Year's Best SF 14 by David G. Hartwell

Author:David G. Hartwell [Hartwell, David G.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Sci-fi, Short Story (Sci-fi), English
ISBN: 9780061721748
Publisher: Eos
Published: 2009-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

VA N D A N A S I N G H

Vandana Singh ( users.rcn.com/singhvan ) lives with her family in Framingham, Massachusetts. She is a college teacher with a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics. She was born and brought up in New Delhi, India, and is “a card-carrying alien writing science fiction.” Her parents both had graduate de

grees in English literature: “I grew up as much with Shake

speare and Keats as I did with the great Indian epics and lit

erary writers in Hindi, such as the inimitable Premchand. My mother and grandmother told us the Ramayana and Mahab

harata, and various folk tales and village lore. In my teen years and early adulthood I also became involved (in a mod

est and occasional way) in environmental and women’s move

ments, which had a lasting impact on my world-view.” And “I love this genre for its imaginative richness, its vast canvas, and the sophistication with which its best practitioners wield their pens.” Her first short story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet , came out in fall 2008, in India, from Zubaan Books and Penguin India. Her novella Dis

tances was published in 2008 by Aqueduct Press.

“Oblivion: A Journey” appeared in the original anthol

ogy, Clockwork Phoenix , edited by Mike Allen. It presents an Indian posthuman future, in which synthetic and natu

rally born people mingle across the colonized galaxy. One woman’s life is controlled by an ancient revenge myth. It is interesting to compare it to “Fury,” another space opera appearing later in this book.

247

Memory is a strange thing.

I haven’t changed my sex in eighty-three years. I was born female, in a world of peace and quietude; yet I have an in

complete recollection of my childhood. Perhaps it is partly a failure of the imagination that it is so hard to believe (in this age of ours) that there was once such a place as green and slow as my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was the last of the great world-shells to fall, so any memory of childhood is contaminated with what came after: the deaths of all I loved, the burning of the cities, the slow, cancerous spread of Hira

sor’s culture-machines that changed my birth-place beyond recognition.

So instead of one seamless continuum of growing and learning to be in this world, my memory of my life is frag

mentary. I remember my childhood name: Lilavati. I re

member those great cybeasts, the hayathis, swaying down the streets in a procession, and their hot, vegetable-scented breath ruffling my hair. There are glimpses, as through a tattered veil, of steep, vertical gardens, cascading greenery, a familiar face looking out at me from a window hewn in a cliff—and in the background, the song of falling water. Then everything is obscured by smoke. I am in a room sur

rounded by pillars of fire, and through the haze I see the torn pages of the Ramayan floating in the air, burning, their edges crumpling like black lace. I am half-comatose with heat and smoke; my throat is parched

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