Numerous beyond the wall.

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Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion (2019)

‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905’ shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire.

Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. These stories, created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.

In Victorian India technological change was necessarily understood through differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Since India was not a settler colony, new British-imposed forms of government could scarcely claim continuity with the past, and political and cultural dislocations gave rise to speculation about wholly new forms of social organization. Creation and destruction, cultural innovation and colonial resistance gave rise to the plots and tropes of science fiction. In the stories collected in ‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905’ nineteenth-century Indian writers project successful and failed revolutions into a twentieth-century future. British writers imagine, on the one hand, a catastrophic flood - thanks to the projected Panama Canal - and, on the other, a utopian future of peaceful multi-ethnic parliamentary government. And a Muslim writer designs a feminist utopia in which women practice science and men keep house.

by Mary Ellis Gibson (Editor)

Get it here

Mary Ellis Gibson is the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature and chair of English at Colby College, USA. Her recent work focuses on the development of English language literature in colonial India. The author of “Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore’ and the accompanying anthology “Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913,” Gibson has edited several collections of fiction, including “New Stories by Southern Women and Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers.”

Barista: Welcome to Starbucks, home of delicious, what deliciousness can I put in motion for you today?

Customer: … Can I get a trenta pink drink please?

Barista: Go big or go home, we here at Starbucks appreciate your commitment, what else can I get started for you?

***

Customer: Nitro cold brew with shots of espresso please.

Barista: Brave of you to commit to staying awake for three days, anything else today?

***

Barista: *slams open drive-thru window* HI HOW ARE YOU?

Customer: …I’m pretty good.

Barista: Are you ready to be even better? Because you’re about to be. *hands them their coffee* 

***

Barista, realizing that a drink was made wrong: *slams open window* SO how do you feel about surprises?

Customer: ….they’re okay.

Barista: Great because I’m about to give you one.

***

Barista: You have two drinks so I am going to hand you two straws which means, FANTASTIC news, these straws double as drumsticks. / You have one drink so I am going to hand you one straw and, promise not to tell anyone, this straw doubles as a magic wand.

***

Barista: Here are those cake pops, I plucked them fresh from the tree myself.

***

Barista: *slams open window, holding drink* Amazing, fantastic, delicious, you are a very lucky man/woman!

***

Barista, realizing drink is being delayed or remade: Looks like it’s gonna be just one minute so they have time to put the extra love in.

***

Barista: I’ll be with you in one hot second. *beat* WOW that second sure was hot!

turns out i’m just the youngest person in the class by about 30 years so the deduction wasn’t that hard

anyways, apparently people keep taking the welding class over and over again and the wait list is like 100 people long and so it was by some act of providence of pure dumb luck that I managed to get a spot. This also means I was the only person there who hadn’t welded before.

I’m stationed at a big center table where the teacher can keep an eye on me, and everyone else is in booths on the surrounding walls each making their own projects. And these are impressive looking projects. One guy is making a side table, a woman is making a giant metal rocking chair, and another guy was making a wind chime out of old compressed air canisters. 

The elderly gentlemen in the booth right behind me introduces himself to me as Jim and asks me if this is my first time and I say yeah and he smiles at me and tells me I’m gonna love it and how this class is so fun.

Immediately Jim becomes my new best friend. He comes over whenever I stop to take a break and asks how I’m doing and even helps me take the welding mask off when I couldn’t figure out how to do it myself. 

at one point i see Jim and another old guy talking to the teacher and i catch the old guy pointing at me. now being pointed at is usually never a good thing. the teacher has had me welding edges of scrap metal together so I can get a feel for the equipment. The teacher comes to check on me and I jokingly as him if those seasoned guys were making fun of me. 

Turns out I’m super good at welding and the old guy didn’t believe it was my first time welding ever and Jim was trying to convince him I was a newbie. :D

So for the entire 3 hour long class, like 15 middle aged and elderly people would periodically come by my table and check in with me, making sure I’m having fun and asking me questions about my life, and things like, do you know where the drinking fountain is, making sure I’m taking breaks, looking out for me and that kind of thing, all while being completely kind and supporting and complimenting me on my welding skills. 

the other elderly gentleman’s name is Gino and spoke with a thick Italian accent and took to calling me Bella for the rest of the semester. Jim made sure to always take the booth closest to me. 

Another guy in the class named Mike did salvage diving as a hobby and always showed me pictures of the cool stuff he’d found. He also made very cool sculptures out of spoons, forks and knives. I at one point made an offhand joke that I was moving soon, and was jealous that Mike had all this cutlery to spare to make sculptures out of. (I was going to be moving in with my boyfriend and neither of us really had a lot of kitchenware) The next class he brought in an entire cutlery set insisting that he was trying to clean out his house because he had so many and wouldn’t take no for an answer. We still have them to this day :)

They had cupcakes waiting for me on my birthday and on the last day they had framed picture of me with my final project because “it’s important to celebrate your successes” and encouraged me to give it to my mom (which of course I did, along with my cattail sculpture)

“The Divination of Claude the Crab”

Oil on canvas

The Steampunk Aesthetic Of Victorian London In Superb Paintings Of Vadim Voitekhovitch 

Vadim Voitekhovitch was born in a small town of Mozyr, Belarus. He spent most of his life Belarus and he graduated from Bobruisk Art College. From 2004 he lives and works in Germany. 

vs.

It’s Not a Plot Hole, It’s Just Something That They Opted Not to Spoon-feed You Because It Would Be Obvious If You Thought About It For 20 Seconds

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It May Be a Plot Hole, But It Still Works In Terms of the Story’s Themes and Character Logic

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All Works of Fiction Represent Constructed Realities and by Demanding a Lack of Plot Holes, You Are Improperly Importing the Rules of Objective Reality into a Subjective Creation that Must Be Judged Primarily on Its Aesthetic Merits

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Friends at the Table

The Adventure Zone

The White Vault

Alice Isn’t Dead

Lesser Gods

Limetown

A morningstar whose achingly beautiful singing voice is only somewhat lessened by the unbelievable filthiness of its songs’ subject matter. It insists on attempting to “soothe” hostile parties with its singing, with mixed results. Able to use bardic inspiration with total of 5d6 available dice, refreshing on a long rest.

A spear with encyclopedic – albeit erratic – knowledge of nearly every topic. Consulting with the weapon grants advantage on Intelligence-based skill checks. However, on a failure, the spear’s advice is wildly, disastrously wrong. Any check benefiting from this effect is made in secret by the GM; the player is not informed whether it succeeded.

A crossbow whose ambition is to curate a great exhibition of the arts. It thinks it has excellent taste; it really, really doesn’t. Capable of appraising the market value of any art object it encounters down to the last copper piece, though it will report its assessment very grumpily if it feels – as it often does! – that a particular piece is over- or undervalued.

A battleaxe obsessed with Hegelian dialectics, a subject on which it’s prepared to hold forth at great length. Once per day, the axe’s wielder may split a single object of size Large or smaller into two undamaged objects embodying its opposing attributes by striking it. The opposition thus demonstrated is often obscure, though the axe will happily explain.