Sami Ahmad Khan’s Aliens in Delhi is everything a sci-fi buff would want. There is a secret, all-powerful conglomerate, reptilian aliens, a mutation that spreads through the smartphone (har! har!) a mysterious stranger and a beautiful woman.
Talking about the genesis of the book, the 32-year-old academic says, “A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, I was driving around Raisina Hill on a rather balmy evening. As the sun set, traffic police personnel, yellow DP barricades, and security forces lined the streets, in order to facilitate the top brass returning home. A web of questions sprang to my mind. Why is the security beefed up like this? I got my answer in one word: terrorism. Impulsively, I tried to imagine threats worse than the usual terrestrial ‘others’. Why don’t, I asked myself, aliens visit India? Why do they always go to the US or Europe? A post-colonial angst raged within me. We are a thriving democracy, a rising superpower, and a country of more than a billion people. Are we not good enough to deserve being invaded by aliens? How would the Indian state apparatus respond to such a horrifying eventuality? I wanted to answer these questions in my head using a genre-fusing narrative, and Aliens in Delhi emerged out of such a speculative exercise.”
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Recalibration for readers and writers
Khan has done his PhD on how Indian SF writers, using their narratives, reinterpreted, reworked and addressed maladies prevalent in today’s India. About his fascination for the genre, Khan says, “ Je ne sais quoi . Perhaps, because SF is a genre that ideates, interrogates and speculates about the problematic interfaces between technology, humanity and social realities. This becomes all the more pivotal in our times, where a cell phone not only makes phone calls, but can as easily incite a riot. SF emerges as a software that recalibrates the readers’ mind to counter fundamentalism, extremism and parochialism by portraying plurality and by showcasing dystopian futures.
The Delhi-based author says that as a child he used to stare at the night sky for hours. “I used to squint at the stars in the hope of finding any movement. My earliest SF memory is from Class III, I think. I read about a space battle in a Hindi comic book, and it changed the way I saw the world around me. I somehow got hold of a Star Trek novel in Class IX, and I realised that despite being only average in Math, Chemistry and Physics, I could (at least) speculate about wormholes, multiple universes, AI, FTL drives and time travel etc. What science, with all its emphasis on proofs, didn’t allow me to do, SF did. It was truly liberating.
While the author argues against SF being escapist, insisting the genre is social commentary, he has described Aliens in Delhi as an anti-highbrow SF novel. “I felt a desire to write a politically incorrect, pulp, theoretically-catatonic, narrative about bug-eyed-monsters-from-outer-space, which had no social or literary aim except one: the invasion has begun!”
As a genre, SF movies (good ones) are characterised by stunning visuals. Khan, however, does not feel they overwhelm the books. “I don’t see a binary between movies and writing here. On the contrary, they have been pretty complementary to each other, and it is through SF films that many SF texts have gained a wider recognition and reach, and vice-versa.”
A commentary on the world
A fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who , and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Khan says he loves how SF, “while being full of space battles and laser guns and experiments gone wrong, somehow also ends up commenting on the world we live in, thereby indirectly telling us to take better care of the world around us.”
Some of the characters from Khan’s award-winning debut novel, Red Jihad , are seen in Aliens In Delhi , including the Indian Prime Minister Bipolab Roy, Yasser Basheer, the American president and the Maoist leader Agyaat. Khan chooses Basheer as his favourite character. “He has been something of a dark horse since Red Jihad . The moment one feels he/she has figured him out, he mutates. Sometimes, quite literally!
The research, Khan said, “Involved talking to people from different backgrounds, reading a lot, and sifting the Internet for facts and figures relevant to the plot. Arranging this information as a cogent, plausible whole, and interlacing it with the fabric of the narrative, without the overall pace becoming sluggish, was a challenge.”
Leaving an opening for a sequel which would have more on Imran and Sonya, Khan says it was a bit difficult to get it published. “Many see SF as a genre imported from the west. Indian SF has had its own history and tradition, and isn’t ‘new’ here. It is a significant part of contemporary popular imagination. Publishers are often a bit reluctant about SF, since they feel it will not ‘sell’. However, good stories always have a market (irrespective of their genre).”
