New Publication: Review of Star Warriors of the Modern Raj by Sami Ahmad Khan

I (foolishly) took on two book reviews last academic year. For the first time, I had journals reach out to me based on my expertise, so I felt like one ought to take advantage of such an opportunity and say yes! One hasn't been published yet, but the other just came out. These were both good to do... but ate up what little writing time I get these days! I promised myself not to do it again this year.

In my capacity as associate editor of Studies in the Fantastic, I worked with Dr. Dennis Wilson Wise of the University of Arizona on an article he published about fan poetry; this caused him to remember me when a book crossed his desk for review at the journal where he works, Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. We had a lot of quibbling about citations, so he knew I was attentive to detail! The book was about Indian science fiction, and he remembered seeing my essay about Manjula Padmanabhan's sf on my CV. He was a good editor, helping refine my not-very-good first draft into a better review.

The review is of Star Warriors of the Modern Raj by Sami Ahmad Khan, a 2021 publication from the University of Wales Press that gives an overview and analysis of Indian science fiction in English. You can see it here; these are the first couple paragraphs:

A few years ago at the Science Fiction Research Association’s annual conference, I was on a panel about Indian SF; as I chatted with my co-presenter afterward, I remember bemoaning the lack of an entry for India in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia – there was no readily accessible broad overview of Indian SF, despite a tradition going back to the 19th century. The last few years have seen attempts to alleviate this, with Suparno Banerjee’s Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (2020) and now Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj.

Khan’s monograph explores what he calls ISFE (Indian SF in English), largely from 1999 to the present. Though Khan protests that his book has no pretensions to being either comprehensive or exhaustive (xii), Star Warriors of the Modern Raj nonetheless feels, at times, as if Khan were attempting to cram every work by every single writer of ISFE into the text; even individual short stories often receive multiple pages of discussion. This expansiveness drives the book’s strengths and weaknesses alike. The task he has set out for himself is incredibly difficult as little unites these works except genre and country of composition. What kind of overall thesis or perspective can one have on decades of SF from across an entire country?

Khan foregrounds this difficulty in his introduction, telling a story of two different approaches he could have taken if he had been politically motivated. The right-wing approach would be to claim that Indian SF goes back thousands of years because the Ramayana is actually SF; the left-wing approach would be to reject religion and depict ISFE as something totally new and unprecedented. He sums up all political framings as simplistic: “The right wanted to reclaim a golden past, the left wished for a red future, and the centre did not know which colour it sought” (xii, italics removed). He concludes that his book is “aware that there can be no single -ism or any grand unified theory that can explain the divergences of ISFE – and hence [it] flits across vantage points that arise out of markedly different contexts” (xiv). The strength of Khan’s book is its avoidance of a single overall frame, letting each story operate in its own context.