Vandana Singh

Vandana Singh

 

Vandana Singh is an Indian writer of speculative fiction, which includes science fiction and fantasy. She is very much attached to the science fiction genre. The following sentences will prove her love for this genre. She says:

I love this genre (science fiction) for its imaginative richness, its vast canvas, and the sophistication with which its best practitioners wield their pens. Science fiction and fantasy have come a long way from the lurid caricatures of ray-guns and little green men (which, by the way, I still insist on enjoying, for the most part); in fact no other genre asks deeper questions about the human condition or sets up literary thought experiments about our interaction with the physical world, including other worlds and new technologies.

She was born in New Delhi and settled in the United States. Her higher education was in the field of Physics. The following are some of her works.

The Wife

Three Tales from Sky River: Myths for a Starfaring Age

Delhi

Life-pod

Oblivion: A Journey

Young uncle comes to town

The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet

Manjula Padmanabhan

Manjula Padmanabhan

     Manjula Padmanabhan is a playwright, novelist, artist, illustrator and cartoonist. She is the author of the award winning play Harvest, which was awarded the Greek Onassis Award. She has written one more powerful play, Lights Out! (1984). Hidden Fires is a series of monologues. The Artist's Model (1995) and Sextet are her other works. She has authored a collection of short stories, called Kleptomania.

HARVEST

      Manjula Padmanabhan in Harvest presents   a war between machine and man. The play shows the futuristic picture of the modern times where the machines will be replacing and distancing human beings gradually. The play warns through the character of Jaya how one has to govern the machines instead of being governed. It is a futuristic play about the sale of body parts and exploitative relations between developed and developing countries. 

Samit Basu

Samit Basu

Samit Basu is an Indian novelist and screenwriter. The Simoqin Prophecies, published in 2003, was the first book in the bestselling Gameworld Trilogy and marked the beginning of Indian English fantasy writing. The other books in the trilogy are The Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelations.

Samit was born in Calcutta and he obtained a degree in Economics. The Simoqin Prophecies, Basu's first novel, was written when he was 22 and published when he was 23. The GameWorld trilogy has been widely well reviewed and all three books have reached Indian best-seller lists. In 2010, Basu wrote a YA novel called Terror on the Titanic. His next famous work Turbulence introduced him to the West. It also won a Wired Geekdad Goldenbot Award and appeared at no.2 on the list of hot new Amazon Science Fiction titles on the week of its release. Basu is also known as a columnist, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist writing on travel, film, books and pop culture.

Basu’s work in comics ranges from historical romance to zombie comedy, and includes diverse collaborators, from X-Men/Felix Castor writer Mike Carey to Terry Gilliam and Duran Duran. His latest GN, Local Monsters, was published in 2013.

Gokulananda Mohapatra

Gokulananda Mohapatra (24 May 1922 – 10 July 2013)

    Gokulananda Mohapatra is a popular Scientist and science fiction writer of India. Mahapatra was born in Odisha. He was honored with PhD from the Utkal University. He has written more than 70 science fictions and books for children such as Krutrima Upagraha, Pritibibahare Manisha and Chandrara  Mrityu. He was honoured with Odisha Sahitya Akademi award in 1986 and Kalinga Puraskar in 2010. The following are some of his science fiction works:

       Pruthibi bahare manisa

       Krutrima Upagraha

       Candrara Mrutyu

       Nishabda Godhuli

       Sunara Odisha

       Mrutyu eka matrutwa ra

       Nishchala pruthibi

       Mrutyu rashmi

Three types of Science Fiction: Raymond Williams

Three types of Science Fiction: Raymond Williams

There are three types of SF according to Raymond Williams. They are, Putropia, Doomsday, and Space Anthropology.

By Putropia he meant the characteristic 20th-century corruption of the Utopian romances. They describe stories of a secular paradise of the future.  Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Orwell's 1984 are the most famous examples.

Putropia, however, stops a little short of Doomsday. Doomsday is the immensely popular genre which, with considerable ingenuity and variety, disposes of life altogether. There are catastrophes which stop just short of this, and move into putropia.  Mr John Wyndham's Day of the Triffid’s is an example. Here, the great majority of human beings are struck suddenly blind, and the Triffids-locomotive stinging plants, sources of vegetable oil, developed by Russian scientists-take over. The sighted minority has to decide whether to try to save the blind masses, who, characteristically, have taken to drink and so on, or to abandon them, to regroup the few who can see, and start making a better society.

Putropia perhaps, is to be rationalized as a warning against combined science and war while the Doomsday is the familiar nightmare of mechanism; nobody does anything wrong, but we are finished all the same.

ebinkvk@gmail.com

Top Ten Fantasy Movies

        Top Ten Fantasy Movies 

        

          1.   Life of Pi (2012)

       Life of Pi, based on the novelby Yann Martel, tells the fantastical story of Pi Patel, a sixteen-year-old South Indian boy who survives at sea with a tiger, named Richard Parker, for 227 days. While cast away, he forms an amazing and unexpected connection with the fearsome Bengal tiger. It’s the story of their relationship and survivel.

Directed By:  Ang Lee

 Cast: Suraj Sharma, Irfan Khan, Tabu

2.   The Hobbit- An Unexpected Journey (2012) & The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

The Hobbit  is an epic fantasy adventure film based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. It tells the tale of Bilbo and his journey to the Lonely Mountain with Thirteen Dwarves and a wizard named Gandalf the Grey, to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug.

Directed by Peter Jackson.

Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage

          

           3.   The Lord of the Rings Series

       The Lord of the Rings is a film series consisting of three epic fantasy adventure films adapted and directed by Peter Jackson and based on English author J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Set in the fictional world of  middle earth, the three films follow the Frodo as he and a fellowship embark on a quest to destroy a ring, and thus ensure the destruction of its maker, the Dark Lord.

Director: Peter Jackson

 Cast: More Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen

         

          4.   Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

         At the end of the Spanish civil war, a young girl meets the god Pan, who gives her three challenges. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the the true princess and will never see her real father, the king, again.

Director:Guillermo del Toro

 Cast: Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez

5.   Pirates of the Caribbean series

           Pirates of the Caribbean is a series of fantasy films stories following the adventures of Jack SparrowThe films take place in a fictional historical setting; a world ruled largely by an amalgam of alternative, evil versions of theBritish Empire and the East India Company, with the pirates representing freedom from the ruling powers

Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom

6.   Harry Potter series

      The young Wizard Harry Potter’s quest to overcome the Dark wizard whose aims are to become immortal, conquer the wizard world, subjugate non-magical people, and destroy all those who stand in his way.

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe

7.   King Kong (2005)

       The film tells the story of an overly ambitious filmmaker who coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter, King Kong a legendary giant gorilla. Captured, he is displayed in New York City, with tragic results

Directed by Peter Jackson

Cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black

8.   X-Men series

        The X-Men series tells the story of a team of mutant superheroes and their adventures.

Cast: Hugh Jackman, PatricK Stewart, Ian McKellen

9.   The Avengers (2012)

       Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. assembles a team of superhumans to save the planet from Loki and his army.

Director:Joss Whendon

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans

10. Wrath of the Titans (2010)

       Perseus, a son of Zeus, lives as a fisherman after the death of his wife with his young son, Helius. He is called again, this time to rescue his father Zeus, overthrow the Titans and save mankind.

Directed: Jonathan Leibesman

Cast: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. He often presented dystopias that are dominated by political and business hegemonic organizations. Philip K. Dick considered himself a “fictionalizing philosopher.”

Biography

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. In June 1938, Dorothy and Philip returned to California, and it was around this time that he became interested in science fiction. Dick attended high school Berkeley. He and fellow science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin were members of the same graduating class (1947) but were unknown to each other at the time. From 1949 to 1950, Philip K. Dick was a student at the University of California—Berkeley. Philip K. Dick studied history, military science, philosophy and zoology. From 1948 to 1952, Dick worked at Art Music Company, a record store on Telegraph Avenue. He was married five times. In 1947 he had a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. He was not a financially successful writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously.

Works

In 1951, Philip K. Dick sold his first piece of short fiction. Four years later he sold his first novel. In the 1950s, Dick tried to write mainstream fiction. In 1963, he was awarded the Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle. His novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Time magazine declared that Dick’s Ubik was one of the greatest novels written in English since 1923.   In 1968, Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This novel would become one of Dick’s most renowned works. In 1982, the film Blade Runner was made based on this works. . For several months, Philip K. Dick had visions. These intensifying visions fueled the VALIS triology: Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The  Policeman Said".  In A Scanner Darkly published in 1977 , there is  an underlying thread of paranoia and dissociation with multiple realities perceived simultaneously Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. He spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. . The last novel Dick wrote was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It was published shortly after his death in 1982.

In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner Total Recall A Scanner Darkly Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers ...