Joshi, Ruchir
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1960- ) Indian journalist and author whose first novel, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), is set in Near Future Calcutta, around 2020/2030, but whose narrative shuttlecocks through various eras as the protagonist reflects upon his and his country's almost unendurably complex history from 1970 to the moment he sits down to reflect, sometime after cities like Bombay and Karachi have been destroyed by nuclear bombs as the troubles continue. His memories/reconstruction of his parents' revolutionary activities and dreams, and his relationship with his own daughter (a fighter pilot) quartered in a Space Station, are rendered with a gonzo pointillist intensity, no one passage of story remaining long enough to settle in the reader's mind; but the mosaic created, though jagged, has at times very considerable power, generating a sense that Joshi's State of the Nation tale may be a central contribution to twenty-first century sf. [JC]
Ruchir Joshi
born Kolkata, West Bengal, India: 1960
works
- The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (London: Flamingo, 2001) [hb/]
links
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