Akankshya Abismruta:
Climate crisis is the talk of every town, as it should be, and it may be too late to do anything but live with its consequences. To depict it in stories, though, raises awareness. To speculate about the aftermath of such changes is to create new worlds.
Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World by Gigi Ganguly is a collection of twenty-two speculative short stories that are enriching at best, and at worst … wait, there’s absolutely nothing awful here! Ganguly is witty, empathetic, playful, and awe-inspiring. She weaves myths, legends, science, technology, aliens, mutants, and humans together with strings of tenderness and sensitivity. She challenges the self-importance of humans and their shameful self-appointment as the destroyer of the natural world, which has led, and will increasingly lead, to the catastrophic effects of climate change. In their place, she makes way for wonderful, albeit alien, worlds with uncertain and limitless possibilities.
The book is a significant marker in the Indian publishing scene. It is published by IF, a list by Westland India dedicated to speculative fiction—a first of its kind in the country. In the introductory letter accompanying the book, Karthika VK (Publisher, Westland India) states that the list is dedicated to “look beyond what is possible, predict the future, reconsider the past, step back and look at the present, and always be a terrific read.” Biopeculiar keeps all these promises.
The collection’s storytelling is deceptively simple and lucid, bordering poetry in many instances. Ganguly conquers the complexity of compassion with finesse: whimsical relationships between humans and nature amid climate crises recur throughout the book. “Head in the Clouds,” the first story in the collection, is a bittersweet tale of an old man who spends his entire life as a cloud herder. He builds an intimate relationship with his herd of clouds over the years as he trains them. The technology disrupting the natural world lingers in the periphery, but the images depicting the central relationship between the old man and the clouds are reminiscent of the soft aesthetics of a Ghibli film. “A Year (Not Quite) Alone in an Alien Wilderness,” meanwhile, is set in a future in which the character of Loursge, born an orphan in a womb-o-matic, is stranded on a moon during her mission to find the next habitable planet for the human race. This is a story of first contact with an alien world that patiently waits for its visitors, and it understands that building both trust and familiarity is a part of forging equal relationships. In particular, the vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna of this moon evoke images similar to James Cameron’s world in Avatar minus the hostility. For instance:
Deeper they take her into the forest, where she sees multi-coloured mushrooms growing on trees, dark green deer, yellow rabbits with lilac eyes, peach-and-white wolves, silver and green tigers … and insects in all sorts of fluorescent shades. … As she settles down near the water, hundreds of tiny fish gather near. She looks into their eyes and knows that she is welcome. A few birds swoop down and stand on the rocks. Two of them directly land on her shoulders. Out of the shrubs, a silver-blue pig snorts and comes running towards her. (pp. 30-31)
It is interesting to observe that the threats of technology, and perceptions of harmful behavior of humans as a collective are mentioned briefly; their reality isn’t dismissed. For instance, in “Solastagic,” Ganguly explores the nostalgia and guilt some people of the future feel when they move to a new world, leaving Earth to recover from environmental degradation before its populations can attempt to return. But she is playful with her technology, not too serious, inviting readers to have a quick laugh by surprising minds that are accustomed to tales of the devastation caused by explorations of science and exploitation of power. The focus here is on various possibilities and worlds. And when humans engage with nature or alien worlds, it’s intimate: it is an individual’s engagement that is depicted rather than the collective’s. In “Call for Kelp,” for instance, a scientist goes out to save an otter at the risk of her own life. In “Sort Sol,” a woman witnesses a miraculous communication as starlings fly away. In “Hunter,” we are shown a day in the life of the eponymous man (named so by his father) who consciously performs his every act to defy the connotations of the name. These stories urge the reader to focus on an individual who is trying to change the world, making efforts to save it. What we pay attention to, grows!
Furthermore, Ganguly retains and utilises the characteristics of the animal kingdoms found in these stories set in unfamiliar worlds. For instance, she writes a detective story, “Corvid Inspector,” set within the cosmopolitan crow family, Corvidae, that is known for its intelligence. They perform the roles of detectives, police, even scientists. The story begins with the funeral of a crow who ran a restaurant, murdered amidst the upcoming elections for the mayor. The story explores loss, grief, revenge, family, forgiveness, and mental health by introducing a wide range of characters while keeping the reader on the edges, wondering who the killer might be. This story, in particular, takes the Indian reader back to childhood, when stories of the Panchatantra were filled with anthropomorphized animals and birds. In this way, the collection urges one to look back and wonder: when did we stop believing in stories that showcased the harmony between humans and nature? Biopeculiar doesn’t carry fables that preach, like the Panchatantra’s. It merely pokes and prods a person to return to the world of innocence and imagination, to rejoice in a sense of wonder.
As already suggested, the book often takes lasting images from classics and popular culture for a spin. In “Cocoon,” a young man is bitten by a silkworm, reminding the reader of Spider-Man. In “Corvid Inspector,” a bird revives the dead, evoking images of Frankenstein (1818). In “Nemesis,” the author uses the classic image of a man waking up as a cockroach from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). Ganguly also invites dinosaurs into the future in “Solastagic” and gives the reader a hearty laugh by creating another Jurassic Park. All this familiarity helps highlight the invigoration the reader experiences as she looks at the otherwise joyously fresh possibilities deriving from what would more habitually be grim tales of devastation. These stories ask: what if our focus wasn’t on revelling in the spectacle of violence? It then goes on to create full-fledged narratives in answer.
Ursula K. Le Guin once said that “to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.” These stories spectacularly showcase everything there still is to hold on to. Most importantly, they evince empathy toward the human capability to create ethically good worlds, to create joy—a capacity we seem to have forgotten while watching the world burn. Ganguly invites the reader to explore the various alternative possibilities that might exist between humans and the natural world, shaped with empathy, trust, playfulness, and absolute joy. This allows a sense of wonder to linger in the characters and their readers: for the latter, there is a suspension of disbelief in the absence of tech-induced devastating expansion in the future.
In short stories, the space to introduce the nuances of invented worlds can be limited. But the rootedness of these stories in their realities makes their worlds believable. Gigi Ganguly intricately portrays one world after another filled with hope, through dreams and myths, pop culture and contemporary politics. Our world is burning but Ganguly tells stories that urge people to take action rather than sit and complain. This collection of speculative short stories is written for dark times, but it is inspiring. It makes a case for living lightly without being reckless. It is the mashaal in the tunnel that shows us the next step forward, even when we aren’t sure of the destination.
In one of this collection’s stories, “Eatflicks,” a character observes: “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. Something new, something wonderful will come my way.”
It certainly will. Something new; and something wonderful.
Areeb Ahmad:
It is truly a shame that I had not heard of Gigi Ganguly before: after having read Biopeculiar, I am a firm believer that she should be a household name. The portmanteau neologism of the title is the perfect choice, since the natural realm lies at the heart of these stories. Its subtitle, “Stories of an Uncertain World,” however, lends added emphasis to how Ganguly highlights the strangeness of nature, how it still remains inscrutable, and the folly of assessing it within human paradigms and values. Time and again, she pushes the envelope in subtle and witty ways, bringing new perspectives to the fore.
Ganguly is deeply aware of the threats that the earth faces, the inexorable damage of climate change that is waiting in the wings, brought on by late-stage capitalism. Many of these stories provide visions of an all-too-real future that is hurtling towards us at full speed. As such, it hardly comes as a surprise that apocalypse, whether impending or already past, is an important plot device that repeats in various guises, making it not just a possibility but an inevitability if we keep disregarding the planet we inhabit. In “Losing,” climate change has made rains scarce and severe droughts common across the world. Some governments and societies use technology to induce artificial rain while others have gifted individuals who can summon rain through song, but it seems to be a losing battle. In “Eatflicks,” humans have become extinct and the streets and bylanes of Delhi have been reclaimed by nature. Keeping their memory alive are robots created as companions in humanity’s last hour who have since made robots of their own, hoping that soon the earth will heal sufficiently for evolution to kickstart again.
Neither story is solely focused on the cliche of survival in a post-apocalyptic landscape; they instead look at what it means to hold on to hope. A different set of stories move entirely away from Earth after the apocalypse, in search of new planets and other worlds—a place where humanity might restart and be better. In “A Year (Not Quite) Alone in an Alien Wilderness,” a generation spaceship routinely sends out explorers to look for a suitable home planet for mankind. The protagonist lands on the strange moon of an inviting planet to find a thriving ecosystem in which everyone is deeply connected to each other. It is a bio-social relationship that perhaps won’t survive a mass human migration. “Crown Shyness,” which at four pages is half the length of “A Year,” follows a similar arc but in reverse: a ship crash-lands on Earth centuries after a climate change apocalypse. The ship is one of many sent to investigate the erstwhile home planet, which is now populated by a sentient forest and the evolved post-human descendants of individuals who had stayed behind to help the earth heal in the aftermath.
Metamorphosis is a recurring theme, especially across stories that blur the boundaries between the human and the animal. The Anthropocene, in which humans are master over the earth, is a fiction we have created for ourselves, a fiction that perhaps downplays how we are also mere cogs in the machine, turning gears in ecosystems much larger than us. What better way to show this oneness than through transformations that emphasise the liminal? In “Call for Kelp,” a doctor’s consciousness merges with that of an otter she is trying to save before its habitat is entirely destroyed by tests of a super-secret bomb. In “Cocoon,” a group of close friends are having a merry time in a forest used for silkworm rearing when one of them is bitten by a neon green silkworm—after which his hair goes green and his spit changes to silk. In “Nemesis,” meanwhile, an enemy state launches a biological weapon which turns citizens of the target country into cockroaches in the blink of an eye. These changes are far from being just physical; there is an opening-up of the psyche, too, as characters learn to see beyond themselves.
Ganguly does not privilege only a limited human perspective. Many stories have animal protagonists going about their mundane lives. These stories often seem anthropomorphic—most of Ganguly’s animal names, for example, are cheeky, relying on alliteration, pop culture references, or localised translations into other languages—but they largely manage to avoid twee Disneyfication, showcasing the richness of nonhuman existence. In “A Storm of Stings,” which narrates a coup in a beehive by the current queen’s advisor, and “Hats and Other Coverings,” which follows a pair of dolphins fascinated by human headwear, it is obvious from the beginning that the characters are not human. On the other hand, “Polarspeak,” which focuses on a pack of polar bears, manages to keep the identity of its characters hidden until the very end. In all three, humans are not entirely absent: they crop up towards the end and almost seem to snatch both the narrative voice as well as agency from the animal protagonists, rendering them mute and unintelligible as well as making their behaviour a perplexing mystery.
“Corvid Inspector,” the longest story in the collection by far and another example of the collection’s animal-centric narratives, conclusively breaks this trend. Set in a park that is well populated by heterogenous members of the Corvidae family of birds, humans are next to nonexistent in it. The story follows Bram, a crotchety raven with a traumatic past, who is the titular Corvid Inspector, in charge of investigating suspicious injuries and death. A crow, infamous for his numerous shady dealings, has been murdered and suspects abound. The story has multiple point of view characters and Bram is just one of them. There’s Polly the parrot, the chief of police; Mayur the peacock, the animal mayor; Ciara the magpie, the purveyor of funerary services, and so on. The narrative jumps from one viewpoint to the next, even as it moves back and forth in time in order to flesh out a surprisingly poignant tale.
Rest assured, though, that Biopeculiar is not all doom and gloom. While most stories capture the eerie wonder of the natural, its heady sublimeness, some actually put it front and centre in a way that pivots into magical realism. In these stories, nature truly comes alive, a grand consciousness undergirding all existence. The best example is the opening story of the collection, “Head in the Clouds,” which is about an ageing cloud herder gathering his flock for the last time as he prepares to retire. The clouds, like animals, can be guided to places that require a spell of rain. Another story, “Moss,” follows a young couple who buy a moss frame to decorate their new home. It turns out to have a mind of its own, and when it is given regular water, it expands to cover all the walls in the house. It watches the cat, uses the phone, and brings out lunch.
In other words, these twenty-two stories showcase an incredible breadth of imagination and conceptual creativity. From science fiction to fantasy to horror, there is a little something for all fans of speculative fiction here. The length of these stories also works in their favour: while there were times I wished some were longer—if only to stay more within that world—the stories which could actually have used more material were few and far between. Equal parts perceptive and whimsical, Biopeculiar makes for an engrossing, captivating read. It also marks Ganguly as an exciting writer worth watching out for in the coming years.