Amitav Ghosh at Equator:
I came of age as a reader in the 1970s, when apocalyptic fiction was much in vogue because of intensifying nuclear anxieties. As a teenager, I devoured books set in the aftermath of an atomic catastrophe, like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.
Apocalyptic fiction was then more or less exclusively the preserve of Western writers: as far as I know, no Indian novels of this kind existed at that time. Perhaps this was because we, in India, did not have nuclear weapons targeted directly at us back then; we were merely spectators in a conflict that had two blocs of powerful nations as its main protagonists. In the event of a nuclear war, we would be merely collateral damage; our elimination would be an afterthought.
Today the risk of nuclear war is greater than ever before, yet it hardly merits so much as a headline. This is possibly because the world as we know it could now be brought to an end in many other ways as well – for instance, through biodiversity loss, runaway artificial intelligence, unstoppable viruses and, of course, abrupt climate change.
More here.
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