The Science Fiction Dimensions of Salman Rushdie

This book focuses on the science fictional dimensions of Rushdie’s later novels, Fury, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown and Luka and the Fire of Life, and Rushdie’s first unpublished novel, The Antagonist, to show how the author‘s oeuvre moves towards a more consistent engagement with science fiction as a generic form and an ideological investment. The author demonstrates how Rushdie recreates personal and national histories in a science fictional setting and mode, and contends that the failure of his first novel Grimus may have led Rushdie away from SF for some time, although he returns to it with a much firmer conviction and a much stronger voice in his later novels, showing his commitment to this imaginative form which he describes in Fury as providing “the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and metaphysics.”The science fictional mode is the most appropriate vehicle for expressing these thematic and ideological concerns and the organizing feature of Rushdie’s oeuvre. The author rereads the later novels in light of recent critical engagement with SF as a vehicle for reimagining national histories and as a potentially subversive tool for social and political engagement in a fictional realm.

Yael Maurer is a lecturer in the department of English and American studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Yael Maurer

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 212
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7496-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1402-1
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vi
Preface: Rereading Rushdie 1
1. Rushdie’s Peripheries: Imagined Histories of Nation 3
2. Rage Against the Machine: Cyberspace Narratives in Rushdie’s Fury 30
3. “The World Is (Not) What It Is”: The Ground Beneath Her Feet 50
4. The Year of the Reverse: The Antagonist and Midnight’s Children 75
5. Haroun and Shalimar: Kashmir and Koshmar 121
6. Immortality Now: Luka and the Fire of Life 149
Conclusion: The Genre That Isn’t: Rereading Rushdie 178
Chapter Notes 187
Works Cited 195
Index 201