Essays

How would phenomena that occur on our planet appear to an observer stationed on the Moon? How would our present time appear to a historian of the next millennium? Some questions regarding our common space and time can only be answered through a distance.

I take the idea of a sociological imagination quite literally, and envisage a not-too-distant future where race, science, and subjectivity are reconfigured differently, defiantly, and hope-fully.

Early Artificial Intelligence researchers wanted to make computers like people. A lesser known field called Automated Reasoning sought to develop new forms of reason that capitalized on what computers could do, but were quite different from the human faculty.  What did “reason” mean following the advent of modern digital computation?

X rays promised a transformation of vision, allowing for visual access to hitherto invisible realms, but fiction writers foresaw a darker dimension to this powerful new form of sight. 

Once nuclear war became thinkable, both policy intellectuals and writers were confronted with the challenge of how to talk about the aftermath — in the process revealing interesting ways of projecting the evolution of languages.

In Bolshevik Russia, specialized knowledge generated by biomedical research was transformed into an influential cultural resource and formed a zone of contest at the interface of four major cultural domains: religion, science, philosophy, and literature. Science fiction literature served as a critical medium for these two processes.

Cryonics – the practice of freezing deceased or “de-animated” people in anticipation of their eventual revival – is a controversial practice resting precariously at the intersection of hope and hubris, science and speculation.

During the Cold War, the “Neanderthal mentality” not only represented the evolutionary antecedents of humanity but also presaged a dire potential future.

The history of tachyon research affirms science fiction as a way of doing science, and a way of constructing the future.

South Asianists never speak of the undead. Africanists do. Latin Americanists do. But not South Asianists. Favoured by a more fulsome textual archive, South Asian historians dwell upon seemingly weightier matters. Yet when one allows one’s self the liberty of such distractions, one cannot fail to observe the swarming undead of the Raj.

Written in 1905 Calcutta and one of the first feminist science fiction stories, “Sultana’s Dream” asks how subjects who dream with technoscience might do life, gender, kinship and nation differently. 

Michael Crichton’s 1969 technothriller The Andromeda Strain anticipated the promise and peril of the biosciences at a time when many—including those in the nascent field of science studies—were still fixated on nuclear power.