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There has been a rising interest in Indian Science Fiction in recent years, with a number of critical studies and articles being published. Suparno Banerjee’s book, Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity, marks a key milestone in this trend.
An attempt to critically analyse the history and structure of Indian Science Fiction is not an easy endeavour, with a number of challenges that need to addressed even before proceeding.
The first challenge, of course, is to define Science Fiction. A controversial topic that never fails to ignite debate, SF as a genre has been defined in myriad ways, with Wikipedia alone providing nearly 40 definitions under the entry, “Definitions of Science Fiction”, ranging from Hugo Gernsback’s, simplistic “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” to Tom Shippey’s candid “Science fiction is hard to define”.
Add to this numerous scholarly articles, dissertations as well as other genres of non-mimetic literature whose defining boundaries can and often do overlap with Science Fiction, and the task of defining SF indeed looks daunting.
The task of putting borders around what Indian Science Fiction is adds another dimension to this challenge. For while historically some of the works in this genre may have been written by authors who lived in parts of…