SciFi classics in Tamil: Sujatha’s short stories

Abstract

S. Rangarajan alias Sujatha (1935-2008) was a prolific and popular Tamil writer of novels, detective fiction, film scripts, etc. An electric engineer by profession, Sujatha has also written popular science books and is well-known for his SciFi short stories.

Rather than the technophile, hard-core SciFi his professional background may suggest, Sujatha’s stories usually feature common Tamil social settings and quite economically deploy elements of estrangement. A very typical trait of his stories is their calibrated enactment of a climax or turning point, a quality that has been seen as a defining feature of short story writing in general.

I my paper I want to portray and evaluate Sujatha’s SciFi productions and discuss their generic features. I will also attempt to place them in the larger South Asian SciFi context.