Rebellious cellphones. Lustful holograms. A tourist vampire with a taste for spicy Indian blood. A conference of galactic gods.
In twenty-five exhilarating stories, Manjula Padmanabhan brings her trademark twist to familiar reality, dreaming up inventive futures and capturing today's world with equal flair.
From bejewelled party guests suddenly stripped naked to a teenager who steals time, from mosquitoes that infect people with Gandhian pacifism to a dystopia where everyone breathes canned air, this remarkable collection poses urgent questions: what does it mean to live in a society, and this one in particular? Where are we headed, and do we even want to get there?
At once funny, provocative and profound, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities is science fiction served up with a dab of ghee and a sprinkling of dark matter that will hold you captive till the very last page.
Review
'Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities is an electric, dazzling, thought-provoking collection. This is Manjula Padmanabhan at her finest: a terrific feat of Indian SF!'– Sami Ahmad Khan, researcher and author of Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction
'Manjula Padmanabhan's stories are original, often disturbing, and always thought-provoking. This collection reveals a writer in top form, effortlessly weaving between startling futures to come and the mundane realities of the worlds we inhabit today.' – Anil Menon, author of Half of What I Say
'Stolen Hours is testimony to Manjula Padmanabhan's evolving significance as a major author of Indian and South Asian SFF.' – Tarun Saint, editor of The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Vol 1 and 2
About the Author
Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer, artist, cartoonist and playwright. She grew up away from India, returning as a teenager, and now lives in the US, with a part-time home in New Delhi.
Padmanabhan is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including her travel-memoir Getting There and the first two of a science fiction trilogy, Escape and The Island of Lost Girls. Her play Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize for Theatre in Greece. She has published more than twenty illustrated books for children as author–artist, including Unprincess!, Mouse Attack, I Am Different and Mama, What is The Night?. Her female comic strip character SUKI has appeared in mass circulation newspapers such as the Sunday Observer, Pioneer and BusinessLine.
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