bibliogramma (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bibliogramma) wrote2019-05-31 07:00 am
bibliogramma) wrote2019-05-31 07:00 am
Entry tags:
unfinished: Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines
Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.
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Ambiguity Machines is the extremely apt title of a collection of shorter fiction by physicist and science fiction writer Vandana Singh. Singh’s writing is rarely linear, with a single interpretation; her work asks the reader to consider the complexities and multiplicities in life and art, to welcome the ambiguities.
Most if the stories collected here are reprints, but I certainly had not read all of them before, so there was much that was fresh and exciting to me.
The last piece in the collection, and the only new piece, is the novelette Requiem. Varsha, originally from New Delhi, now a grad student in Boston, has come to Alaska, to a scientific installation near Utqiagvik, an Inupiaq village, to collect the personal belongings of her deceased aunt Rima. This is a post climate change Alaska, where the weather is cold but uncertain, and automated oil mining factories roam the land and the ocean floor, seeking the last scraps of fossil fuel for a world that, with the vision of space travel before it, no longer cares about the destruction of the planet. As Varsha collects her aunt’s things, she learns about the polar region and how the ‘big melt’ affected the people who lived by the sacred, vanishing bowhead whale. And how the actions of greedy corporations affected the whales and other species of the north, living in such a delicately balanced ecology.
Requiem is a story about passing through grief to truth, and about surviving, and fighting back in ways that, ultimately heal rather than harm. It’s about communication, between people, between species, between humans and the environment they live in. For those of us who worry about the coming climate shifts, it’s a story of a secret, underground hope that not all will be lost.
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Ambiguity Machines is the extremely apt title of a collection of shorter fiction by physicist and science fiction writer Vandana Singh. Singh’s writing is rarely linear, with a single interpretation; her work asks the reader to consider the complexities and multiplicities in life and art, to welcome the ambiguities.
Most if the stories collected here are reprints, but I certainly had not read all of them before, so there was much that was fresh and exciting to me.
The last piece in the collection, and the only new piece, is the novelette Requiem. Varsha, originally from New Delhi, now a grad student in Boston, has come to Alaska, to a scientific installation near Utqiagvik, an Inupiaq village, to collect the personal belongings of her deceased aunt Rima. This is a post climate change Alaska, where the weather is cold but uncertain, and automated oil mining factories roam the land and the ocean floor, seeking the last scraps of fossil fuel for a world that, with the vision of space travel before it, no longer cares about the destruction of the planet. As Varsha collects her aunt’s things, she learns about the polar region and how the ‘big melt’ affected the people who lived by the sacred, vanishing bowhead whale. And how the actions of greedy corporations affected the whales and other species of the north, living in such a delicately balanced ecology.
Requiem is a story about passing through grief to truth, and about surviving, and fighting back in ways that, ultimately heal rather than harm. It’s about communication, between people, between species, between humans and the environment they live in. For those of us who worry about the coming climate shifts, it’s a story of a secret, underground hope that not all will be lost.