Vandana SinghRezensionen

Run, don't walk, and read this lady's short stories.

Thoroughly interesting and enjoyable. Some body-horror. Yes, she does think she is a planet. No, I don’t want to spoil it.

What can we make of the relationship between human and machine?

This is three beautifully told related vignettes wrapped in a twist made of awesome. (Really, the twist end booted this very firmly up from four to five stars. I'm into this kind of thing, though.) Available free at Tor. Go and read it already.

If you like science fiction and fantasy short stories from a different point of view, read this book. Instead of using the standard European influences, some of these stories are based on Indian mythology. One of my favorites (the last) stars an Indian woman who has traveled to a warming Arctic to collect her aunt's belongings. Even though I've already read this as a pre-release ebook, a print copy is on its way to be added to my collection.

I've been a fan of Vandana Singh since I read The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories and met her at the Science Fiction Research Association 2015 conference, so I was excited to acquire an advance review copy of this, her second collection of short fiction, covering works released (mostly) after the publication of her first. A second novel is always a tricky thing; I'm wondering if a second short story collection can be even more so.

I enjoyed the first collection for its thoughtfulness and its sense of play, but I'm used to Singh's voice now, and at times I felt that Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories wasn't giving me much that I hadn't got out of the first. Singh has a recurrent interest in how (what one of her characters in TWWTSWP&OS called) "inner space" and "outer space" need to be accessed at the same time. As a result, there are a lot of ruminative stories about people in outer space here, people's ordinary lives paired with extraordinary journeys through time and space. On top of that, AM&OS adds an interest in the environment-- as is common in contemporary sf, a lot of these tales take place after some kind of ecological disaster or environmental collapse, though sometimes they're about one being forestalled. I'll be honest, occasionally it started to all blend together.

But when Singh hits, she really does sing. I really enjoyed "Peripeteia," about a physics academic who, after her lover leaves her, starts to worry that Occam's Razor might not be true, and maybe all of physics is just an ad hoc alien construction. "Are you Sannata3159?", about a man working for a pittance in a meat factory in a stratified future society, is a really dark story, more like what I would expect of Manjula Padmanabhan (it's sort of Harvestesque), but blackly good. "Sailing the Antarsa," about a lone space explorer who discovers there's always a new unknown to know, was a nice and uplifting counterpart to that one. I liked the knitting together of the stories of ordinary people during a fantastic event in "Cry of the Kharchal."

The second-best story in the volume is the last (and the only one not previously published): "Requiem," about a graduate student who goes to Alaska (in a time of environmental collapse) to collect the belongings of her recently deceased beloved aunt. A strong take on grief, with some intriguing ideas under the surface. The best story in the volume is the title story, "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination," three stories about nameless characters encountering machines that may or may not exists, each one on its own an insightful, melancholy tale, but in combination, greater than the sum of their parts. Which is true for many machines, many stories, and many collections, including this one.

This is an excellent collection of short stories. There's a range of fantasy and sci-fi, with some overlap, but the stories are all very different from each other. The one dystopic horror story, Are You Sannata3159?, didn't do much for me, but it just wasn't my thing. Everything was well written.

My favorite piece is Requiem, the novelette that closes out the book (and is original to this collection), an ecological sci-fi tale about a young woman visiting the arctic research station where her aunt died. Environmental themes also show up (though subtly) in Indra's Web, Cry of the Kharchal, and With Fate Conspire. Other themes include communicating across time, and Indian myths and epic poetry. Oblivion: A Journey, a space opera revenge fantasy that draws on the Ramayana, was another standout.½

A collection of science fiction stories from author Vandana Singh. They were very original and well written with really interesting settings. There’s a range of themes throughout the stories too. Often her Indian culture shows up in the stories lending them a much different feel to most of the English language sci-fi that’s out there. I particularly enjoyed the unusual revenge story Oblivion: A Journey, and Requiem, where a woman travels to a research station in Alaska where her aunt had been working before she died. The latter is the final story in the collection, appearing here for the first time, and it’s the longest story too. All of the stories have something interesting in them though, and are full of intriguing ideas. If anything, sometimes it feels like the detailed worlds she built needed more than just a short story to take advantage of them and occasionally it feels like the plot gets lost amongst all the details. Mostly though, it’s an excellent collection of science fiction with a different feel from most.

This is a collection of Fantasy and SF short stories from an Indian author. Most of them have been published elsewhere, but the last, and maybe the best, hasn't. It's a refreshing change to read stories that come from a non-English speaking tradition, and even the stories that are set somewhere else other than Earth have a different influence from the SF I'm used to reading. There's a great variety of settings, from the past to the future, but the same high quality story telling in each. I really enjoyed reading each one.

This gorgeous collection of speculative short stories swept me away. Vandana Singh is a truly skilled writer.

This collection includes ten short stories and one brief essay, where Singh writes about the importance of speculative fiction (in this case she was preaching to the choir). The stories themselves are a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Most of the stories are set in India, although one takes place on the Moon and one takes place in New England.

My favorite of the collection is probably the opening story, “Hunger.” An Indian house wife who loves science fiction novels and dreams of other worlds feels trapped within her own, occupied with planning her daughter’s birthday party. This party is more for her husband than her daughter, as it is a chance for him to impress the higher ups at his firm. Most of the story stays within the bounds of reality, only veering outside it within the last few pages.

Like with “Hunger,” the protagonists would often be people with a sense of hollowness in their lives, unfulfilled by the demands of respectable society. In “Tetrahedron,” the protagonist is a college aged women who’s engaged to man her family approves of, but she dreads a future with him. When a mysterious tetrahedron appears out of nowhere in her city, she becomes obsessed with understanding its mysteries.

These restless protagonists are often women, such as in “Thirst,” where a wife dreams of water and serpents. She begins to understand her own family’s legacy, and why the women of her maternal line have always been drawn to water.

In “Delhi,” the protagonist at drift is a man, who on the brink of suicide was pulled back from a bridge and given a card, which led him to the office of a fortune teller. He received a computer print out of a woman’s face and the advice that she was the reason he had to keep living. Who is this woman? The protagonist doesn’t live entirely in the present — he glimpses visions of the future and the past, so the mysterious woman could be from anywhere in history. I loved this story’s chilly hints about what the future holds.

Some of the stories contain traces of sly humor; this is most obvious in the titular “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet.” A respectable middle-class man retires and finds out that he doesn’t really know his wife. And then she starts saying that she’s a planet! What will the neighbors think?

“Three Tales from the Sky River” may be the only one of these stories that’s also available free online (check Strange Horizons). It’s possibly the shortest story in the collection, but it’s still incredibly lovely. “Three Tales from the Sky River” is three original fables from star-faring people. Even if you don’t have time to read this full collection, I would suggest at least giving this story a look.

In “The Room on the Roof,” a sculptress moves into the house of a thirteen year old girl. This story falls somewhere in the category of fantasy or magical realism, and there’s enough layers that I’m still sorting it out.

Some of the stories are more science geared than others. “The Tetrahedron” would be one of these, but “Conservation Laws” and “Infinities” are the two others. “Conservation Laws” takes place on the Moon, and through a story within a story structure heads to Mars as well for a strange, epic tale of aliens who preserve our reality. In “Infinities,” a mathematician becomes obsessed with the idea of infinity even as violence between Hindus and Muslims breaks out around him.

I enjoyed pretty much all of the stories. The only one that never really landed was “The Wife,” the one set in New England. On the whole, 9/10 is pretty good for a short fiction collection. I’m so glad I got the chance to read this book, and I look forward to exploring more of Singh’s work.

Review originally posted on The Illustrated Page.

This is a slim little volume, less than a hundred pages, written from the perspective of a boy named Arun who wakes up amnesiac after a fire. He has the ability to weave the minds of those around him into a "meta-mind," a group acting as one-- but he can be caught and trapped by minds more powerful than his, and he's also fascinated by the minds he thinks of as solitons, which don't lose their coherence in the presence of a meta-mind. It's a nice little novella: I read my first work by Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, last year, and like the stories in that book, Of Love and Other Monsters has a compelling otherworldly feel, and a strong sense of voice and character. We follow Arun through a number of intimate relationships, some sexual, some romantic, some both, some neither, as well as a series of geographical relocations, from India to the United States, and beyond.

I enjoyed it, but I think I would have like it more if the "meta-mind" idea had actually mattered: we only see Arun do this once, and exactly what it means in practical terms is nebulous, and its role in the story could have been filled by more typical science fiction-style telepathy. The meta-mind seems like a great idea, so I was disappointed that Singh didn't really explore it. Still, a distinctive story by a unique voice, which is what Aqueduct Press's "Conversation Series" volumes exist to promote.

Oh wow. I really loved this collection of tall tales. Much too quick of a read. And learning a bit about northern India was a treat. I'm putting the sequel on my priority wishlist.

Re-read for the Children's Books Sept 2012 and still loving it. Love the baby, determined to eat up an entire shirt of Younguncle's. Love the chance to learn about the traditional culture (packed buses, heavy parental involvement in marriages, ghosts) and some more modern issues (nature reserves, attempts to clean up corruption). Really wish the sequel would be released in the US.

Oh just as fun as I wanted it to be. Maybe not quite as resonantly enchanting as the first, but such a delight. I really loved that it showed how universal human nature is, even in what is, to me, an exotic culture in a far-distant part of the world. I especially loved the bit about how young women of India are still being encouraged to marry according to their parents' arrangements, but can fight back against the system.

But that was just a bit, really - there's a lot in here. Excitement, humor, mystery, family dynamics, politics, animal rights, villagers vs developers, etc. etc. And yet it's only a slim children's book, easy to just read on the train up to the hotel in the mountains...

Younguncle is India's "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle." Younguncle has come to town to visit his brother, sister-in-law and their kids. He is a well-traveled free spirit with few responsibilities but many interesting stories. He is able to cleverly solve problems in the village such as recovering a stolen cow and saving his sister from an arranged marriage she doesn't want. Charming and perfect for a readaloud.

Seeing that I was presenting on short Indian science fiction at the Science Fiction Research Association, it seemed I ought to read the short Indian science fiction written by the conference's guest of honor. I was glad I did-- Vandana Singh is a very different writer to Manjula Padmanabhan (one might glibly say that Padamanabhan's work is all about getting out of India, while Singh's is about getting back), but also a very good one. This volume collects all Singh's published short sf as of 2008, most of which I would classify as falling on the literary end of things, some even being more stories about science fiction than actual science fiction. Anyway, it's thoughtful, inventive stuff: the title story, for example, sees a man's wife transform into a planet, to the extent that her residents colonize him!

I particularly liked "Infinities," about an obsessed mathematician; "Hunger," about a dinner party gone bad through the small cruelties all of us commit every day in our need to get by; and "Three Tales from Sky River," an inventive set of folklore from another planet in another time. My favorite story in the book, though, was "The Tetrahedron," where a giant tetrahedron just appears in a city street one day, and its protagonist must try to figure out what it's doing and why it captivates her so much. No one else understands her interest, and I felt this sentence not only summed up the story, but also the book as a whole, and was just a lesson worth remembering: "outer space, inner space, both had unknown topologies. You couldn't overlook one at the expense of the other."

This is a story about a mathematician in India who wants to see infinity. He is also a Moslem, with Hindu friends, who lives in an area of repeated ethnic/religious conflict. The story takes two paths. One is a real sensawonda glimpse at parallel universes, which didn't grab me, but I'm sure would thrill many sf fans. The second is a gripping tale of the ethnic violence going on around him, which I found quite compelling.

Strange, but movinng, tale of a small group of scientists trying to change reality to avoid global disaster. The viewpoint character is an ordinary woman who sees the past....

From the shirt-eating baby to the paneer-eating tiger - not to mention the eponymous hero - the characters in Vandana Singh's debut children's book are endearingly idiosyncratic, humorously entertaining, and altogether charming. This all-too-brief chapter-book chronicles some of the adventures of Younguncle - a sweet-tempered, open-minded young man, with a horror of being tied down, either to career or wife - who comes to live with his elder brother's family, and quickly becomes the favorite companion of his nephew and two nieces. Whether he's rescuing the local dairyman's cow or recovering his great-uncle's stolen horse, Younguncle always seems to know just what to do, resolving crisis after crisis in clever and amusing ways. He even finds a way to extricate his little sister from her engagement to an unexpectedly boorish young man! As Sarita, Ravi and the baby discover, once Youngucle comes to town, nothing is ever the same again...

Chosen as our September selection in The International Children's Book Club to which I belong, where we try to read a children's book from a different country each month, Younguncle Comes to Town was originally published in India, by New Delhi-based Zubaan Books. How fortunate that Viking picked it up for publication in the states, as now American children will also have the opportunity to read it! Not only is it a lighthearted introduction to life in northern India - the monsoon rains, the periodic invasion of the local monkey population, the crowded bus-rides - it is just a fun-filled, warmhearted, entertaining romp of a book, in its own right. I found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion while reading it. Younguncle's admonition to his sister that they are not living in a silly Bollywood film, his reflection that a particularly ostentatious pink mansion must be the product of a "disturbed mind," his sister-in-law's habit of Speaking in Capitals - they all had me chuckling! The depiction of the baby's ongoing crusade to find a shirt of Younguncle's to eat was the best of all, though, and had me in stitches:

"Although the heat had adversely affected the enterprise and energy levels of the two older children, the baby was just as usual. She spent her spare time crawling about the house, pulling herself up along a sofa or chair, waiting for Younguncle to relax his guard. The baby's chief ambition in life was to find and consume an entire shirt of Younguncle's, and Younguncle knew this. Although they loved each other very much, Younguncle and the baby had completely different ideas on the meaning and purpose of shirts.And one day the baby got her chance."

Hilarious! I closed this book with a strong desire to read the sequel, Younguncle In The Himalayas. Here's hoping Viking published that as well! If not, it will have to be yet another book order from abroad...

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy most of the book. What I did like was the world-building, which was inventive though not particularly well fleshed-out. The key problem was that it seemed so very disconnected at an individual level. It’s not that the characters were wrong. It’s that I didn’t get any motivation or backstory for the characters. Got plenty for the cultures and the world, but not for the individuals. Distances might have succeeded better for me had it been novel length, with more space to get me invested.

Full review: http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/distances-vandana-singh

The stories in this collection range widely in genre, from "Conservation Laws", a story-within-a-story about a mission on Mars that took a strange turn, to the not-quite-everyday "Hunger" and "The Wife", to the wonderful "Three Tales from Sky River", a collection of far-future folklore of settlements on other worlds, and "Infinities", a story of advanced mathematics and real-world religious tensions.

"Delhi", one of my favourites is about a man who glimpses the past and future of Delhi, who sees a woman he's been given a picture of from a strange organisation that stops suicides by offering them an unusual reason to live in these pictures of individuals they must try to meet. He tries to find out whether he can interfere in the events and lives he glimpses - especially the mysterious woman's. Not all of it is resolved by the end. If only Singh would write a novel that starts with "Delhi" and keeps going!

The language is often beautiful, sometimes strange. I wish I had my copy with me so I could quote extensively; the only line I copied was: The apartment, with its plump sofas like sleeping walruses... (The second sentence of "Hunger".) Singh evokes her settings, usually India, such that they feel real, with all the attendant complexity, beauty and harshness, and so on.

Singh clearly loves India, loves writing about it and its people, while engaging critically with its expectations of women. In "The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet", Kamala's husband, Ramnath, is concerned with the way her planetary state makes her act in public, almost more than he's concerned about her mental health. Towards the end, when events have turned quite fantastical, a judge taps Ramnath on the shoulder and tells him how reprehensible this is. It's probably more surreal than what Kamala is doing. In "The Tetrahedron", Maya develops a relationship with an interesting young man, based on discussion of the tetrahedron, and realises that she really doesn't want to follow the path already laid out for her: newly acquired fiance who doesn't especially like or understand her. In the appropriately titled "Thirst", Susheela is drawn to the water, away from her married life. The mysterious woman Urmila in "The Room on the Roof" is bitter that her friend Renuka, formerly a skilled sculptress, is now content to only inspire her husband; events later take a sinister turn. And so on.

Ian McDonald may fill his books with "exotic" detail, but Vandana Singh's India is the one I want to read about. Her work is intelligent, interesting and, above all, real - even when it's about a woman-naga or a mysteriously appearing alien shape.

This is one of the best books I've read recently. Highly recommended.½

This collection offers ten stories, each with its own finely grained world. When in the last story, "The Room on the Roof," I came across pov character Urmilla's conclusion "that the world she lived in was not a separate, self-contained thing, but actually an intersection of many worlds. There was the world of the beetle, the world of her mother pounding spices in the kitchen downstairs, the chess world, where her brother battled the evil enemy king, and who knows how many hidden worlds outside her awareness"(181), I found myself thinking that her observation distills a sort of subtext of the collection as a whole. Of course more world than one is evoked in each story, but one of the things Singh does well is give us a sensual taste of the particularities of the daily in her characters' lives.

I'd read several of the stories before and found them well worth a second read. I do have favorite stories in the book, though: the inexplicably powerful "Hunger," the poignant "The Room on the Roof," and "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet." The latter is a classic feminist sf story that imparted a sense of wonder even as it made me giggle with its sly, not-to-be-denied humor. The story is told from the point of view of the middle-aged Ramnath Mishra, who grows increasingly frantic to restrain Kamala, his wife, who is in the process of becoming a planet, from disrobing in public (and private). Here's a sample:

He caught her just as she was about to run out into the driveway in nothing but a petticoat and blouse, in full view of street vendors, cricket-playing children and respectable elderly gentlemen. He wrestled her into the bedroom and tried to slap some sense into her, but she continued to struggle and weep. At last, frustrated, he pulled half a dozen saris out from the big steel cupboard and flung them on the bed.

"Kamala," he said desperately, "even planets have atmospheres. See here, this gray sari, it looks like a swirl of clouds. How about it?" She calmed down at once. She began to put on the gray sari although the fabric, georgette, was unsuitable for summer.

"At last you believe me, Ramnath," she said. Her voice seemed to have changed. It was deeper, more powerful. He looked at her, aghast. She had addressed him by his name! That was all very well for the new generation of young adults, but respectable, traditional women never addressed their husbands by their names. He decided not to do anything about it for now. At least she was clothed. (45)

An alien with the ability to manipulate human minds comes to terms with his existence on Earth. Main character is interesting in all the internal conflicts he has to deal with.

When their eccentric uncle come to visit Sarita and Ravi in their small village in India, the long, hot days are enlivened with many adventures. This book has wonderful stories full of humor and with the flavor of Indian culture. It can easily be enjoyed in brief sittings, since the book is broken into distinct stories or episodes during the uncle's visit. Suggested by Helen.½

In a small town in northern India, three siblings await their father's youngest brother, Younguncle, who is said to be somewhat eccentric. Hilarious stories.

(rec from Rachel)