![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorotheanI was almost afraid to read this book because I didn't see how it anything could possibly live up to the ideas that "the woman who thought she was a planet" conjured up in my mind. But it did, oh it did!
The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet has ten stories and a short essay, "A Speculative Manifesto." Some read more like science fiction (space travel -- other dimensions) and others more like fantasy (a woman discovers she's a Naga) and some, like "Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age," overlap.
For years I have adored, in theory, the concept of speculative fiction that speculates about mathematics as well as science. This was attempted in the 1950s and 60s by editor Clifton Fadiman, whose collections Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie are unfortunately riddled with sexim and white supremacy. If I were an editor, I'd try to do a new version of those books with only a small minority of the authors being white men. I know now that Vandana Singh would be the first author I'd beg to allow one or more of her stories in that anthology. My first choice would be the emotionally fluent "Infinities," which intersperses quotations from Indian mathematicians and poets with the story of Abdul Karim, who wants to spend his life in understanding the ideas of Cantor and Godel, but who, like Archimedes, can't hold himself aloof of the sorrows of the world. "The Tetrahedron" is an absolutely classic story along the same lines as many in Fadiman's anthologies, asking the reader to think about Moebius strips and the fourth dimension in order to follow the plot, which in this case has to do with an object of bizarre properties that is blocking traffic in New Delhi.
To take the rest of the stories in order: ( Read more... )
This is the sort of story collection in which no matter what order you read them in, each story is even better than the one before. I can't recommend it enough.
The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet has ten stories and a short essay, "A Speculative Manifesto." Some read more like science fiction (space travel -- other dimensions) and others more like fantasy (a woman discovers she's a Naga) and some, like "Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age," overlap.
For years I have adored, in theory, the concept of speculative fiction that speculates about mathematics as well as science. This was attempted in the 1950s and 60s by editor Clifton Fadiman, whose collections Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie are unfortunately riddled with sexim and white supremacy. If I were an editor, I'd try to do a new version of those books with only a small minority of the authors being white men. I know now that Vandana Singh would be the first author I'd beg to allow one or more of her stories in that anthology. My first choice would be the emotionally fluent "Infinities," which intersperses quotations from Indian mathematicians and poets with the story of Abdul Karim, who wants to spend his life in understanding the ideas of Cantor and Godel, but who, like Archimedes, can't hold himself aloof of the sorrows of the world. "The Tetrahedron" is an absolutely classic story along the same lines as many in Fadiman's anthologies, asking the reader to think about Moebius strips and the fourth dimension in order to follow the plot, which in this case has to do with an object of bizarre properties that is blocking traffic in New Delhi.
To take the rest of the stories in order: ( Read more... )
This is the sort of story collection in which no matter what order you read them in, each story is even better than the one before. I can't recommend it enough.
