The Hindu : The enchanting world of science fiction

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 03, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Karnataka-Bangalore

The enchanting world of science fiction

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE April 2. Quality science fiction, as a genre of writing is little known in India, though it is immensely popular in the U.S., the U.K., and France.

A talk on "The enchanting worlds of modern science fiction" here on Tuesday by C.G. Ramachandran Nair, former Chairman, Science, Technology, and Environment Committee, Government of Kerala, organised by the students' organisation, Prasthuta, of the Indian Institute of Science, brought out several facets of science fiction, including its prophetic nature and power to break mindsets.

Consider Noise Level by Raymond Jones: The top civil servant of a country brings together the best scientific and engineering minds in the State and shows them a video clip. A young man is seen controlling a little object that seems to be hovering above the ground, lifting some object placed on it. The civil servant tells the scientists that the young man was a maverick inventor, and that before he tragically died in a car accident, he had invented an anti-gravity machine. Now, would the scientists, please come up with a way of reinventing the machine, which was destroyed in the accident? Presented with the fait accompli of such a machine having been built once, the scientists overcome their scepticism about the project, and manage to build one. But this machine is as tall as a big building, and can only lift a small weight, a far cry from the elegance of the compact anti-gravity machine in the video clip. Then comes another scientist, a well-known psychologist, accompanied by the young man in the clip who was thought to be dead. The young man apologises to the confused and angry scientists, and explains that he was only an actor, and that he played the role of the maverick inventor on directions from the psychologist.

The psychologist comes forward and explains that he perceived a mental block among the assembled scientists that the machine could not be built, and that presenting it as an accomplished fact was the only way he could think of to break that mindset. The story ends with the civil servant musing about which was greater: the invention of anti-gravity machine that the scientists finally achieved or the discovery by the psychologist that men could be made to achieve what was thought impossible by presenting it to them as a fait accompli.

Dr. Nair, who incidentally is the elder brother of HAL's former Chairman, C.G. Krishnadasan Nair, divided his talk loosely into science fiction as predicting future science facts (Jules Verne's submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated 1946 paper on future communications based on satellites), psychological science fiction as in Noise Level, humour in science fiction, feminism (Consider Her Ways, John Wyndham's world devoid of anything male), and stories that contemplate the future of the human race on a philosophical level as in Clarke's Childhood's End.

There were of course several references to stories by Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific writers of both science fiction and non-fiction the last century has seen.

The talk was received enthusiastically by the audience.

A few students from the IISc. were also interested in starting here a chapter of the Indian Science Fiction Association, which Dr. Nair started three years ago in Thiruvananthapuram.

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