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The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2009)

von Vandana Singh

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1045259,958 (3.88)3
Well known and well regarded in the world of science fiction and fantasy writing, Vandana Singh brings her unique imagination to a wider audience in this collection of stories, newly reissued by Zubaan Books. In the title story, a woman tells her husband of her curious discovery: that she is inhabited by small alien creatures. In another, a young girl making her way to college through the streets of Delhi comes across a mysterious tetrahedron. Is it a spaceship? Or a secret weapon? The first Indian female speculative fiction writer, Singh has said that her genre is a "chance to find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning in the greater universe." A revolutionary voice in fantasy writing, Singh brings her passion for discovery to these stories, and the result is like nothing of this world.… (mehr)
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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.
  Black_samvara | Aug 9, 2023 |
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. ( )
  pwaites | Nov 14, 2017 |
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."
  Stevil2001 | Aug 28, 2015 |
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. ( )
2 abstimmen alexdallymacfarlane | Aug 30, 2010 |
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) ( )
1 abstimmen ltimmel | Sep 7, 2009 |
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Well known and well regarded in the world of science fiction and fantasy writing, Vandana Singh brings her unique imagination to a wider audience in this collection of stories, newly reissued by Zubaan Books. In the title story, a woman tells her husband of her curious discovery: that she is inhabited by small alien creatures. In another, a young girl making her way to college through the streets of Delhi comes across a mysterious tetrahedron. Is it a spaceship? Or a secret weapon? The first Indian female speculative fiction writer, Singh has said that her genre is a "chance to find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning in the greater universe." A revolutionary voice in fantasy writing, Singh brings her passion for discovery to these stories, and the result is like nothing of this world.

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