Blurring the boundaries

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories

I was originally planning to title this review "Loss as a catalyst." That was when I had read only half the stories in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh. That is indeed a major theme of many of the stories in this volume: Loss catalyzing growth, or withdrawal, or mayhem, or even dissolution.

The stories range the limits of the SF genres, from rather hard science fiction to speculative fiction (hardly "sciency" at all) to outright fantasy. Gradually I realized that most of the stories involve blurring or shifting boundaries, even shape-changing.

As I sometimes emphasize, I read fiction in search of ideas. Ms Singh, being Indian (and probably Sikh) has a viewpoint that is quite Other to a Westerner, and thus her writing has new ideas aplenty. Amidst this flurry a few stand out:

• "Sailing the Antarsa", I gradually realized, rethinks "dark matter" as something that one day might be manipulated or somehow taken advantage of. In this story flowing streams of "Antarsa" (I suspect it means something in Hindi or a related language) can be sailed using "altmatter", which is opaque to the flow. Along the way, a series of interlocking nature-intensive cultures form the framework of the piece. I say "nature-intensive" in that they are less divorced from nature than European cultures, and probably more so than most Asian cultures as well.
• "Are you Sannata3159?" loosely follows "Soylent Green", in a highly exaggerated caste-based culture. It is also an anti-corporate diatribe, as is the next.
• "Requiem", which I had read before in another anthology, is near-future hard sci-fi: the Arctic in about 2100 (or perhaps much closer to 2025!), with global warming at the point of destroying Inupiat culture on Alaska's North Slope and a protagonist gathering a late relative's belongings. Themes of communication among species recur in the book, and form a strong thread in this story.

The title story, "Ambiguity Machines, An Examination", presents three interlocking stories about "impossible machines"—impossible because they blur boundaries of space and time—with instructions for a student to self-modify so as to prepare a comprehensive report. Reference materials are to include Yantric Oracle; yantric turns out to be Sanskrit for "Machine". Yantric Oracle is apparently a universal machine compendium, reminiscent of the library in "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Such a book is the wondrous fruit of a life of boundary crossing, but there is more going on here than just someone from India who has lived half a life in America. It takes a special kind of mind to transform this into stories of this quality, stories that challenge our understanding of permanence and consistency.