Indian Science Fiction May Become A Major Force In World Literature: Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick is one of the most popular authors around. This interview of Swanwick was conducted quite a while back. The primary goal of this interview was to understand the focus of Science Fiction stories.

Swapnil: Should contemporary issues be included in SF stories or SF should leave that for mainstream stories?
Swanwick: When I was a new writer, in the early 1980s, whenever I was with friends in a major city on a cloudy night, I’d ask them to tell me, without looking, what color the sky was. Black, they’d guess, or purple. Then, when they looked up, they’d see that the sky was actually a ruddy orange from the reflected mercury vapor and sodium streetlights. This was a detail that SF writers like myself or William Gibson or Lucius Shepard used all the time. But I never saw it in a mainstream story until about five years ago.
 
Mainstream does a terrible job dealing with contemporary issues. That’s because we’re already much further into the future than most people realize. Science fiction, on the other hand, has been dealing with environmental degradation, identity theft, ubiquitous surveillance, and a hundred other contemporary issues for decades – since long before anybody else recognized that they were already problems.
 
Swapnil: What role mythology plays in SF stories -- should we try to re-write bible in the light of science?
Swanwick: There is a playfulness to even the most serious SF stories. They’re a kind of mental game in which the readers are permitted to think things and consider ideas which they would not ordinarily entertain. Because “it’s only science fiction.” Myths explain the world, and so do the stories we write, but our explanations are only provisional. Rather than dictate what to think, we present new possibilities so that the readers can better think for themselves.
 
I have no ambitions to re-write the Bible. If I did, I wouldn’t be writing fiction.
 
Swapnil: What is your opinion about Indian science fiction scenario?
Swanwick: I haven’t seen any science fiction written in India. My copy of the Clute-Nichols Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (which, admittedly, was published in 1993) doesn’t even have an entry for India. So it’s not just me – Indian SF simply isn’t reaching the United States.
 
Which is a pity because, based on novels and stories set there by Western writers who have actually visited it, India seems a natural setting for science fiction. It has such a great diversity of people and setting, poverty and wealth, high tech and low, complex politics and even more complex spirituality, that almost anything seems possible there. And possibility is the very soul of science fiction.
 
Swapnil: Should SF be based on future society or can it be weaved in present day scenario as well?
Swanwick: Both, plus the past and alternate histories and impossible worlds as well.

It helps to think of science fiction as not an ideology but a set of tools which allow SF writers to achieve extraordinary things. I once wrote a story in which memory had been reversed. Time still moved forward, as it does now, but people could remember the future but not the past. So you would know everything that was going to happen to you until the instant you died. But you would have no idea whether the person you woke up beside was your wife or somebody you picked up in a bar the night before.

 
In a mainstream story, the only possible response to such a situation would be to assume the protagonist was mad. Which would not be very interesting to read or to think about. But since it was science fiction, I was able to address questions of determinism and free will and whether it’s possible to be free in an unfree world. These are important questions to examine, and SF gives us that opportunity.
 
These possibilities impose upon us an obligation, however, to write about important issues, not trivialities. When God gives you a set of burglar tools, you’re not supposed to use them to tinker with your laptop. You’re supposed to go out and ransack the secrets of the human soul.
 
Swapnil: Anything else you would like to add?
Swanwick: As the world gets more and more interconnected and information becomes an increasingly larger part of its economy, governments are going to become less and less important. A country’s wealth and prestige will depend largely on the richness of its culture. India’s culture is one of the richest in the world, and with this enormous advantage, there’s a genuine possibility of Indian science fiction becoming a major force in world literature. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.