Vandana Singh on How Physics and Fiction Inform Each Other

In this episode of New Books in Science Fiction, Rob Wolf talks with Vandana Singh, a physicist and writer of speculative fiction whose Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories made this year’s short list for the Philip K. Dick Award.

A reader might think that a professor of physics wouldn’t write stories that explore impossibilities like time travel or machines “that cannot exist because they violate the known laws of reality” (the subject of the collection’s eponymous tale). But Singh embraces paradox and the simple truth that there’s still much about the universe that we don’t understand.

“One of the things that really bothers me about how we think about the world is that we split it up into all these different disciplines and fields that have impenetrable walls between them, and one of the reasons I love … writing science fiction is that it allows us to make those walls porous,” Singh says.

Among the themes her stories explore are nostalgia for childhood, mothers yearning for children (and children yearning for mothers), loneliness, and a sense that reality is slippery—that people and inanimate objects aren’t always what they seem.

Born and raised in New Delhi, Singh’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics. She now lives near Boston, and is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Earth Science at Framingham State University. Ambiguity Machines is her second short story collection.

“The only reason I haven’t written [a novel] is because of lack of time because I have a very intense day job,” she says. “So all I can do is to find a little oasis, a temporal oasis in the summer and write some stories, and short stories at that.”

An edited excerpt of Wolf and Singh’s conversation follows.

Rob Wolf: I can imagine that your knowledge of physics informs your stories, but does your fiction ever inform your physics, maybe give you new insight into a way to look at the world or solve a problem or maybe even just convey lessons to students?

Vandana Singh: Definitely. It works both ways. So when I think about physics I think about nature speaking to us through the laws of nature, through the phenomena that we see. Physics is one way to listen in on the conversations that nature is having, the stories that nature is telling us, whether it is a planet telling the story or a proton or a molecule.

For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been transitioning from studying particle physics to interdisciplinary scholarship of climate change, and I find that when I write fiction to explore concepts, it helps me also conceptualize climate science for the classroom and beyond and think of—or reframe—different ways of thinking about climate change and what’s happening to our world.

RW: I can imagine that your knowledge of physics might get in the way of a story because you stop yourself and say, “Gosh, I can’t put that in my story because that’s not possible.”

VS: Well, yes and no. It’s certainly true that knowledge of science puts constraints on what you can write. But it also allows you ways out of those constraints. So, for instance, I would never, ever in a million years write a story about a spaceship that, let’s say, runs out of fuel suddenly and comes to a sudden stop. Newton will tell you that cannot happen. So I would not put any egregious violations of physics in my stories. But that need not limit the imagination because I can ask myself, “What kind of universe would there be where the law of inertia doesn’t hold?”

You can write an alternative universe story, but there, you are deliberately breaking the laws of physics to work differently in a different universe. It is not as though you are making a blunder because you happen not to know the laws of physics. There’s a speculative element to the science that we can do if we are knowledgeable.

It’s analogous to using words, using writing to create different structures. You can you can break the rules of grammar out of ignorance, and then it’s just a bad piece of writing. But if you know the rules of grammar, and you mess with them or bend them in a creative way with full awareness of what you’re doing, then that’s a different story.

RW: Do you think we’ll ever figure out a theory of reality that holds together? Or is it possible that the human mind and our abilities will hit a wall that we simply can’t go beyond?

VS: I hope that we’ll never find that the universe is so simple that we would find the key to everything. I think that it’s an infinite onion. You take off one layer, and there’s another and there is another. In part, it is because of our limitations as human beings that we only see in a certain way. Maybe there’s a theorem that someone will write in the far future that the more understanding you have, the more unknowns there are, and the more questions there are. And I think I would enjoy that universe better than one that was so simple that once you have the key, that’s it.