at how the genre has worked out in different languages and cultures

Definition: The problem of defining a genre like science fiction begins with the problem of defining genres themselves. Though constructing generic definitions is a scholarly necessity, adopting any historical approach to genre seems to undermine attempts at fixing a genre. Paul Kincaid (2003), following Wittgenstein, proposes that we can neither extract a unique , common thread binding all texts of science fiction together, nor identify a unique, common origin. He uses Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to argue that “science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things –a future setting, a marvellous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more subtle – which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations.” But then, the assertion that SF is “whatever we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction” does not mean anything much unless “we” know who “we” are and why “we” are looking for science fiction.

A much more objective definition, excluding the “we”, was attempted in the 1970s by Darko Suvin. What Suvin opposed to the wide range of texts included in the category of SF was a precise concept of the genre ruled by what Roman Jakobson called a “dominant”: “the focusing component of a work of art … [that] rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components” (Jakobson 82). Suvin (1979) wrote that science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” Suvin takes off from Ernst Bloch’s concept of the novum (Bloch 1986). He postulates a spectrum or spread of literary subject matter which extends from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, which range is what is called a novum.

Suvin also wanted a very restrictive use of the term science fiction, as exemplified in an essay where he asked for the exclusion of a large number of titles from the status of SF-hood. Suvin’s aim was a sharp separation between what he saw as legitimate SF, and other types or genres of fantastic fiction. Suvin insisted on this separation on a linked literary and political ground (if at all, particularly in his case, the two can be separated). A Yugoslav Marxist settled in Canada, the founder of Science Fiction Studies, the first major academic journal for the genre, Suvin stood on the grounds created in the 1930s, and if he adopts “novum” from his reading of Bloch, his privileging of “realism” over other literary forms is profoundly reminiscent of Lukacs in the celebrated Bloch-Lukacs debate of 1938 in Das Wort, turned  into a collection with other important German literary texts in Aesthetics and Politics (1980).

But while the Bloch-Lukacs debate was part of the debate over what should constitute the best popular frontist cultural politics, Suvin saw his task as drawing a line firmly between progress and reaction. Like Lukacs, though, he would take a sharp stance against ‘abstract and one-dimensional’ fantasy, with its ‘ideology of escapism’.

Suvin’s definition shifts SF to a different point of the novum because estrangement distinguishes it from the lived reality of the reader and the author. But cognition is supposed to differentiate it from folklore, fairy tale, fantasy, which he defines as (ghost, horror, Gothic, weird). Cognition for him implies not only a reflecting of but also on reality. It implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author’s environment. However, Suvin traces this “typical SF methodology” back to Lucian, Sir Thomas More, Cyrano de Bergerac, Swift, and on to Wells, Jack London and others. Clearly, he is conflating all utopian literature with SF. And in order to do so, he has to take in hand certain well known texts widely accepted as SF, and downgrade them. So he argues that Verne’s fiction, while acceptable as Science Fiction, has to be seen as a lower form of development.

Raymond Williams put forward a different understanding of Science Fiction, distinguishing it from Utopia per se. Williams admits that there is a kinship between the two, but devotes a long essay to drawing distinctions. (Williams 1978). Of the different arguments he presents, one in particular is significant. That is the role of technology in social transformation. If we move from the theorists to the practitioners, we shall see that the term emerged precisely at this point.

A man named Hugo Gernsback, minor author, editor, used two terms. The initial one was “scientifiction” and the later one “Science Fiction”. As he wrote: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (Gernsback 1926). This was the bringing together of types of text so far considered distinct. Verne relied on hard science, while Wells was willing to use totally non-scientific explanations like an element that had a natural attraction for the moon. Gernsback went beyond such differences to perceive some similarity, and posited a new genre. For his role, he has been honoured by the SF equivalent of the Oscar being named after him (the Hugo award). But his world was a narrow world. Aimed at a 16 year old male readership in the main, adventures with some unbelievable technology thrown in constituted the core of this literature.

History: Subsequent historians of Science Fiction, even if they sometimes pushed its re- history back to ancient or medieval stories of utopia or the supernatural, all agreed that the first “hard” Science Fiction novel was the previously perceived “Gothic” novel of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In the preface she begins with a disavowal of any desire to write tales of the supernatural:

“The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.”

This certainly brings her close to both Williams and to Suvin. But what makes Frankenstein a Science Fiction novel? The Industrial Revolution created the possibility of applied science regularly and systematically changing humans and their environment. But while the “optimists” of the 19th century were seeing only a potential for growth and progress, putting forward a bright picture, Shelley was more cautious and critical. She rejected the position that science need not be concerned about its social consequences, or that science would by itself solve problems without reference to ethical issues. These were explicitly the issues raised by Frankenstein. Beyond that, it also raised a serious specific question. How far was science, and behind it, the humans working with the scientific knowledge, right to tamper with the universe, including living beings?

This combined concern, despite other differences, can be traced also through the writings of Verne, or Wells. In La maison à vapeur (1880, English title, Steam House), Verne looks at colonial India a decade after the great revolt of 1857, and highlights some of the cruelties wrought by the rulers. Verne’s political sympathies also become clear in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, 1870) and The Mysterious Island ( L’Île mystérieuse 1874). Wells was a socialist, who stressed the role of education, and who had a belief in superior types of people playing a crucial role in effecting the transformation, as in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), a dystopia where hunger has disappeared but monopoly capital dominates the world. Wells is known for a large number of Science Fiction novels, such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds(1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901).

Two or three other writers can be mentioned for their long term impact, though there were other significant authors, who would however be recovered only after the genre was defined and its histories began to be researched. In the latter category would fall someone like Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman (1776-1822), a major figure of the Romantic movement, who played a role in examining the relationship between the new sciences and the older natural philosophy, and showed considerable interest in the emerging machine culture. But the authors who influenced directly were, in the first place, Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888), whose hero Julian West falls asleep to wake up 113 years later in 2000. He finds the USA transformed into a socialist utopia. Bellamy was deeply indebted to August Bebel, the German Marxist leader, for some of his arguments.

Another important figure was Karel Capek, who in his RUR (Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti, 1920), took up some of the themes highlighted by Shelley. This created a lasting image of the dangers of science creating artificial life and intelligence that would go out of human control and be a potentially threatening one. Capek described the Robots as organic beings who could be mistaken for humans. But in 1920, when Capek wrote R.U.R., knowledge of DNA and generally genetics were still in their infancy, so his Robots, though organic, are assembled in a factory. The impact of World War I as well as Fordism are perceptible here. Robot in Czech means worker, and is derived from the old Slavonic Rabota, which meant servitude. So it was not just work but work under coercion.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was different, again. His John Carter transported thrilling adventures to a new planet, and in doing so, opened up the possibilities for innumerable imitators. Barsoom (Burroughs’ name for Mars) is implausible, and John Carter travels there by magic rather than hard science. It is also marked by race and gender overtones marking the author and his immediate intended readership. If it is still worth mentioning, there are two reasons. By placing the action in Mars, Burroughs starts a process where the ecology of the planet becomes an integral part of the tale, even though his own handling is terrible (for example Barsoom is an aging planet whose seas are drying up and which has water scarcity, water supply via canals is controlled by often warring city states, but he has all manner of carnivores, without realizing that each carnivore needs a much larger supply of herbivores and they n turn greens needing more water). Nonetheless, both Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke read and were influenced by Burroughs. Science-based imagination, social criticism, stories based on technological progress; and sheer adventure – these were the four elements introduced and nurtured by the writers discussed.

Hugo Gernsback founded a journal, Amazing Stories. In 1930, having seen the success of Gernsback’s magazines, a new magazine came up – Astounding Stories of Super Science. In 1933 it was acquired by Street and Smith, a fairly big publishing house. It was in this magazine that more sophisticated and sensitive writings started coming up. One of the earliest authors to write in a new way was Stanley Weinbaum. His A Martian Odyssey was to show a clear alternative to the Burroughs type of portrayal of Mars. Tweel, the Martian, is intelligent, but thinks and acts differently than humans do. And Mars is not a slightly desert like US wild west, where the hero uses intergalactic six-guns to win the heroine.

The other writer coming up was John W. Campbell, Jr. An important writer, he was far more important as an editor who shaped the next decade of US Science Fiction. In 1937, he became the editor of Astounding, and the next decade saw him completely dominating SF. Authors developed by him included Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Lester del Ray. In fact, hard SF of the kind that became core to SF for a long time was created by a partnership of Campbell and Heinlein, to start with. “Life-line” (1939), was the first story of Heinlein in Astounding. He would develop a whole structure called ‘Future History’, and while sometimes deviating, he did keep to many of its pointers. One can find forerunners for the kind of writing one is referring to, but Campbell’s insistence that the science of the SF must sit well aesthetically was a crucial development. In the hands of Heinlein, the new and ‘astounding’ science and technology came to be described through the eyes of beings who lived in the age being narrated, rather than appearing in undigested lumps of lectures on science real or fictional. Heinlein also accepted Campbell’s stress on individualism and the supremacy of free market capitalism, and in Starship Troopers, (1959), sharply challenged leftwing anti-nuclear sentiments in the name of patriotism and civic duty. Many of his stories, such as Gulf (1949), If This Goes On— (serialised 1940, expanded 1953), and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), depend strongly on the premise, related to the well- known Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential. Another Campbell author, Isaac Asimov, would develop the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ in I, Robot (1950), and The Rest of the Robots (1964). Often implicitly accepted by other writers, these ‘laws’ allowed the writing of robot stories without the fear that Shelley and particularly Capek had stoked. What robots were and what they could and could not do was ethically decided and turned into a core component of their manufacture. Later, Asimov would also explore the question of human ethics and ecology (Robots and Empire (1985), Foundation’s Edge (1982), Foundation and Earth (1986)

Asimov had a leftwing orientation, and as a Jew, had trouble with Campbell’s racial stances. He tackled that by creating a human only universe. But his left orientation emerges in the Foundation trilogy. Though he would later ascribe it entirely to a reading of Gibbon, his association with the Communist and Trotskyist connected SF writers’ group, the Futurians, makes one suspect that the Second Foundation, a tightly knit group of superior thinkers silently guiding the universe, appeared to be a Science Fictional vision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, even as the evolution from the fall of the Galactic Empire was followed by organised religion, barbarism, trade, the collapse of lords, and the rise of a new capitalistic empire. The Campbell model was more decisively challenged by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, in The Space Merchants (1952). It shows a world dominated by monopoly capital, being challenged not by one heroic individual but by groups cooperating. Those who do the challenging, however, appear more as Greens than as communists, even if Trotsky’s name is dropped at one stage. The references are clear. The “Consies” (conservationists) are seditious enemies (this came out around the time of McCarthyism). Congress controlled by corporate entities; conservationists vilified as anarchists; food and beverages adulterated beyond belief, corporate espionage driven to life/death levels; severe shortages in fossil fuels and clean water. This sets the tone for later radical works, such as John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. But the Futurian challenge was also about questioning the fixation on technology and its ability to solve all human problems.

In England, Science Fiction had a different trajectory, being associated with Wells, Olaf Stapledon and others, and hence never treated as just “pulp fiction”. The most influential (and grim) SF dystopia would be written by a disillusioned leftist, George Orwell, in 1949. Titled Nineteen Eighty Four, this drew on James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, to suggest that bureaucratic elites were coming to dominate in all parts of the world. But it also drew on Trotsky, and the history of the Soviet Union, as well as the British labour tradition. The permanent purges and confessions were derived from Stalinism, but the beer and television culture was more from his British experience. Significantly, accepting that Nineteen Eighty Four was a legitimate part of the SF canon would take a lot of time. The sentiment appeared to be, if it is high grade literature it cannot be called SF. It would only be when some of the pulp writers would break out of the ghetto and be taken seriously, and when, in the 1960s, new types of SF would be written, that the shape of the genre would start to jell. Histories would be written, like Amis (1960), Aldiss (1973), and then only would we see the major theoretical interventions by Suvin (1979), Williams (1978), Jameson (2005) and Bould and Mieville (2009).

Canon Formation, Genre, Sub-Genres 

The problem of understanding science fiction as a genre cannot be taken separately from the issue of canon formation. This has already been noted in connection with Suvin’s attempt to read numerous texts out of the canon. Most schools of critical reading tend to privilege one particular genre (e.g., Lukacs, orthodox Marxism and the privileging of “realist” prose fiction, or New Criticism and lyric poetry, etc). Science fiction has had few influential readers. In other words, for a long time, those minorities of readers possessing social and institutional power enabling their views to prevail ignored SF as a genre. Canon formation was done in part by publishers, who could separate “hard” SF from the rest, or who could also lump all SF with fantasy, myths and related material. In any case, literature is a conventional term. So its generic categories change. A few generations back, autobiographies were not considered “good literature” worth teaching, writing critical essays and putting into syllabi. That has changed. The same has happened to SF over the last half century. So if its birth can be dated to 1818 (Frankenstein), its transformation into “good literature” dates to perhaps the 1970s. This presupposes that till fairly recently, powerful forces in the literary field did not wish SF to function with the social prestige that literature in the strong sense enjoys. This is not primarily because of unfavourable judgements on individual texts, but because of a wholesale rejection of the genre.

As the previous discussion on definitions also indicates, the upward evaluation of SF has to do a lot with trends in Marxist literary/critical theory. This does not imply that SF itself is socialist oriented. But its canon formation and generic definition has been undertaken by a primarily socialist oriented critical theory.

From this we can move on to a consideration of style, and the issue of historicity. In Philip K. Dick’s novels, the issue of feeling, and how it can change over time, comes up. Thus, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Dick invites the reader to consider the possibility that emotions move in a different way in a future age, compared to what we empirically experience. A character feels irritated, “though he had not dialled for it”. What is also important, however, is that Dick’s writing quality is not what is normatively considered stylistic or “good” writing. One can think of Le Guin or Delany or Attwood as SF authors who would be considered “stylists” in mainstream fiction, but the key point one is making here is, SF calls very often for styles that are distinct. The Formalists would have underscored this, but much of standard lit. crit. shies away for that very reason. A detailed discussion of Dick’s texts is of course not possible here. But the novel mentioned earlier, or Ubik (1969), can be analysed using Bakhtin’s terms. Dick’s language use is radically dialogic. He exploits what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, or the existence of linguistic polyvalency (Bakhtin 1981). And the way form and content are constantly brought together in Dick’s novels reminds us of Bakhtin’s stress on the impossibility of delinking style from its social context, and the linking of linguistic turns with more general movements of culture and society. In Ubik, for example, the SF-ness is brought alive by references like the solar system as a functioning economic unit, the quantification of psi-power, and the resulting estrangement of the corporate capitalist society even while certain concepts are de-estranged by imposing measurability on them.

From this, it can also be argued, that a main current of SF is a variant of historical fiction, or that SF steps in where old historical fiction declines. Lukacs argued that the French revolution and Napoleon made history a mass experience, and thereby made the historical novel the most vital literary form of the era. Leaving to one side his arguments about why it declined, we can suggest that in the twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first, among the popular genres that came up, SF alone presented an alternative, because it showed itself repeatedly as alternative history or future history. SF emerges as a counter strategy that revitalizes the notion of progress by transforming our present into the past of something yet  to arrive.

Such an idea of progress is a complex one. Historically, Western liberal ideas of progress have cheerfully encompassed colonialism, all to uplift the benighted colonized. Responses come through subgenres that turn the gaze. The main current of SF was for long “hard SF”. That is characterized by rigorous attention to accurate detail in the natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, astronomy, and in recent years also biology and ecology. Working scientists who have written hard SF include Fred Hoyle, Gergory Benford or David Brin.

Other notable hard SF writers include Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Greg Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Anne McCaffrey. Among them, McCaffrey’s status has changed significantly over time. A large part of her novels are set in the universe of the Federated Sentient Planets. In the most popular series, the Dragonriders of Pern, several thousand humans travel to a distant planet after a long war with the Nathis, and then are cut off. A periodic coming closer by an erratic planet with a cometary orbit brings in its wake material from the Oort cloud that is a threat in the atmosphere of the planet Pern. As mechanical resources fail, the people are forced to develop biological alternatives, the fire- breathing dragons that bond at birth with sensitive humans in telepathic linkages. After 2500 years, the old memory is lost, and the first novel Dragonflight, actually reminds us more of a fantasy/feudal world of dragons, weyrs, and Holds and their Lords, as do its immediate sequels – Dragonquest and The White Dragon. It is only over time that the physics and the biology of Pern is worked out, across the first years (Dragonsdawn, 1988 ), the years of the first Pass of the Red Star and the First Interval (Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, 1993, and parts of Dragonsblood 2005, with Todd McCaffrey).  By this point as well as in All the  Weyrs of Pern (1991) and The Skies of Pern (2001) a strictly scientific account has been constructed, with several errors that had previously crept in tidied up. Acknowledgement sections in the novels show the close collaboration with a range of scientists. What had appeared “power” (magic) in the early novels gives way to a more “scientific” approach to telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation. In The Brain & Brawn Ship series, and the Crystal singer series, the setting is the main line of the Federated Sentient Planets, and while special human skills are used, the storyline is hard science. What sets are off, however, is the attempt at feminism within this hard science, something relatively uncommon in the earlier times.

Social Science Fiction or Soft Science Fiction includes more extensive focus on psychology, politics, sociology, anthropology, and economics. Philip K. Dick straddles the two worlds. Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974) deals respectively with utopia suggesting that is not the end of history but the creation of new social complexities. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) deals and with the question of gender and sexuality in a very central way, since in the planet Gethen the inhabitants, very humanoid, however do not have sexual organs present all the time, and when these periodically appear they can be either male or female. The earth human ambassador Genli Ai and the Gethenites find mutual exchange difficult, for earth humans identify people strongly in gendered terms, while to the Gethenites, earth humans appear to be permanently sexually charged, a situation they find difficult to understand. Le Guin as well as McCaffrey are key figures in a cross between fantasy and SF, too. Not only the Left Hand of Darkness, but her Earthsea novels put her in this position. But it would be with China Mieville that the border between fantasy and SF would be totally overthrown, for example in his Bas-Lag novels.

A wide range of sub genres have been identified in recent years. Cyberpunk uses advances in information technology and computers, and film noir techniques. The film Blade Runner (1982) has been treated as a definitive example of cyberpunk. Military SF has been a widely developed form in the late Cold War and post-Cold War period, with a clear orientation in favour of imperial powers. Major writers include S. M. Stirling, David Drake, David Weber, and Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Pournelle’s Future History series (in collaboration at times with Stirling and with Niven) dealt with an imperial space navy, marines, and the creation of a Galactic empire after earth is destroyed in “nationalistic” wars due to a breakdown of a US-Russian duopolistic empire.

Environmental concerns emerge in novels over a long period, from Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954), via John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972) to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) and Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (2010).

In Other Language Worlds: 

While Anglo-American SF has been dominant, Russia, East Europe, India, Bangladesh and other areas have also produced SF, in different ways. Another genre requiring in depth treatment would be Afrofuturism and Black SF. Here, we will merely mention some authors and themes for all of these.

Russian political SF goes back at least to the Bolshevik theorist Alexander Bogdanov, who wrote Red Star (1908) and its prequel Engineer Menni (1913) to depict a communist society in Mars and how it came about. Bogdanov would later be influential in the first years of the Soviet Union as an inspirer of a radical cultural trend known as the Proletkult. In the USSR, science fiction was inspired by scientific revolution, industrialisation, and the mass education that called for mass literary production. Evgenii Zamyatin’s We (1924) was a critique of industrial society, which he saw as leading to dictatorial collectivism, and which has been seen as one of the influences on Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (1925) and Ivan Vasiliyevich (1936) were also critical SF. Alexei Tolstoy by contrast wrote hard SF working out class struggle along the way. Post-Stalin Soviet SF had a greater leeway, but a major difference from much of Western SF was an assumption of a possible peaceful world. Ivan Yefremov, the brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, are among the noteworthy writers. The Strugatskys wrote several novels dealing with a utopian future earth sending agents to other planets for social change, who however fail. Science  Fiction was  well developed in Soviet cinema, with figures like Andrei Tarkovsky and Vladimir Tarasov.

One outstanding East European Science Fiction writer who needs mention is Stanislaw Lem. His early novels were written under what he later said was compulsory Socialist Realism to placate the censors. They include The Man From Mars (1946), and The Magellanic Cloud (1955). De-Stalinisation resulted in a sharp rise in his output (17 books between 1956 and 1968, including several widely acclaimed SF books, both novels and collections of stories). Solaris (1961) has been considered his greatest work. The planet Solaris is apparently uninhabited, except for the scientists from Earth who operate a small research station. The surface of the planet is covered by water, and the visitors marvel at the range of patterns and forms taken by the waves, which act in an awe-inspiring and sometimes frightening manner. But cryptic events start taking place among the researchers, and the only possible explanation is that the ocean is responsible. Can a geographic fact, a part of the landscape, really be a life form? Lem deals with the fact that human intelligence can only try to understand the reality around it in its own terms, and that can lead to major limitations.

In 1835, Kylash Chunder Dutt , a young student of Hindoo College, Calcutta, published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette ‘A Journal of Forty-eight Hours of the year 1945’, dealing with an imaginary revolution against British rule and its eventual failure. Indian historians have read it as a proto-nationalist article (Chattopadhyay1965: xv-xvii). But by the terms we have been using, this can be seen as the first Indian SF Avant La Lettre. In Bangla, SF was written, but not presented as SF for a long time. Premendra Mitra’s tales of Ghanada, the resident of a Calcutta “Mess” who spins tall yarns, has a number of stories which qualify as SF. Noted author and humourist Sukumar Roy wrote ‘Hesoram Husiyar er Diary’, which can be seen as a spoof on colonial discovery narratives. His son, noted film maker and author Satyajit Ray, wrote a series of stories with a character called Professor Shonku. While very popular among Bangla readers, especially children and teenagers, Shonku has poor science and little social setting. He is an inventor who invents everything from spaceships to robots to death ray discharging guns in his one man laboratory. Far more important for the development of a Science Fiction readership in Bangla were Manabendra Bandyopadhyay,  who translated a vast number of SF novels (from Verne to Lem) and Adrish Bardhan, who edited at different times Ashchoryyo and Fantastic, two SF periodicals.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, a feminist utopia, was written in English in 1905. It is only in recent years that it has received some attention, but as yet very little in terms of a Science Fiction text. There are also fairly rich traditions of Hindi, Marathi and Tamil SF, but most accounts exist only in the relevant languages.

Afrofuturism was a term coined by Mark Dery in his article “Black to the Future,” (1993). It describes music, literature and art including science fiction, magic realism, Afrocentricity, and non-Western cosmologies. It imagines futures for those groups that stem from the cultural experiences of the African diaspora. Though the definition should therefore also include Brazilian and other non-Anglophone people of colour, in Science Fiction, the major figures who are considered tend to be all Anglophone. Samuel R. Delany has been seen as the first of these writers. Afrofuturism has been traced back to the 19th century. Much like their white counterparts, nineteenth-century Afrofuturists wrote in a diverse range of fantastic and proto- science fictional forms. The rise of pulp SF meant that race issues could not be easily taken up. New alliances between Afrofuturists and SF began in the 1960s, the decade there was a huge Civil Rights movement and a variety of social radicalism across the USA. Pioneering black authors such as Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Charles Saunders, and Jewelle Gomez wrote SF. But it is possible to go back to the 1930s, and look at George S. Schuyler’s Black Internationale (1936-38, serialised), portraying a race war where Blacks fight back and defeat the White oppressors in the US, and liberate Africa as well. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, collected together as Lilith’s Brood (2000), and Sheree R.Thomas (Ed), Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) are some of the defining texts.