Manjula Padmanabhan is a well-known figure in the field of Indian science fiction. Besides novels and stories, she has also written many plays, books for young readers, and created a long-running comic strip, Suki. Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities, published by Hachette India in 2023, is a collection featuring twenty-six of her stories, all published between 1984 and 2021. It also includes four stories that find space in this collection for the first time.
Reading the stories of Stolen Hours means stepping into a world populated by humans but shared with vampires, Yetis, genetically enhanced clones, robots, AI, aliens, and living holograms.
Patterns are a part of life, and the human mind is excellent at seeking them out. In fact, humans are so good at imposing order on seeming chaos that we invent it where sense cannot be found. Why? Because patterns are comforting. Patterns make it seem like there is a purpose to everything, a purpose to our suffering. For some reason, it’s easier to bear a burden if we know there’s a reason for it.
But patterns can also become cages of comfort. We know how to exist within a pattern, even if that pattern is one of grief. In Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible, Grace Winters, a retired math teacher, lives in a pattern dominated by the grief of losing her son, and her days are spent in the shadows of past mistakes.
There is much in Lost Ark Dreaming which is the kind of generic dystopian SF we have read before. What makes Okungbowa’s version of this interesting is the way the story is told.
