 Hi Rajya, so nice to meet you. So nice to meet you, yes. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and edit the link. Just give me a minute and we can get started. Sure, thank you. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I guess we can begin because there's already some 9, 10 folks waiting on the YouTube streaming link as well. Okay, all right. All right, everyone. Welcome to the Antel Insights Science Fiction Book Club. We are here today with Lavanya Laxminarayan and we are staying ahead of the curve talking about her book Analog Virtual. Right. A few things before we begin. Please keep your mics on mute. We will be taking questions at the end of the session. So please keep typing them into the chat box as and when they occur to you. To introduce myself, I am Vijay Laxmi. I am the author of Strangely Familiar Tales. My writing, my poetry and short stories have been published in various online journals and anthologies. And my writing on pop culture and feminism can also be found on women's web. My co-modulator today is the wonderful T.G. Shenoy. T.G. Shenoy is an SFF enthusiast and columnist and critic. He is the writer of India's longest running weekly S.F. column, New World's Weekly for Factor Daily. And the spec fix column for Bangalore Mirror. He also curates the S.F. track for Bangalore Litfest. He has featured in podcasts such as the Taliharete Kannada podcast and events such as the Sri Lanka Comic Con to talk about SFF in general and Indian S.F. in particular. He hosts to boldly go a fun SFF quiz every Saturday. He is also an advertising and marketing professional and is currently a consulting partner with Celsius 100 consulting. Today, of course, we're speaking to Lavanya Laxminarayan whose book Analog Virtual has been in the news recently for all. Welcome Lavanya and congratulations. Lavanya Laxminarayan is the locus and BSFA Award nominated author of Analog Virtual and other simulations of your future. She recently won the Times of India Author Award for best debut novel. She's also a game designer, has built worlds for Zynga Zynga Engs-Famvel, Pamvel 2 and Mafia Wars, dabbled in building games around NFTs on blockchain and attempt to design an augmented reality robot fighting game. Her forthcoming publications include a short story in the Gollink's book of South Asian science fiction volume 2 and her novel in the anthology Third Eye. In her spare time, Lavanya is a classically trained pianist with stage fright an animal lover with two dogs and a world traveler who can't wait for her next big adventure. Lavanya can be found on Instagram at Lavanya.ln and on Twitter at Lavanya underscore ln. Chenoy, would you like to get us started off by telling us why Analog Virtual is such an essential book for our times? Well, yeah. This is the book and I absolutely loved it when I read it first. So, like all good SF, whether you're talking about future or whether you're talking about new governance is ultimately speaks to its time and I thought in that sense Analog Virtual and other simulations of your future was very timely and very relevant and it's sort of holding a mirror to where we are and where we should not go. That I think is more important. For those of you who have not read the book, this contains about 20 stories and it's set in the future where nation states no longer exist as we know it and all cities have been privatized run by corporations. Those that are not privatized are run as a cooperative society but they're very few and far in between. The most successful cities like Apex City is run by corporations such as the Bellcourt. Now Apex City is what once upon a time used to be called Bangalore and the title Analog Virtual refers to the people who live in Apex City. The virtuals are your elite who have access to technology and who live by the mantra of productivity and success. Whereas the Analogs are the ones who don't meet Bellcourt what shall we say standards of productivity and everything and thus relegated to outside Apex City where with no access to water electricity and all of those things and if you're even worse than that you get sent off to the vegetable farms. I guess you can figure out what the vegetable farms are where you are the vegetable and you get farm and for those familiar with Bangalore the dividing line between the Analogs and the virtual is the Carnatic Meridian which lies at Mint Square which is where the Coven Park metro station is right now where the Tejas Jet has been kept and that's the dividing line between these two worlds. Now as much as we talk about meritocracy and all of those things the world that Lavanya has posited in Analog Virtual isn't something to look forward to because everybody's life is sort of governed by the bell curve. It's almost like I keep saying annual appraisal by HR so that's the vision of the future that's there in Analog Virtual and we see snippets of it through 20 short stories interlink short stories about various people and what life is within and without life is as an Analog or as a virtual or virtuals who want to slip into Analogism and Analogs trying to be virtual and we'll discuss about these themes in great detail as we come along but before we proceed I would like to really congratulate you Lavanya your debut novel long listed for the Nebulas SFW's Nebulas it was there on the Locust recommended list for 2020 and that's that's quite the fee we had the maximum representation from Indian authors this year in the Locust and yours was amongst the best there you just won the author award for best debut 2020 so how does it feel like that people are buying into your dystopian vision or what does it mean like the journey so far it's kind of surreal and you know thanks you and Vijay for having me here and for saying such wonderful things about my book about Analog Virtual it's it's incredible to have it received this way simply because when you write your book and you send it out there at least for me personally I hope it just connects with you know one person right like I just want one other person to read it and say I got what you were trying to say so to have such a diverse spectrum of people recognize it and appreciate it not just here at home in India but also outside of India I think it's really quite overwhelming and it's very heartening to know it means that the concerns that I chose to write about because I was writing from a point of concern these are concerns that we are sharing together as humanity and that is really the biggest takeaway for me from all of this recognition that the book has received of late now coming to how Analog Virtual is structured it's 20 interlinked stories which puts the folk and each of them talks about different bits so there's this one story about monsters under the bed which is you know which is the favourite of the lot also the scariest of the lot where this person has this implant which tells him what to think what not to think so that he comes in line with Bellcorp's vision then you have POV characters from the resistance from the underground and all of that and I think I agree with Yenmon when he wrote in Locust that this must be the sort of format for future dystopian and when I read that I was reminded of what Tolstoy said all happy families are the same but that family is sad in its own different way so 20 visions of sadness each different makes perfect sense for dystopia rather than for a utopia where you can just have one character see his or her life through so what was the decision to structure it like this was it easy difficult and I know it's a publishing thing but when we were nominating and voting on for the Locust do we slot this into a collection or do we slot this into a novel I mean it's both and then finally it got slotted into a collection for reasons but how do you go about choosing and how did you choose these characters and these subjects I actually very similar lines to what you hinted at when building this dystopian city I really wanted to talk about what it is like to experience it from different perspectives simply because like you said all misery is unique to every single character and look they're not all miserable some of them do find a bit of redemption but what I wanted to do was be able to reflect the spectrum of experiences within a given city I didn't want to focus to live with single character and their biases and so on and so forth simply because I felt that there are enough ways in which our I guess our evolution as cities or as the entire world it impacts every single person in an entirely unique way and I wanted to demonstrate that by creating characters who would each be engaging with this reality on completely different terms everyone's uniquely motivated everyone is sort of they all have their own backstory and their own history and what really compelled me to do this with this book to sort of break it up and create the sort of like mosaic view of the city was that the overarching dystopia is based on the need for conformity and when you superimpose the idea of conformity and a single set of values onto a massive group of individuals you want to produce little bricks on the wall but the truth is every single individual is their own person and to conform in order to succeed or to survive really takes a toll on people and that's sort of what I wanted to reflect the cost of conformity or the cost of having to change yourself to meet an external system of values when I wrote it I did intend it to be like a very fragmented novel of sorts but hey you know once the book is out there in the world the author is dead and so the people who want to read it as a collection by all means you know the collection is best read in serial order though because there are links between the stories and it makes better sense when you read it progressively and to those who see it as a novel so be it in my head it is a novel and I'm very grateful you know that it's on the locust list at all so wherever it is on that list it works in either situation I mean author is dead and all that unless you're JK Rowling Vijaya So Lavanya one of the things that I loved about analog virtual is that there is this sense in it of you know the more things change the more they stay the same so it's a world in which a woman can you know not go through pregnancy physically so you know technology is evolved to that extent but the idea that a woman can be child free is something that still causes quite a bit of outrage and you know especially in this past year we've seen the world literally divide itself into virtuals and analogs who've you know born the brunt of the lockdown and the economic and social impact and all of that so it's the world of analog virtual is like a strange world but with very familiar problems I wanted to know how you worked on blending that strangeness with the familiar Great Thank you that is something I wanted to bring through because I feel like we fundamentally do need to make this massive shift in our mind space as a collective right towards towards more empathy towards more awareness and towards more acceptance of different people and what their priorities might be and who they might be as people and that is something I really wanted to bring into this book something that I love about science fiction to me the best science fiction is the kind that sort of creates an entirely unsettling environment or a universe and then extrapolates these really human concerns and puts them in there so that we can reflect upon them without necessarily being bound by reality or by realism where we don't see historic biases or existent biases into it we just carry what human beings behave like into it and I wanted to take these aspects into it the story you talk about with the woman who still can't choose to not have a baby I wanted to demonstrate that a lot of the time we think we are making progress and we think that the words like empowering and enabling equality of sexes and so on and so forth we are not actually addressing a far more fundamental problem when it comes to this which is a basic respect and how people are perceived in the first place beyond very very specific functions of type to them and that is something I wanted to try and bring in as much as possible through every single story this being an example of one of them. It was a wonderful story it really really hit the point and in general like that different setting but same problem kind of scenario that you have created it really brings through the fact that advanced technology doesn't necessarily mean progress because that's the connection we have in our heads that technologically advanced society is a progressive society but it really isn't not necessarily I mean technology just makes it easier to enforce things you would want enforce it just makes it easy yeah but yeah so it also reminds me of this other interview of yours that I was watching with Oxford Bookstores where you were taking questions from participants and one of the questions was about how you link the climate crisis with you know going virtual and your answer was really interesting because you spoke about how what the virtual world demands of us is not really in sync with what the natural world demands of us. So I'd like to ask you that same question how you link the world going virtual with the climate crisis is it really interesting answer that you give? Oh thank you so I the way I view it right the virtual world or our experience of it and the way it is being designed right now and actually before I start on this you know I do want to clarify technology is not a bad thing it is a very powerful thing and it can be used very powerfully as a tool for unification as a tool for enabling access and creating platforms and so on and so forth having said that currently the way technology is being designed is very very top down and it is being designed towards consumerism and enabling consumerism simply because most of the people building our technology are their capitalist powerhouses right and what we have been trained to do through technology is to consume and to consume at a very rapid pace if we if I want a brand new book I will order it and I will have it here tomorrow right using technology if whether if I want I don't know if I want pizza for dinner you know I'm just going to put it up on Swiggy and it will be at home in 45 minutes and we have been trained by the way in which technology has been designed and built to constantly expect instant gratification and and that is very out of sync with how the real world works so to speak you know where we're sitting in a little bubble where everything arrives at our doorstep within a day to five days but if you really look at the real world if we look at going down to you know climate change this is a long standing pressing issue that needs to be repaired we need to arrive at solutions if we look at our relationship to food in a very natural sense of it you grow something in your garden it takes weeks and months to grow and I love gardening I love gardening with my mom I you know we have a little home garden where we grow our own vegetables it takes a really long time and then you get this tiny little handful of tomatoes right and that's how reality works but we are being so disconnected from the process of living which is you know everything happens in its own time and a lot of we cannot take a lot of things for granted because things are all our natural elements come into play I mean if climate change impacted swiggy delivery I bet everyone would be a lot more proactive about it right it's just the climate change impact other people's issues that don't really hit us because eventually all our produce is in a supermarket and we don't even have to go to the supermarket anymore we just get it delivered home so we are so many degrees away and we are being honed by these algorithms to continually want that dopamine hit of buying shiny stuff and bringing it home as soon as possible I think that is where the real issue lies not that these are bad things I think it has certainly made life more convenient it has made living faster but to consume in this manner without having awareness that this is the impact that we are getting into this instant gratification loop that's where the real problem lies so I hope that was as effective an answer as the previous one absolutely one thing that struck me while I was reading analog virtual like you said most of us who live in tier 1 metro towns and all we live in this little bubble right and then to not everyone live in a Bangalore Bombay because there is severe inequalities and all of those things it's nice to look at this and say that it's dystopia but like I always said the best SF is the reflection of our times to paraphrase what Willian Gibson said about the future if the things in analog virtual are dystopian then dystopia is already here absolutely absolutely even right now like you said we're sitting in Bangalore and many of us here have these privileges but just down the road there are people who don't they don't enjoy those same privileges and outside of tier 1 cities again you know regardless of whether it's tier 2 whether it's a small town there is this uneven distribution what we believe is very universal access to technology that's the total myth I mean that's an absolute myth because I went back home to my ancestral home in Udupi it's a small village and there sometimes the phone signal just drops for hours there's no power for days because obviously Bangalore is more important you can't have a pocket in Bangalore so that's how it goes and that just drives home the amount of privilege that we have and you know what divides analogs in the virtually quote-unquote merit and that's something that the privileged are most often talking about and that's the dream we shouldn't make allowances for the poor we shouldn't have allowances etc because it all comes down to merit and I read from the book from the preamble to the bell charter on human rights and this is how the bell charter on human right goes bell cop declares that civilization is free from discrimination a universal system of merit determines an individual's worth to society we are a meritocratic technology we are the future of the human race so put this power of tech-probillionaires and this is how it will be so can you expand a bit on meritocratic technology you know and why the bell curve of course I think it goes back to this first the fallacy of merit of merit as a fair equal system it isn't in order to even be able to access opportunities from which you can be meritorious you need a certain degree of privilege in the first place otherwise it's not that you cannot but the number of obstacles you need to overcome it's tremendous and I'm sitting here in my position of privilege something I've occupied for my entire life in many ways and I'm acutely aware that a lot of other people don't have access in the same term but having said that going back to what you said about debates about let's not have reservations like how controversial reservations are how merit is seen as this one size fix all solution it's basically you know you put in your hard work you are self-made it's as easy as that it's a point A to B thing I think that is that is a pipe dream that's being sold to people it is a pipe dream that is also consolidated and perpetuated by capitalist systems where you look at this ladder of success the way we are taught all the way from our schooling onwards it is work hard, top your class get into the best university top your university, excellent get the best job and now work 16 hours a day so that you get that promotion and once you get that promotion you get the house you get the car, you get you know these are the dreams that were sold and in parallel to that we are it is almost being established particularly in corporate spaces that all of the good things that come your way are only on the basis of your merit and it is never acknowledged that different people might be differently able to even access an opportunity and convert it on that scale of merit right if I am let's say I am in a corporate environment and I am writing for games as an example I have done that and we want to hire a new writer but the writer who comes in does not have the same pop culture references because they grew up in a very different environment the corporate world does not want to take the time to bring this person in help expose them to if you are writing mafia nobody wants to explain that you have to come in having watched Goodfellas and that is the bar so it this is a very tech growth sort of an issue where because we want to move faster we want to be profitable faster we only want people who are capable of operating at that speed, at that pace this sort of herd of people with perfect alignment all of the time and the bell curve is absolutely a reflection of this for those who haven't experienced it before it is sort of a starting mechanism where HR slots you into different percentiles based on your performance and it is always determined that there can never be let's say more than 20% at the top of the curve or occupying the position of performer for example and it doesn't matter if in a group of 100 people 40 people have done a stellar job 40 people are not going to make it it's just going to be 20 people making it to that top 20% and so on and so forth so it is a rootless extraordinarily competitive system and I believe that it sort of lends itself to the notion of metatocracy you know they kind of go hand in hand towards exclusion as opposed to I guess empowerment and equality and working together as a collective I mean the full title of the book is analog virtual and other simulations of your future so I don't know whether it's a simulation we are already living in that's the hopeful part that's the hopeful part the use of simulation yes hopeful quote unquote it's like how Samit Basu describes his new book chosen spirits as anti-dystopia it's not dystopia it's anti-dystopia because that he says is the best case scenario so yeah speaking about merit and how differences and opportunities are never really taken into consideration when we are talking about merit the story that probably illustrates that best in analog virtual is etudes and going by reviews it seems to be everybody's favorite story certain he is one of my favorites I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about that story itself you know and what you are going for with it what you were hoping that people would take away oh thank you so etudes is a story about a young analog girl she is a teenager she has been adopted into a virtual family but because she is an analog she is under constant monitoring by bellcore and by bellcore system effectively where she has to prove her work prove that she is worthy of being a virtual citizen while she is being monitored she does not have access to a lot of technology to any technology in fact she is the only person in her class who uses books physical printed books and who has a journal because bellcore doesn't trust her with technology and until she proves that she can be a citizen she will not get access to technology this really gets in her way because her dream is to be a virtual so pianist and in this reality you know as opposed to traditional piano lessons where you learn with you know the way we learn it's not necessarily the way we learn music right now because that has opened up but the traditional way to learn let's say classical music is here's a book it's filled with cheap music read it play it practice it master it right but in this world there's this amazing technology it pretty much you know directly sink into implants it has an internal metronome so you're always keeping perfect rhythm it gives you direct feedback from your instrument so that you know you're playing it dynamically you're evoking the right emotions and so on she doesn't have access to it and that sets her back because you know a technology like this in my version of how music is learned it really helps you understand music so much faster and she works in spite of this to pursue that dream and what I wanted to really address when talking about when writing the story was that we actually have a lot of systemic discrimination on a number of grounds that is very prevalent right from a very very formative age I do go into that a bit in other stories in my book as well where so the character in the story Nina she's bullied at school because she's always in quotes falling behind and that is systemic discrimination you stop them young you feed them propaganda young they'll pick on people for you they will exclude people for you at the same time I did want to talk about you know how a lot of the time simply simply allowing something to policy for example an analog an analog child being adopted that is you know that is policy but without affirmative action backing it where people are supportive and understanding and capable of you know encouraging someone like this it doesn't really matter you are bringing somebody to the brink of opportunity and then limiting them and cutting them off right there and that's what I wanted to demonstrate through that story it exists on many levels for me simply because I mean it's a story that's very close to my heart as well writing it you know it was a hard one to write because my heart went out to Nina as I was writing her journey she kind of broke my heart quite a bit and through the story I feel like I wanted to talk about how it is not enough to simply allow things or permission is not enough you know and in fact permission is a pretty obnoxious like top down way to do things it is oh well you know you wanted rights here you go you asked for it now what are you doing with it right that's rubbish and like I said it's obnoxious it's so condescending what you really need is an entire system that says okay you know here you have some rights and here you have some opportunities and we are going to help you get across that life and the support system her parents and some of her friends are very supportive but beyond that you know the whole world is conspiring against her and I wanted to talk about the unfairness of that yeah yeah I mean the character I mean she sort of sticks out like a like a bubble in a still water you know and this sort of feedback because everything is also uniform and still and you know the other bit the analog virtual also sort of highlighted for me is the extremes to which you took what we could possibly call virtual signaling or being performative on social media it really doesn't matter what you do as long as you say the right things and do the right things and you know be cool about it and all of that so I mean I wanted to tell you a little bit more about that I mean whether it is a b-moji project whether you like it or not your things will be out there for everyone to see it's like that joke that meme that was doing the rounds that this broker is showing a commode to this prospective buyer and says here's this commode that'll post all this shit on twitter on facebook so the b-moji made me of that you know and tries to bring you down into conformity and the women you know whether it is Thracialaceous and all of those people trying to you know sort of fit in be cool and all of those things so was that a criticism of current social media behaviour or certain people or you know when people say hey here's a controversial opinion it really isn't just saying that for more you know like you said dopamine hit yeah it was in part a massive criticism of the way social media works where a lot of the time you don't one does not necessarily always mean the things one says and there is a lot of let me join the bandwagon because of peer pressure like what will everybody else on my facebook or twitter or instagram think if I don't comment on this I don't say something about this if that was part of it the other part of it or you know this sort of conformity being soft conformity right like of opinions and values and all of that it emerged to me as pretty problematic once I realised that most of the time with the people I was hanging out with in real life we would be sitting at you know lunch conversations or dinner conversations that everybody would have watched the same stuff on whether it's on youtube or netflix and had the exact same opinions on it you know everyone is talking about the creating the exact same critique there is pretty much no difference of opinion and that sort of started to really disturb me a little bit because a lot of the time we need tension you need differences of opinion to really sort of explore a point of view to really explore a problem examine it from all sides arrive at really critical well thought solutions that only come from dissonance right and to have this echo chamber of and you know of course I'm talking about you know really soft terms like pop culture right where there is this echo chamber where everybody's favorite I don't know MCU movie is the black man right and everyone saying awesome stuff about it and I'm not taking anything away from the movie that's not what I'm saying it just becomes disturbing when nobody has anything critical to say or something that is so popular and so on and so forth but when you take that outside the realms of pop culture and kind of you know just and look at more pressing concern like our social inequality the disparity of opportunities of technology and everybody has this like a little bit earlier this little bubble where they think oh but everyone has access to technology right like that's awesome where we are so progressive when the human race is getting better it's not how it works but yeah so that's what I was coming from when I sort of created these perfect alignment pop cultural systems okay to the people listening in please feel free to type in your questions to Lavanya in the chat or if you're on youtube in the youtube chat and we'll be taking that in a few minutes so my one last question to you would be Lavanya the choice of Bangalore apart from the fact that you are a Bangalorean and you live in Bangalore and love it and are familiar with it was beyond that was what was the reason to cast Bangalore you know set it in Bangalore is it more to it than just familiarity with the city itself one bit second question I wanted to ask is where is the vegetable farm located is it by any chance in Whitefield or is it not in Whitefield because the city is Bangalore and Whitefield is Whitefield it could well be in Whitefield it could be Whitefield it's just far away enough from the rest of things for it to be a nice closed facility okay Whitefield then Whitefield it is it's connected by the metro you can drop in anytime but you can never leave but you can never leave so of course Bangalore Bangalore actually lent itself very very easily to this book because of its current ethos and you know having lived here having grew up here I've seen the city transform as many Bangaloreans have from the sort of very laid back chill environment to start up central where you can't walk into a coffee shop without hearing like investor pictures and progress and teams having their daily updates that those are happening in every single coffee shop or at least they were prior to the pandemic and I felt that that transition in Bangalore's peoples I kind of wanted to push it even further and say okay so we're here now where will that be a few years from now another reason for choosing Bangalore really is it genuinely reminds me in its present privilege bubble I'm talking about sections of Bangalore that have that tech privilege vibe that really reminds me of the very delusional Bay Area vibe of these cities that are responsible for all our cutting edge technology in the present day that are responsible for all our down capitalist consumerist technology it gives me that feeling especially when I look at a lot of the start-ups popping up here they they are rooted around these these very convenience driven very sort of I would say buy stuff faster technology and I felt that Bangalore that way was a great metaphor for any city in the world that is going through this sort of tech revolution startup revolution because there is a certain degree of and I'm not making this is sort of a blanket statement but there is a certain degree of callousness when it comes to the types of technologies being developed or at least on a large scale they are entirely more shopping apps more furniture stores online and as opposed to more I would say socially relevant solutions convenience technologies that maybe even enhance simple things like recycling and that's the direction I think a lot of tech heavy cities are going in and I see Bangalore doing that Thank you Lavanya to kind of come back to the stories themselves a little bit Shenoy earlier mentioned that his the scariest story in the book for him was the monster under the bed for me it was a seven year glitch and I have still not gotten over that story what is the Mrs and why is it in people's heads like why would anyone want to do that yeah that was a terrifying story to write look I was scared writing both stories just just to be clear they were not enjoyable stories to write process of writing them when I wrote my message I was kind of plumped on the couch for days because if it is a bleak dark horrible story if you haven't read the book yet my message is and I'll call it them that communicates directly between the Nebula which is the future of the cloud it's where all big data is stored where trends are observed and so on it is basically an algorithmic implant inside of your head that communicates information directly to your head from the cloud and it has access to everything about you so if you think the Fitbit is a bit creepy because your heart rate and your breathing tells you when you need to be stressed my message is the Fitbit on steroids and it actually manipulates your everything from your hormones to your physiology to push your decision-making button and I thought why would anyone sign up for that well you know if again going back to that that illusion of merit so a character in the book named Aditi signs up for my message to test my message and the reason is very it goes back to the fallacy of merit it's a super competitive world my message will help you be more efficient more ruthless, more cutthroat it will tell you exactly what you need to do to get to the top and if you are somebody with ambitions this is my message perfect algorithm for you when I was writing about my message I was kind of riffing off of that the number of productivity apps that can track everything you're doing and recommend things to you at the back end your Fitbit which is a great useful tool but it's also pretty creepy in the way that it's tracking every step that you recommend when you need to work out and so on these are invasive and I wanted to push the invasiveness of these particularly in the light of productivity and the cost of being super productive at everything else that's what I wanted to reflect on with my message I mean very successful because I actually put the book aside for a while after that I was like I can't deal with anything for my no Fitbit no smart watch life for a sci-fi fan I'm a bit of a Luddite that way but then I completely put that on sci-fi writers like you who posted such videos and like no I am happy being a Luddite yes I shall only read physical books thank you very much actually the more you read so that's it the more you read SF the more you are like it's nice but let's keep our distance yeah I need a tinfoil hat and I guess we need to be clear when we are using technology and when technology is using us yeah anyway to kind of tie the whole discussion together we've kept on talking throughout and the thing that we've spoken most about is this need for conformity that technology is encouraging and the way we are living right now is encouraging and even in the world of analog virtual that really comes through because you have to have that right thoughts the right preferences you have to do the right things and if you're not like excommunicated from society as an analog and probably sent to the vegetable farm but for a real world parallel the lazy way to kind of look at it would be that it's cancel culture but you know we know it's a little more complicated because no one in real life is actually getting cancelled but I do want to you know pick your brain on this in terms of you know if the way if technology keeps growing and our lives keep getting less and less private is this pressure to confirm only going to keep growing on us or is there an alternative I think so so yes you're right like we are rapidly moving away from from privacy being something we can demand or expect but I think that it really depends upon how we choose to use that technology and I think that requires like several steps back and a lot of cognizance to sort of think about being able to respect other people's opinions being able to have dialogue and you know what you're saying about cancel culture where if I don't share the exact viewpoint as you do over let's say something a bit controversial or meaningful to you right there could be a number of reasons for it of course one could be that I am an extremist and I don't respect your opinion that is problematic and that is very much my problem but a lot of the time it comes from a point of view of ignorance and it is frustrating to deal with ignorance yes it is but can you can every individual facilitate dialogue right attempt an explanation attempt to reach out and meet the other person half way I think in that case you know it's not so contingent on technology as it is on humanity because it's true right like if the technology is going to explode there's going to be there's going to come a point where we are all performing all of the time and by performing I'm not saying faking it but we you know our lives will no longer necessarily be entirely private and you know this is something that I think as we did our rights about the machine hood I think the circle by Dave Eggers you know they deal with a complete lack of privacy and that's not a very distant future it's just given that can we be better human beings can we be more empathetic to the different circumstances from which people come that might you know it could very well be that that is what limits them when it comes to empathizing with you so can you can you reach out and of course if it's completely unnecessary you know they are rather not unnecessary if it is completely unrealistic and your attempts go nowhere then sure you know calling somebody out that is fine but it doesn't have to turn into war all of the time is what I mean thank you so much I think we'll start taking we did say that this one is going to be BYOQ bring your own questions so there's a few of them the first one comes Lavanya from madmax one who asks meritocracy is not perfect what's the alternative that's a loaded question I mean meritocracy is definitely not perfect right and it is quite a bit of a myth I think I can't think of a system wide word like a single word but I do believe that the alternative involves like we've been talking about you know through this discussion it involves not just saying hey this is an equal opportunity world we're not taking anything away from you know like nothing's in your way when inequality exists as the baseline that attitude or that approach does not work so I really believe that sort of I think facilitating equality is really is really the solution and I'm not talking about equality by erasing differences right in analog virtual there are no cultural differences everything is completely like hegemonized to the pursuit of productivity right like the culture has been erased effectively except what Belkor tells you culture I don't mean invalidate cultural differences I mean acknowledge that people come from different points of privilege and see where you can enable see where you can enable equality so that people have the opportunity to convert you know to convert whatever opportunities that come their way it's more meaningful that way thank you Laumanya the next question is from Navin and he asks given I think I recall that the SFU prefer presents an unequal or unsettling world where people have relatable problems are you considering a more escapist or speculative story for your next work I wouldn't necessarily call it escapist it's not dystopian it's definitely not as bleak as analog virtual I love personally I do enjoy escapist science fiction and fantasy as well unfortunately I just don't think I write it yet so my next book is about the future of food and while it isn't the bleak and dark future of food it's not dystopian there are a lot of real world themes that will hopefully be relatable that I intend to make relatable in that future of food that sounds exciting like I'm looking forward to that thank you so Sujata 1972 Sujata asks I hope that's not the time to travel anyway my technology is driving all aspects of our life and it is becoming what about the technology being created what's your say on this there is absolutely a technology being created we say everybody has a smartphone and you know this whole smartphone proliferation statistic about India that keeps being tossed around yes a lot of people have smartphones but what is the difference in capability in a smartphone and someone else's smartphone what can I do with it that somebody else might not be able to do with it that divide is very real it's very present right now and I think again the trouble where it really comes from is that technology is proliferated top down it is a capital system that is selling technology to us and until the means to produce technology are opened up right and people are given the opportunity to create their own technology to create their to sort of divert technology to solving problems on let's say a community basis whether it's a neighborhood or a family or a city unless people get those tools it's always going to be a huge divide and we will always be at the mercy of mega corporations and the price points that they set and yeah so that's what I think about the divide in technology right now it actually leads to our next question you've kind of taken a stab at it already now when answering but I'll still ask you the question which is that if technology is working on a top to top to bottom way what is the way out to reverse that I don't yeah I like you said I've sort of gone there and I think the way to reverse it is you know we are there is currently again experimental technology when it comes to you know things like 3D printing right or when it comes to open source platforms where you can code and so on and so forth imagine the two going side by side and being opened up to everybody where everyone has access to developing developing their things that meet their own needs like if I could 3D print for example my own table and right now this is really speculative because I've used 3D printers I actually custom built toy robots with friends of mine using a 3D printer that we bought together and it was a painfully slow process so it's still quite a long way out to think that that's going to be accessible but could that be a solution where everybody has access to either on a neighborhood basis an individual basis could everyone also then be empowered to code could code become more friendly so that people don't necessarily have to engage too deeply with syntax like can we frame thinking in such a way that people can be more self sustaining as opposed to dependent on larger corporations to solve problems for them and I think I might be going off on a bit of a tadnip but I think that is massively problematic the fact that we are being induced into this dependency where we think it's solving all of my problems so it's okay to be dependent but it's actually hitting us in terms of our own sort of ability to probably solve for ourselves to chase things down and create them for us. Thank you for that very well addressed so moving on now from your role as author of analog virtual to you as an SF writer there are a couple of questions for that one is Yudhanjay Vijayrathne asks your thoughts on global SFF publishing and making headway in the conversation as someone who is effectively outside the anglosphere where most of the discussion happens oh hey Yudha thanks for that question so it's particularly pertinent it is an uphill battle or an uphill journey rather than a battle to be heard to be heard on a global platform all the way in the subcontinent it's something I'm sure Yudha has experienced I've experienced it a lot of writers outside of the anglo-centric spaces of the UK and the United States have experienced it and I think the crux of the matter really lies in the fact that the United States has dominated science fiction publishing for a very long time it has established the market it has established precedence for what what will be published what will appeal to the market but I think there is it has not explored all avenues as of yet in terms of what might appeal to the market and there is room for risk taking so for example a book set in India why would anyone outside of India care about it we could say the exact same thing why would we care about a book set in the United States in the near future of the United States but we do and I think as the world moves towards being a bit more global I would possibly hope that publishing is a space moves towards representing more global perspectives there is a move right now where a movement of sorts where a lot more own voices authors are being represented and are being encouraged to tell their stories but again it is harder geography is still a very solid constraint here where it's a lot of diaspora people who no longer live in the subcontinent or let's say for example a South America or in Africa doing this the platforms for people who are outside of the Anglophone geography and not just the Anglophone experience are very limited but I think we are slowly seeing tiny little breakthroughs just the fact that there were a bunch of short story writers on that Locust Longlist who from the subcontinent Samit and Gautam Bhatia's books were up there as well it's a sign that things might be moving towards opening up a bit and I am optimistic I am very optimistic or I wouldn't be doing this I mean thanks to you Lavanya and you Yudha and Samit and Gautam Bhatia knocking on the door is getting louder it's just a matter before those doors come crashing down I think it's just a matter of time if things are anything to go by right sorry sorry quickly adding like Yudha's book salvage crew number one on audible that's not a small achievement you know that's huge so congratulations and go on Srinoy that's what I was about to get to you know the salvage crew is you know up the vessel your book Gautam Bhatia's book, Samit's book are on Locust list Shivram Das, Nivedita Sen and you know the Charma they were all there on the Locust list as well like I said in the beginning this year was the highest representation for Indian writers and by Indian writers South Asian Indian writers still in India publishing from India right so let me preface that because if you expand the definition then we'll be here till the cows come home and explaining why that is so yeah I mean good sign of things to come and also the community of one of the big things that America has which we didn't have to this it was a sort of community I mean they were always readers but there was no community people together that's there that whole thing of Ghar ki Murgi, Dal Barabar is slowly changing right chosen spirits was shortlisted for the GCB I mean right usually it's only just lit fig that gets picked so these are signs of changing times and I think you know it's going to change yeah absolutely and as much as you know you writers are doing a wonderful job and thank you to all of you I think it also comes back a lot as readers to keep making noise about these books to kind of really you know just keep talking about it because they are worth talking about, they are awesome books thank you so much I think that's a really relevant point Vijay I mean we wouldn't be here at all without readers nobody would want to publish science fiction out of this part of the world without people reading science fiction from this part of the world and you know everyone tuning in today and listening to our conversation because you make this possible and that's amazing thank you thank you Dabanya few last questions one from Mad Max one who asks which is your favourite sci-fi book and another one from 1972 Sujata who asks is there any platform for young aspiring writers and your valuable inputs for them wow favourite what's your favourite sci-fi book first because I just have to say it's impossible to pick it is truly impossible to pick there are so many unbelievable wonderful books out there I can probably mention my favourite sci-fi books from the last year I suppose like you know we've mentioned them we've mentioned all those books already there's Samet Basu's Chosen Spirits The Wall The Salvage Crew fantastic books all from South Asia just in the last year alone which is incredible other than that like influences or maybe wider influences a lot of the classics Ursula Le Guin is possibly one of my biggest influences she's a marvellous writer check out her left hand of darkness if you haven't read it already yeah it's a huge thing like William Gibson Kim Stanley Robinson I can go on Octavia Butler long list long list and the second question I think which was about aspiring writers I think in terms of platforms I'm not clear like if we're talking about short story platforms in SFS there's one of them there's the Mithila review which is Indian SFS magazine and they just brought out their 15th issue so congratulations to them really glad to see them back and there are a ton of magazines like Strange Horizon each one has their own niche of things they tend to like to publish it's not dominant it's a very subtle you'll get a vibe for what they like to do or the kinds of avenues they like to explore by reading them so it's a pretty complex like our long answer I think that I would say look out for SFS magazines if you do write SFS and in terms of advice of any sort I would say the only thing you can do is to persevere and to keep writing like it's a hard space to operate on it's a very subjective space which makes it harder but keeping at it and reading a ton of stuff while you keep at it and reading stuff from every possible genre I mean most of the stuff I read are sci-fi fantasy but I do read outside of those spaces as well and if you can stay open to ideas and keep writing and keep persevering I think that's the best thing you can do if you want to write Thank you Lavanya I mean this has been a fascinating discussion I wish we could go on but I think let's wrap up now thank you so much for agreeing to come and speak to us this is really really wonderful thank you to the audience who's been so wonderful and participative I hope you will pick up Analog Virtual if you haven't yet, please do read it and also look out for Lavanya's upcoming work in Girlings and Third Eye Thank you to my amazing co-moderator Shenoy as always Thank you to Hasgeek, Zainab Jyotsna, everyone who's been handling the back-end stuff over here Thank you everyone, if you have any suggestions for who you would like to see next on the Antel inside book club please let us know Thank you and good evening to the folks in India good afternoon good night to wherever else people are Thank you Vijaya you're an amazing co-host as well it is Friday evening TGIF whatever socially distanced house arrest Friday night plans Thank you Lavanya Great conversation Thank you for agreeing to come and echo Vijay Lakmi's sentiment that we've had a very engaged audience today Thank you all guys for giving us an hour of your time and for making it Do pick up Analog Virtual and also some other further reading suggestions that we other books that we spoke about Keep reading in NSF support our authors and next thing you know we'll get more and more such books from our own people it's only if we support our writers and make noise about it will the publishers listen will the quote-unquote Anglosphere listen and we'll have bigger, better, more amazing books and coming out and more frequently Thank you, keep reading and I guess live long and prosper Thank you Thank you so much everyone Thank you for having me Hey Hey Yuna Finally Yes I've put on my kimono as you can see I'm loving it That's an awesome look Oh nice He looks like he's just about to get into a big brother broadcast with that flag It really got like this dystopian sound-cancel Exactly I'm getting full on man in the high castle vibe Right now it's a man in the slightly extremely low castle I'm going through edits on the inhuman peace and oh god I want to shoot somebody Oh no Yeah Let's just say that I would happily yield this editor into the sun If I could She has changed so much colloquialism Outrightly much gross Anyway