The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction

The latest in MIT’s Radium Age series, which aims to champion “the best proto-sf novels and stories from 1900 to 1935 among scholars... as well as general readers,” is more likely to achieve the former goal. The ponderous title novella by Hemendrakumar Roy (1888–1963), along with three mild short stories from other authors, offer a valuable peak into genre history but limited entertainment value. Though Chattopadhyay, in his introduction, argues that “The Inhumans,” first published in 1935, subverts the colonial overtones of the Lost Race trope, the slow-moving narrative wastes a lot of time before reaching that plotline. Nanigopal Majumdar’s “The Mystery of the Giant” (1931) concerns a series of disappearances that may be connected to a spirit as “tall as two men, with a deformed face and a body covered in glass shards.” An encounter with an alien in “Voyage to Venus” by Jagadananda Ray (1895) turns out to have been only a dream, while “The Martian Purana” by Manoranjan Bhattacharya (1931) takes a satirical turn: a man’s efforts to buy a gemstone for his wife from a Naga, a “mythological half-human, half-serpent” underworld deity, are stymied because “the Electric Corporation had, out of sheer laziness, not yet managed to install power lines in the underworld.” While studying how sci-fi themes were treated by Bengalis is a worthwhile academic pursuit, lay readers won’t find much to hold their interest. (Mar.)