Thursday, March 31, 2011

"The Other Sci-Fi"

The focus of the new issue of The American Book Review (Volume 32, Number 2: January/February 2011) is "The Other Sci-Fi," and its editor is Uppinder Mehan. Here's the ToC for the Focus section:

Uppinder Mehan’s “Introduction to Focus: The Other Sci-Fi”

Anil Menon reviews Dexter Palmer’s The Dream of Perpetual Motion (St. Martin’s Press)

Rimi B. Chatterjee reviews Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape (Picador India)

Satwik Dasgupta reviews Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books)

Steven Barnes reviews Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (DAW)

The introduction name-checks a few other authors besides those reviewed in the issue:
Nalo Hopkinson, Archie Weller, Tobias Buckell, Andrea Hairston, Celu Amberstone, Anuradha Marwah, Sheree R. Thomas, Vandana Singh, Steven Barnes, Nnedi Okorafor, Karin Lowachee are just a few of the writers who have started to explore possible futures, experiment with generic conventions, expand the boundaries of "acceptable" literature produced by the subjects of colonial processes. In the Focus of this issue of ABR, a number of these writers have come together to comment on each other's work.

Not really "a number of," more "a few," of these writers make it into the ToC, as you can see above. Unfortunately, Mehan uses the rest of the space in his essay to talk about the very works and reviewers covered in the issue, rather than about, for instance, "the boundaries of 'acceptable' literature produced by the subjects of colonial processes." Which is our loss, since many of us are eager to read more on a sparsley addressed subject. In any case, do check out the issue, if you can.

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