The Subverse

In the final episode of the season, Susan Mathews speaks with Antone Martinho-Truswell, a fascinating behavioural ecologist, Operations Manager at the Sydney Policy Lab, and Research Associate at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. His Substack is called The Village Green and he is author of The Parrot in the Mirror: How evolving to be like birds made us human (2022). The book, and this episode, considers the parallels between the ‘evolutionary grooves' of the extremely advantageous traits of humans and birds—the former, by becoming the cultural ape, and the latter through flight.  Antone explains how one trait that is advantageous leads to a number of adaptations that support it. For example, how human babies are born underdeveloped, and humans have cultures that care for children for a long time in order to support the big brain that we need to grow. Taking us through the evolution of birds, Antone describes how, in dinosaurs like T-Rex, small raptors and Archaeopteryx, scales evolved into feathers which smaller dinosaurs probably began to take advantage of with glides and long leaps. And, over time, the bodies of these creatures became entirely specialised for flight.  They spoke about relative lifespans. Birds live two to ten times as long as mammals of a similar size. The reason is flight. The most obvious advantage is that it's much easier to escape predators, but birds live longer even when there are no predators around. This is because of K-selection and r-selection. K-selection is a live-slow-die-old strategy, and r-selection a live-fast-die-young strategy. An adaptation like flight starts a virtuous cycle where, since it is much more likely that a bird makes it to the next breeding season, evolution selects traits that enable it to live longer.  Movement itself, Antone stresses, is a pretty impressive biological feat. While microorganisms and water-dwelling creatures like coral are bathed in the medium that sustains its life, and plants are rooted in a life-sustaining substrate, wrapping all of the incredibly complex chemical reactions of life in a waterproof bag like a dog or a human is incredible. And then adding the third dimension of flight is a difficult feat because the animal has to fight gravity itself. The evolutionary advantage is huge because it's rare, and it's rare because it's hard to do.  But such a drastic advantage can also have other implications. Antone's article Empire of Flight in Aeon, considers why, even though birds have a lot of the same raw materials for a robust and complex culture—intelligence, communication, long overlapping lives, knowledge passed down through the generations—they have not developed one. Evolution never aspires to anything, only responds to inadequacy, and so, he hypotheses, birds don't need culture because flight is such a powerful adaptation. The more advantageous the adaptation, the less likely it is that a different way of life evolves.  Similarly, in humans, while there are some incremental changes to our genes, our complex culture, with its welfare, science, and other innovations, has taken away the pressure to do things differently. Even if there is an apocalyptic event that takes away all of our technology, we're still going to have all of the abstract components—like writing and money—that give us significant advantages. But just as this capacity lets us build concepts like democracy, it also enables us to build complex concepts like ‘enemies' and ‘hate' in ways that few other creatures can.  Finally, while narrow sustainability—energy consumption, resource use—is important, Antone persuades us to think of broader sustainability. We need to consider the physical space and the resources that we and our cities use, and, rather than fencing in nature, find ways to live that are continuous with the rest of nature.  This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.    More about the guest: Antone Martinho-Truswell's work focuses on animal minds and learning, and on human behaviour and interaction with the natural world. He is particularly interested in birds and cephalopods, intelligent species whose evolutionary history differs dramatically from that of mammals. His academic work has been published in Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Current Biology and Animal Behaviour and covered in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times and New Scientist, among others. He also writes on longstanding questions in biology and animal behaviour for Aeon and the BBC. You can find him on Instagram @stjosephwoodworks.  

In episode four of The Subverse, host Susan Mathews talks with Joaquin Ezcurra, an intrepid and adventurous cartographer, marine technician and web developer. Since 2017, Joaquin has been actively involved in Aerocene, an open-source, experimental practice and movement for eco-social justice founded by artist Tomás Saraceno and carried forward by a growing global community since 2015. Aerocene uses art, site-specific installations and augmented reality sculptures to promote climate change awareness. Joaquin has been involved in its aero-solar flight operations, digital strategies, website development, app development, communications, acts as a community liaison, and documents the movement through thousands of images and videos.  Air and the atmosphere, Joaquin reminds us, are the ultimate commons. As Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, famously said, we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. But today, the air is highly controlled, for political, military and commercial reasons. Aerocene imagines a utopia, allowing us to dream of a world in which we may take more time and a more winding route to reach our destination; and our destinations themselves may change. Over the last decade, Aerocene has had projects on six continents, 37 countries and 158 locations, and a total 218 flights. It has evolved from an art and science project to an art and activism project. Joaquin emphasised however, that the story of the movement is not only one of triumphs but failures and learning. The need for safety came into focus early when, while piloting an experimental flight, Tomás Saraceno fell from a significant height, sustaining injuries that required surgery. Since then, the Aerocene community has embraced the highest aeronautical safety protocols and only involves professional balloon pilots for aerosolar free-flights. A milestone for the Aerocene movement was the 2020 flight of the Aerocene Pacha. A team comprised of Argentine and foreign pilots, the indigenous communities of the Salinas Grandes fighting for their rights, and BTS fans, in the middle of the salt flats of Argentina were witness to a flight that broke 32 FAI world records for altitude and distance. The flight was piloted by Leticia Marqués, a kindergarten teacher turned professional balloon pilot. It was livestreamed around the world, carrying a message chosen by the local First Nation communities: ‘water and life are worth more than lithium'. It was, as Joaquin describes, a sight never seen; a compelling intersection of science, art, activism and music communities coming together. We then discussed the issues with the ‘green transition', which is a shift to electric vehicles in Europe and other countries in the guise of environmental concerns. However, the mining of lithium, which is fuelling this shift, is destructive, and needs extractive infrastructure so vast that one can only comprehend it from a plane or a satellite. It is destroying the salt flats of Argentina, a crucial wetland that serves as a migratory hub for birds in the Americas. In 2023, the Aerocene community gathered in Alfarcito, Argentina, where some of the country's top environmentalist, sociologist lawyers, philosophers, artists, writers and poets issued a declaration based on the idea of the rights of nature for the Salinas Grandes in Alfarcito. This hasn't stopped mining companies, but these efforts have stood along these communities and slowed the advance of mining in this region.  Geopolitics has long been rooted in land ownership, projected upward into the air, and down into the earth. But the atmosphere is more than a void above the land. Recognizing the rights of air means acknowledging its agency in sustaining life. We need to move away from this colonial capitalist view and increase the connections in our lives. Aerocene's Museo Aero Solar, a free and open source project, to build a living museum with nothing more than a few thousand plastic bags and many volunteers, is the perfect tool for this. It brings people together and reminds us that when you have this strong, local connections, as Joaquin says, magic happens. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.  Read more about Aerocene in our interview with Claudia Aboaf, a writer, teacher and astrologer who has worked closely with the collective.  More about the guest: Joaquín Ezcurra is a cartographer, artist, and researcher whose practice explores alternative ways of seeing and representing natural phenomena, combining science with sensitivity in the context of the climate emergency. He has collaborated with leading cultural and scientific institutions worldwide, and since 2017 has been a core collaborator with the Aerocene Foundation and the worldwide Aerocene community.

In episode three, Susan Mathews continues her conversation with Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024). Mădălina works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Please listen to the first part of this conversation in episode two to hear about the need for a holistic view of our immersion in the atmosphere, thermic auras, and multisensory perception as the basis for empathy.  Our conversation began with tornadoes, their radical dynamic form that makes air visible and creates a figure that is both perfect and dangerous, an ambivalence which diverges from the classical experience of beauty as harmony. There are other figures of the sky like clouds, lightning and the rainbow, but Mădălina was drawn to the tornado's uncontrolled genesis and evolution as it challenges the assumption of the Anthropocene that humans can manipulate and domesticate everything.  She spoke of the limitations of equating materiality with solid matter. Water and air are also material, as are light and other electromagnetic waves, radiation and other phenomena. Mădălina invites a shift not just of how matter is conceptualized, but of the traditional representation of matter as something passive that can be manipulated by humans to instead recognise that we are not the only form of matter who can be assigned activity or agency.  The conversation then moved on to an interrogation of the human fixation on landscapes. Mădălina introduced the concept of landscapability to capture our tendency to compose, through analogy, a landscape even when land may not be present, say on the Arctic ocean as we are surrounded by air, water and ice. She also highlighted the values conveyed within our definition of landscapes, including emotional value such as patriotism, of topophilia. This theory of landscapes is also contextually informed by its origins in landscape painting in Italy and central Europe—a theory emerging from a different culture would not have the same principles. For example, one formed in the Amazonian forests would not have the particular principle of panoramic views.  Mădălina's study also includes work on the tactile aesthetics of cityscapes. A city is full of microclimates. On a hot summer day, you can enter a building and experience shadows and, in the last century, air conditioning. A glass houses can cultivate tomatoes earlier than the climate outside allows. This lack of a monotonous thermic landscape is a performance of civilization but so is paradoxically the creation of blandscapes such as shopping malls. The question of how to cope with and mitigate the consequences of climate change is not only for philosophers, but for architects and urban planners. The solution is not to build more capsules for a select group who can afford them; we need to develop strategies of common survival.  Finally, we discussed the idea of traces. Mădălina spoke of how a trace is a kind of material signature left by someone or by something. They are not ruins but remainders. Traces are present, while also suggesting an absence. Some traces are more enduring than a life itself. Waste is also a trace, though an unwanted one. Some of these waste traces are incontrollable and some, like radioactive waste, are indestructible.  Mădălina closes by urging us to pay attention to the things that surround us in everyday life, all worthy of our time and attention, that could open the doors of our perception to truly atmospheric living. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.  More about the guest: Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.

In episode two, Susan Mathews speaks to Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024) who works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception.  Re-defining aesthetics to mean not just beauty but perception, Mădălina spoke of weather not just as a frontal experience, but our immersion in the atmosphere, the very medium of our life and existence as it permeates our porous bodies and sensitivities. We experience it not as thinking subjects, but as living beings. While it is, in principle, a commons that is available to all, its perception and access is socially, culturally, politically conditioned. Aesthetic perception converges with scientific knowledge within the ethical consideration—we simply cannot enjoy a natural catastrophe. There is a communication of vessels between our moral and our aesthetic being. She spoke of how imagination throws us into the past, but we can also project ourselves into the future. And this is what at least some environmentally committed artists do, as they imagine the earth after the collapse of civilization, a paradoxical posthumous imagination.  Mădălina shared her long fascination with what were philosophically known as the ‘lower senses', including olfaction, and the need to go beyond Western philosophical frameworks. Smells are extremely evocative. The sense of temperature, usually subsumed in tactility which is a vast spectrum of perception in itself, deserves a separate theory. While sight has just two sensory organs, with temperature, we have the whole body, its surface and its depths. And the thermic ‘aura' of every living being extends beyond the boundary of the thermic subject. We then spoke of Herman Schmitz's concept of the body's tendencies to narrow and to expand, the epicritic and the protopathic, in breathing, in response to pain.  Mădălina brought to focus the tendency to subordinate the richness of perception of our everyday life and of art to a merely ocular experience. But in reality, we experience, say architecture, not merely as visual but also thermic, clothing also as tactile, perfumes not merely as olfactory but evoking a feeling, say of refreshment. And this goes deeper with performing arts such as dance where, as spectators, the tendency to focus on the visuals, leads to a deficit of empathy and a disregard for other aspects of the dancer's experience such as heat and pain. In visual arts and fine arts, thermic considerations could destroy the art itself, or be used by the artist to form or deform materials. As Mădălina said, we need to expand our traditional aesthetic concepts to account for this richness of experience.  Join us with your thermic body and enjoy the fleecy, cloudy edges of our conversation. This is part one of the conversation. Listen to part two in episode three to hear our conversation about tornadoes, traces and landscapes.  This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.  More about the guest: Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.

We kick off season five of The Subverse, focused on the element of ‘air', with host Susan Mathews in conversation with Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India. Roxy has made breakthrough contributions to the research, monitoring, and modelling of climate and extreme weather events over the Indo-Pacific region. His work has advanced the scientific understanding of monsoon floods and droughts, terrestrial and marine heatwaves, and cyclones, facilitating the food, water, and economic security of the region. His recent research focuses on developing climate-smart health warning systems that integrate climate and health data with AI/ML to enable early action and long-term planning. Roxy actively collaborates with citizen science networks, local governments, and media to bring science to society.  Roxy starts by explaining that the average atmospheric temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.5 degrees doesn't tell the whole story. 93% of the heat produced by anthropogenic climate change is absorbed and contained by the oceans; the heat we feel is only 7% of it. Even this is also not equally distributed over time or space. The tropics, and regions like India which are surrounded by warming oceans, experience more heat. The changes in gradients in the temperature affects the paths of atmospheric jet streams and ocean currents that distribute heat, which changes the rhythm of the seasons, intensifying monsoons and increasing heat waves. The Indian Ocean, bordered by 40 countries that are home to a third of the global population, is warming faster than other oceans and moving to a near permanent marine heat wave state. Corals, on which 25% of the marine biodiversity depends, are the first to die in these heatwaves, losing their protective symbiotic algae. And this affects the numbers and species of phytoplankton, which produce half the oxygen we breath, and there are cascading impacts through the food chain.  He emphasises, however, that climate change is not the only factor in these changes. Industrial fishing has resulted in more depletion of fish than temperature changes. Flooding in India is caused not just by climate change but also rapid and unplanned urbanization and other local changes, but politicians will only blame the former. In the USA, they don't focus on climate change because they have a historical responsibility. The world is polarized and the narratives around climate change are selective based on alliances, but we need to have a comprehensive view.  There is hope, Roxy says. If we can use the data that we have to understand the heat waves over the land and ocean, we can adapt and safeguard the ecosystems and our own lives. If we act now, we can have different socioeconomic pathways for the future. Data is key to making these changes. Roxy's pet project is to make every school in India a weather station, starting with tools as simple as a plastic bottle to measure rainfall, because if children grow up with an awareness of how the climate is changing, they can adapt.  While a lot of the focus is on climate mitigation, this is outside the scope of the individual, or even a single country, and the necessary global cooperation doesn't exist. Roxy reminds us, however, that adaptation is something that can and needs to be done locally. We can track local data, project this data into the future, and prepare our homes, farmlands, and our daily life for a climate changed world. Roxy is that unusual blend of rigorous scientist and amazing science communicator, who speaks with empathy, heart and an outlook prioritizing action and deeds. This conversation was also proof of something I have found in this elemental journey in the past few years. Quoting John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”   This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.  More about the guest:  Roxy Koll did his Ph.D. in Ocean and Atmospheric Dynamics from Hokkaido University, Japan. He is a Lead Author of the IPCC Reports and the former Chair of the Indian Ocean Region Panel. He received the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (National Science Award), the highest recognition in the field of science, technology and innovation in India, from the President of India in 2024. He was conferred a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and was awarded the AGU Devendra Lal Medal for outstanding research in Earth and Space Sciences in 2022. He is among the top 2% scientists ranked by Stanford University. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Kavli Fellowship in 2015 and the NRC Senior Research Fellowship in 2018. The Indian Meteorological Society felicitated him with the Young Scientist Award in 2016 for his research on the changes in the Monsoon. You can follow Roxy on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read more about his work here.

In episode three of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with writer, academic and documentary producer, Sami Ahmad Khan.  He is the author of Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia (2012), Aliens in Delhi (2017), and the monograph Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021).   Sami was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and his fiction has been the subject of formal academic research and a part of university syllabi in India and the US. His overview of Indian SF has been translated into Czech and his short story has been translated into Marathi. His creative and critical writings have appeared in leading academic journals (Science Fiction Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Foundation), university presses (MIT Press, University of Wales Press), and trade imprints (Gollancz, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Rupa, Juggernaut, Niyogi). Sami is also the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship (University of Oslo, Norway), a Fulbright FLTA grant (University of Iowa, USA), and a UGC-MANF Senior Research Fellowship (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India). He currently discusses life and Science Fiction at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, where he teaches MA and PhD-level courses on SF, as well as supervises PhD research on Indian SF. In this episode, we discuss our love for pulpy science fiction, T-rexes, Black holes, and the Bermuda triangle, thought experiments, being a fan, genre conventions, and the future of Indian science fiction. You can follow Sami on X @SamiAhmadKhan Read Sami's Work: Books 1. Aliens in Delhi. Niyogi Books (2017) 2. Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia. Rupa & Co. (2012) 3. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction. University of Wales Press (2021) Edited Collection: 1. The Speculative Route: Futures from South and Southwest Asia and North Africa. Routledge (2025, co-edited with Merve Tabur) Short fiction:   1. “Ancient Zombies: Six Indian Narratives of the Undead”. Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature. Jan-Feb. 2024. 2. “Biryani Bagh”, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction II. Hachette (2021) 3. “15004”, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction. Gollancz (2019) 4. “PT Period”, Muse India (2016) Podcast: 1. The NeoMONSTERS Podcast Academic articles: 1. “Zombies and India: The neoMONSTERS Epidemiology”. The Journal of Popular Culture, 56(2). 341-355. (2023) 2. “Dom(e)inating India's Tomorrow(s)? Global Climate Change in Select Anglophonic Narratives”. Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. 6(2). 25-37 (2019) 3. “The Others in India's Other Futures,” Science Fiction Studies. 43(3), Indian SF. 479-495 (2016)  4. “Gods of War Toke While Riding a Vimana: Hindu Gods in Three Indian Science Fiction Novels.” Journal of Science Fiction. 1(1) 17-31 (2016) 5. “Control+Alt+Delete Humanity” Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. Ed. By Yoshinaga, Guynes and Canavan. MIT Press (2022)

In this final instalment of Cataplisms, we join conservation anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan and his collaborator Iho Mitapo in the Dibang Valley on a journey that is both spiritual and scientific. Iho and Sahil are founding members of the Dibang Team, a biocultural conservation initiative led by the Idu Mishmi, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dibang valley, that takes a multi-pronged and multi-disciplinary approach. It has established an ancestral storytelling program (Taju Taye), piloted a program that adapts the traditional system of shamanic learning to present-day socio-economic realities (Igu Aahito) and pioneered community-led conservation and research.  In this audio story, Iho details the creation story of his Idu Mishmi community, one which deems man and tiger to be brothers. Meanwhile, Sahil fills us in on their camera-trapping expedition that resulted in a sensational deep-forest revelation. His team discovered a unique adaptation that might be critical to the survival of the elusive Asian golden cat, a beautiful mid-sized feline listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Click here to see their discovery vibrantly illustrated in a comic by artist Sudarshan Shaw.  Sahil and Iho's research takes place in the sprawling Dibang valley in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The valley lies in the embrace of the Eastern Himalayas Global Biodiversity Hotspot, where new species, like the orchid Hemipilia basifoliata are continuously being discovered. The culture of the Idu Mishmi is credited for preserving the diversity of this land. However, today the Valley is threatened by infrastructure projects, including 17 mega dams proposed along the valley's eponymous river. Local and national opinion on these projects is divided, but one thing is certain—if these are greenlit the social, cultural and ecological fabric of the region will be irreversibly changed. With such looming threats to their habitat, the fate of the Golden Cat and myriad other species remains uncertain.  You can learn more about the work of the Dibang Team on their website and read about the Save Dibang Valley movement here.           The audio story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website. About the narrators:  Iho Mitapo is an Idu Mishmi from Lower Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh. He has been conducting research on Dibang Valley's biocultural diversity since 2014 in collaboration with anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan. Iho is the first certified river guide from the Idu community. In 2017, he founded a home-grown ecotourism venture, Dibang Adventures, with the aim of preserving Dibang's unique landscape while engaging unemployed local youth. He is a member of the Dibang Team, an Idu-led biocultural conservation initiative. He also co-coordinates the activities of Elopa-Etugu Community Eco-Cultural Preserve (EECEP)—a Community Conserved Area spanning 76 km2 in his ancestral land, one of the most biodiverse parts of India. Iho was awarded the prestigious Sanctuary Wildlife Service Award in 2018 for his tireless work and contribution towards the conservation of his homeland. He has delivered talks at several national and international fora and has inspired films and articles on Dibang Valley's story. He is also a farmer and a father of two wonderfully curious young Idus. Sahil Nijhawan is engineer turned conservation anthropologist. For more than a decade, he has conducted interdisciplinary research in Latin America, Southern Africa and India. He is interested in human-wildlife relations, big cat ecology and conservation, camera trapping methods, indigenous/local concepts of nature, animism and shamanism, hunting sustainability, ritual ecologies, and locally-led conservation. His ongoing research and collaborative conservation work in Northeast India began with his doctoral research which studied the ecological, cultural and political relations between wildlife and the Idu Mishmi people of the Dibang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Future work will expand research into other ethnic communities within Northeast India to understand the factors that lead to local conservation. He is particularly interested in newer ways of integrating cutting edge technologies with local knowledge and classical ethnographic approaches, research capacity building in NE India and collaborating with local people, artists and educators towards inclusive, ethical and reflexive approaches to conservation research and writing. Sahil is affiliated with ZSL, National Geographic Society, UCL Anthropology, and the ICCA Consortium. He enjoys travelling, learning languages, baking and growing his own food.

In episode three, we chat with Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna, and R.T. Samuel, the brilliant minds behind The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which has been making waves in the Indian speculative fiction scene.  Rashmi Devadasan is a writer with over twenty-five years of experience in indie publishing, Tamil feature films, and Indian English theatre. At Blaft, she has been part of the selection, editing, design and production of the company's fiction in translation, comic book anthologies, original fiction, and zines. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a picture book created with the artist Shyam. Her short stories were part of an anthology titled Strange Worlds! Strange Times! Amazing Sci-Fi Stories, published by Speaking Tiger. She is a fan of fungi, moss, lichen, cephalopods, and jellyfish. Rashmi also draws gentle, mostly cuboidal-shaped sample collector robots that do research on a cacti-covered asteroid. You can find Rashmi Devadasan on Instagram @kaimaurundai. Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, who is also his wife, in 2008. The company publishes translations of Indian fiction, folklore, weird fiction, and graphic novels. Rakesh is the co-author of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India, the editor of Blaft's Tamil Pulp Fiction and Gujarati Pulp Fiction anthologies, and co-editor of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF. Sometimes he edits mathematics textbooks. He is interested in marine invertebrates, demonology, topological graph theory, and banging on things to see what they sound like. You can find Rakesh Khanna on Instagram @blaftpublications.  R.T. Samuel is an editor and independent cultural producer working between London and New Delhi. R is the co-editor of the collection, The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, helmed by a viral fundraiser that made it the second-most successful Indian publishing campaign in Kickstarter history. The book involved working with nearly 30 authors, translators and artists for close to two years, and features stories from more than six different languages and diverse mediums. From 2021-23, R was also the writer and broadcaster behind the hugely popular (20k plays and counting) underground political and cultural education podcast Clear Blue Skies S1. A lapsed investigative and culture journalist, R is currently pursuing an MSc in Anthropology and Professional Practice at University College London and is always happy to talk about 80s SFF, public radio, futures literacy and Indian hip-hop. You can find R.T. Samuel on Instagram @mithran.rt. In this episode, we discuss the lack of understanding around caste, what's missing from the Indian SFF scene, the challenges and thrills of putting together an expansive anthology, the importance of translated fiction, Enid Blyton's undeniable influence, and more.  Links to Rashmi Devadasan's work: Kumari Loves A Monster Links to Rakesh Khanna's work: Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India – Blaft Publications The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF – Blaft Publications The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction – Blaft Publications Links to R.T. Samuel's work: I Know My Own Animal Heart on Third Eye (Essay) As Long As The Image Lasts: Shaping Memory & Making Imprints At Peers '23 (Essay)  

In episode two of season four, lawyer, author, and editor Gautam Bhatia returns!  When we last spoke to Gautam, he had just published The Horizon, the much-anticipated sequel to The Wall. Since then, he's published a variety of non-fiction books, helped curate and edit a new anthology, Between Worlds, for Westland Books, and published a new sci-fi novel: The Sentence. The Sentence is genre crossing, with elements of political thrillers, murder mysteries, and old school science fiction. In it, the protagonist, Nila, is faced with an ethical, legal and political conundrum which will change the world as she knows it.  In this episode, we discuss the Indian science fiction landscape, Japanese-style murder mysteries, being fallible humans, the death penalty and carceral justice, and the big fat desi space opera.  You can follow Gautam on X @gautambhatia88 Read Gautam's Work: The Sentence (2024) The Wall (2020) The Horizon (2022) Between Worlds (2025)

In the first episode of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with Gigi Ganguly, to discuss her debut collection of short stories, Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World (Westland Books, 2024). Gigi began her career as a journalist and, after some years of writing for newspapers, she decided to study creative writing at the University of Limerick. Her first novella, One Arm Shorter than the Other, published in 2022, got her nominated for the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award in 2023. Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World focuses on the relationship between the human and more-than-human in a fascinating, speculative way. A man herds clouds, a powerhouse singer conjures rain, a scientist piggybacks on an otter's consciousness, and much more.  In this episode, we discuss the beauty of Steinbeck's writing, the peculiar case of Elon Musk, K-dramas, rain songs, dinosaurs and robots.  You can follow Gigi on X @gigiganguly Read Gigi's Work: Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World One Arm Shorter than the Other  

In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, delves into the conflict between big cats and humans. Nayanika's book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (2021), was a key source of inspiration for Cataplisms, which examines the intersections of capitalism through a feline lens. In this piece, Nayanika focuses on the governance of nonhuman animals, their entanglements with humans, and what the consequences are.  Mathur talks about the two types of big cats—the seeda saada (straightforward) ones who are scared of humans and keep their distance, and the crooked cats – the adam khor (maneaters) who prey on people. The reasons why some cats become man-eaters, while others avoid humans,  are widely debated. Hypotheses include that the cats have come from elsewhere, due to hunting and poaching, or that they're children of other man-eaters. This uncertainty has consequences. For example, the tiger Ustad, who resided in Ranthambore, was moved out of the sprawling environment of the national park to be confined in a zoo on the suspicion of being a man-eater. This move stirred a national controversy, eliciting an emotional outpouring and contradictory viewpoints. Ustad's life may have been restricted without cause. How does one govern the unknown?  Given the precarious status of most big cat species, the fact that hunting crooked cats is the standard solution of the Indian state becomes even more fraught. Especially, as Mathur underlines, when it is difficult to identify which cat is the crooked one. Drastic measures are often taken posthumously to ostensibly abide with the laws of the land and justify a kill.  Mathur emphasises the need to think more deeply about our entanglements with the non-human, revise our laws and institutional practices, and give up our crooked ways.  This audio story is part of the Cataplisms project. You can learn more about it here.  This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website.    About Nayanika Mathur Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies as well as Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, UK. Educated at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge she is an anthropologist with an interest in studying the state, ethnographic methods, nonhumans, and the climate crisis. At Oxford Nayanika is co-director of a research network ‘Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences' which explores the ways through which climate change poses a profound challenge to how the academy – from forms of writing and modes of teaching to disciplinary divisions – operates. Nayanika is the author of two monographs – Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (Chicago University Press, 2021). The first is centred upon the study of bureaucrats and the second on big cats, though they are often confused. In her argument on the governance of big cats this connection - between the paper tiger that is the Indian state and the crooked cats that are entangled with the planetary crisis – becomes, one hopes, clearer. 

In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, we present our first Cataplisms audio story. The Cataplisms project examines our multispecies entanglements, critiques capitalism, and acknowledges the cataclysms at our doorstep, all through a feline lens. In this episode, we hear from someone personally and professionally invested in the fate of big cats and the forests they live in. Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer and wildlife historian, who focuses on East Central India. His childhood in Jharkhand's Palamu region, surrounded by the forest's flora and fauna, including tigers and leopards, ignited his passion for protecting these cats, and his connection with forest landscapes. Kazmi illustrates how industrialization and capitalism have threatened India's tigers and other wildlife. A web of mines, dams, and other infrastructure projects within forest areas and critical wildlife corridors pockmark the forests of East Central India. This has fragmented habitats and disrupted migration routes, disorienting animals like elephants and tigers and exacerbating human-wildlife conflict. Kazmi shares that the lack of charismatic wildlife makes it easier to divert forest areas for more mining projects. Both people and animals who depend on these forests are adversely affected.  He delves into the drastic decline of animals, including tigers and leopards, in Palamu due to hunting coupled with the expansion of industries, which has pushed these animals to the brink, crossing an ecological Rubicon, and making urgent conservation intervention critical. Kazmi also talks about the lack of charismatic wildlife, or animals with mass appeal like tigers and elephants, in the area and how that can make it easier to divert forests for more mining or urbanisation projects. The destruction of these ecosystems thanks to expansion and hunting, has led to desperate circumstances. Raza shares the story of a male tiger's five-year trek across multiple states in search of a mate. The tiger's struggle underscores how capitalistic development has fragmented natural corridors, forcing wildlife to navigate human-dominated spaces rather than the jungles they belong in. But not all hope is lost. Kazmi emphasizes the pivotal role that local communities play in conservation. They are essential for saving tigers and other wildlife from the destructive forces of industrialization. He believes that, “if the forests are there, there will always be the hope of the wildlife returning.” About Raza Kazmi Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer, wildlife historian, storyteller and researcher. His fields of expertise include India's wildlife and forest administration history, conservation policy and conservation issues afflicting the insurgency-ridden east-central Indian landscape. His writings appear in national newspapers (The Hindu, The Indian Express), online media houses (The Wire, FiftyTwodotin, RoundGlass Sustain) as well as various magazines and journals (Frontline, Seminar, The India Forum, Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, Sanctuary Asia, Cheetal, etc.). He has also contributed essays to edited anthologies. A recipient of the New India Foundation Fellowship for 2021, he is currently writing a book tentatively titled To Whom Does the Forest Belong? The Fate of Green in the Land of Red. He works as a Conservation Communicator with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, and also teaches as a Guest Faculty for Wildlife Management at the Forest Guard Training Schools in Chaibasa and Ranchi in Jharkhand.  

In this episode, we're discussing plants, their exuberant multispecies sexualities and what we can learn from them, how botany is always interlinked with its cultural and historic context including colonialism, and an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist. Host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Professor Banu Subramaniam, the Luella LaMer Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. The book is about plant worlds and the legacies of colonialism. It focuses on three subfields: plant taxonomy, plant reproductive biology, and plant biogeography. Plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and its enduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonial sexuality were imposed on plants. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centres questions of what belongs, or doesn't, when and where.

In the eighth episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to Pranay Lal, a natural history writer and climate change advocate about the dearth of interest in publishing  books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums, how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more. Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit Fest Award and Delhi World Book Fair Award 2017. It was listed among Mint's 50 most significant books about India since Independence. His second book, Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (2021), also received multiple awards and was named among the 20 Best Non-fiction Books of 2021 by GQ and won the Green Lit Fest Award 2023. Both books have been translated into several languages.

In this episode host Susan Mathews talks to Heather Davis, the author of Plastic Matter (2022) about plastic and how it has completely permeated our world. They cover a wide range of topics from synthetic universality, technocapitalism, chemical legacies, queer kin, reproductive questions raised by plastic, and hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the author of Plastic Matter, Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada, and  Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies. You can find Heather Davis on social media at Instagram: @theoryxdaddy and on X @heather_davish1. 

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (2024), and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. The interview focused on the central question in the book: in what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet? From microbes to mammoths, life has transformed the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, turning a lump of orbiting rock into the world as we've known it. In the conversation, Jabr spoke of how Western science in particular has segregated geology from biology, regarding planet Earth essentially as a giant rock that happens to have some life, minimising the role of life in shaping the planet. Ferris Jabr has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham's Quarterly, McSweeney's, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program. His work has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count. You can find him @ferrisjabr on all social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon).

We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker Aseem Shrivastava about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment as an existential crisis, not just an intellectual crisis or a crisis of culture. During this fundamental upheaval in human affairs, the first thing you need to do is look at where your feet are. We need to ask fundamental questions about how we got here, and also address the terminal crisis in modern cosmology itself. “Without Nature, we are not.”- This is the start of an article Shrivastava wrote in The Open Magazine in 2021. He quotes Rilke and writes, “it appears that in the process of arising within us, the earth has dreams for us!” This earth is our only home, so he asks, “Are we ready to abandon her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space fantasists never fail to promise us? In a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously consider the possibility that Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in the manner that a mother has dreams for her children. And like a mother's dreams, the earth's hopes for us must have power.” Ecosophy, unlike environmentalism or ecology, fundamentally tackles things like earth alienation and looks at the content of our vanishing relationship to the natural world in its full physical and metaphysical depth. We need a new mythos, and we can learn from Rabindranath Tagore in this context. Through his poetry, music, stories, plays and letter, the mythos is all there and you don't need to go to science to find the meaning of life. We have a world that is arrhythmic, out of sync, not to mention suffering from psychic, cognitive and spiritual arrhythmia too. We need to understand the real roots of the crises we face, the limits of our knowledge, question our need to dominate and control and, in the end, face some heart reckoning and atonement. Aseem Shrivastava has taught at prestigious universities in India and the West and offered courses on Global and Indian Ecosophy at Ashoka University. He has been guiding and mentoring a number of graduate students and young people working in the realms of Philosophy, Ecosophy, Ecology, and Economics. He is the author (with Ashish Kothari) of the books ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India' (2012), and ‘Prithvi Manthan  (2016). He is currently at work on several books on Ecosophy:‘The Grammar of Greed:  Reflections on a Fatal Ecology', ‘The Alphabet of Ecosophy: A Grammar for Twilight Modernity', and ‘For Love of the Earth: Modernity, Ecosophy, Rabindranath Tagore'. All these works dialogue with the ecological challenges of 21st century global modernity. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

Vajra Chandrasekera returns to Arcx for our season finale. Since we last spoke, Vajra has won a Nebula award, as well as Crawford and Locus awards for his debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors. He has also been nominated for Le Guin, Ignyte, Hugo, Lammy, and British Fantasy Awards—and we're sure there are more in the pipeline!  Vajra's short stories, poems and articles have appeared in many publications over the years, including Clarkesworld and West Branch. He has also worked as an editor for Strange Horizons, and Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Stories.  In this episode, we delve into his second cross genre novel, Rakesfall, exploring the complexity of this fascinating novel that follows two characters across space, time, and life cycles and explores themes of power, resistance, and connections. We also discuss political oppression, genocidal playbooks, shifts in the publishing industry, South Asian writers, the flattened postcolonial world we live in, and much more.  You can follow Vajra Chandrasekera on X @_vajra   

This week, host Anjali Alappat chats with SF author, physicist, and transdisciplinary scholar of climate change, Vandana Singh. A professor of physics, Vandana's writing combines science and social issues in thought-provoking ways. In recent years, her work has been climate focused, a stark acknowledgment of the crisis we are currently enduring.  Her work includes Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018), the first work by a South Asian author to be a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award; The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet and Other Stories (2008), part of Zubaan's Classic series, and most recently Utopias of the Third Kind (2022). Vandana was a Climate Imagination Fellow at Arizona State University in 2021. In addition to her contributions to science fiction, she has also written for children, most notably her Younguncle books. She has also been recognised with Parallax and Otherwise Honor awards for her work.  In this episode, we discuss the micro and macro of the ever-evolving climate crisis, the commercialised space race, techno billionaires, writing character led stories, acknowledging privilege and learning from marginalised peoples, the capitalist desire to maintain the status quo, and socio-economic death cults. You can follow Vandana Singh on X @singhvan.  Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of , a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media , or visit for episode details and show notes.

In today's episode of Arcx, we're in conversation with sci-fi and fantasy author, R.R. Virdi.  Virdi published his first book, Dangerous Ways, an urban fantasy novel, in 2016. He is also the author of the Grave Report series, and Star Shepherd, a space western. The First Binding, the first in his new epic high fantasy series, The Tales of Tremaine, was released in 2022. The sequel, The Doors of Midnight, will be out in August 2024. Join us as we discuss stories within stories, the beauty and breadth of South Asian myths, the high cost of becoming a legend, complex magic systems, and complicated relationships.  You can follow R.R. Virdi  on X at rrvirdi or http://rrvirdi.com.   Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.  

Kritika H. Rao, speculative fiction and children's book author, joins us to discuss her critically acclaimed novel, The Surviving Sky, and its recently released sequel, The Unrelenting Earth. Having lived across the world in India, Australia, Canada, and the Sultanate of Oman, Kritika's stories are heavily influenced by her own experiences.   In her books, she often explores deep philosophical themes such as self vs. the world, the nature of consciousness, and the vagaries of identity.   Join us as we discuss main character syndrome, toxic relationships, the importance of community, complex magic systems, writing fantasy novels at thriller-like pacing, and what society really values.  You can follow Kritika on Instagram @kritikahrao.  

In this episode, host Anjali Alappat sits down with Gourav Mohanty, lawyer, writer, and stand up comedian. Born in Bhubaneshwar, the City of Temples, it's perhaps unsurprising that Gourav seeks to reimagine and redefine the myths and magic of the past. In his first novel, Sons of Darkness, Gourav plunges headfirst into the grimdark genre with an epic retelling of the Mahabharata. Filled with political power plays, ambiguously grey characters, mythical monsters emerging from the mist, history being written by victors, and assassins who do yoga—it's where India meets Westeros.  Join us as we discuss the ugliness of war, the freedom to create backstories, charming anti-heroes, George R.R. Martin and more.  You can follow Gourav on Twitter @MohantyGourav7 or on Instagram @thekingbeyondthewall. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Today's guest is award winning author and journalist, Bina Shah. Her first sci-fi novel Before She Sleeps was published in 2018, followed by the sequel The Monsoon War in 2023. Bina's work explores women's rights, societal issues, technology, education, and freedom of expression.  Additionally, Bina has authored four novels as well as two collections of short stories. Her work has been translated into several languages including English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Urdu, Sindhi and Italian. Bina's writing has also been carried in major publications like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, Dawn, and more. She has won Pakistan's prestigious Agahi Award for excellence in journalism twice. Her short story, The Living Museum, won the Dr. Neila C. Sesachari prize from Weber University's literary journal, Weber - The Contemporary West. And in 2022, she was presented with the insignia of a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an honorary award granted by the French government.  Join us as we discuss grappling with grief through writing, the nuances of feminism, seeing the world through the western gaze, women in politics, future federations, and A.I You can follow Bina on Instagram at @Bina_Writer or on X @BinaShah. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In epiode two of this season, host Anjali Alappat speaks to Indian sci-fi legend, Manjula Padmanabhan. A prolific author, playwright, journalist, and comic strip artist, Manjula's latest collection, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities (2023), is filled with short stories written between 1984 and today - and more relevant than ever.   We discuss the collection in depth, wherein a vampire discovers an endless feast in the subcontinent, an atheist reporter attends a divine conference, a man frozen in time catches a glimpse of the future, an enterprising philosopher experiences the bureaucracy of the afterlife, and much more.  Join us as we chat about unconventional upbringings, the arrogance of youth, what it takes to shape characters and scenarios, religion, tolerance, and Alice in Wonderland.  You can follow Manjula on Instagram @manjulapadmanabhan. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. We're kicking off this season with debut novelist Prashanth Srivatsa to discuss his debut epic fantasy novel, The Spice Gate (HarperCollins 2024).  Prashanth lives in Bengaluru, India, and is a longtime sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast. His short stories have been published in a variety of prestigious publications such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more.  The Spice Gate is a sweeping, exciting first novel, featuring a young man from the lowest rung of society, who, through a series of strange events, changes the world. Amir, the protagonist, is desperate to save himself and his family from a life of exploitation spent painfully transporting spices between kingdoms. Despite his dire circumstances, Amir dares to dream of a different life and soon becomes embroiled in political plots, resistance movements, and more. Throw in a love story, a socio-religious revolution, magic, mayhem, and you have a recipe for something truly special.  Join us as we discuss South Asian pirates, white saviour complexes, the best biryani, the many aspects of resistance, and generational trauma.  You can follow Prashanth on X where he's at prashatsa. Arcx is a mini series from the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagines futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or visit darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, we are in conversation with Dr. Craig Walton, a planetary scientist based at ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge. Craig's work spans the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe.  In this podcast, we chat about cosmic dust, the origins of life on Earth, and phosphorus—a key element for life, known as the ‘bringer of the light of day', and its more fiendish nickname, “The Devil's Element”. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in February 2024, Craig and his colleagues note that life on Earth probably originated from “reservoirs of bio-essential elements” such as phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. But our earth rocks are relatively poor in reactive and soluble forms of these elements. So where did they come from? Apart from meteorites and asteroids, they could have also found their way to earth through cosmic dust, mineral grain aggregates of less than 3 mm derived from asteroids and comets. And glaciers provide settings capable of both locally concentrating cosmic dust and initiating closed-system aqueous prebiotic chemistry in cryoconite holes, self-sustaining puddles or lakes. In a more poetic turn, we talked about meteorites, which has been termed by Elizabeth Grosz as the ultimate outsider, a cosmological imponderable that might burst through the perceived limits of the known. Craig noted that these materials speak at a deeper level about where we come from and how we should live. Potentially, all life derives from these cosmic gifts. We are really made of stardust. Everything about meteorites and their eviscerated metallurgic intensity speaks to their incredible durability.  We then moved on to Craig's PhD thesis on phosphorus, the backbone of DNA and our metabolism. It cycles through ecosystems in a mostly closed loop as organisms live, die and decay. This remarkable element, crucial for global food production, allows our civilization to flourish. However, with its overuse, we now face the dangers of fertilizer run-off such as algal blooms which can lead to ocean anoxic events which have been correlated with mass extinctions. For four and a half billion years, life has recycled minerals and resources, but we humans take them for granted. We churn through these resources, dump them in the oceans and move on. It can't end well. Outside of research, Craig writes science fiction as well as science communication articles on a wide range of topics. If you want to hear more from Craig about all of the above, you can follow him on Twitter/X @lithologuy for updates. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.  

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024). The conversation centres around the science of geology and its epistemic and field practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins. Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were categorized as ‘inhuman'. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns) that reveal subterranean currents. Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown, and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations. Yusoff speaks of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of extraction. She speaks of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison complex. For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don't start from the division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being. The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene, where we have what she terms as a “white man's overburden” with tech bros or predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and archiving of those struggles. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai, an anthropologist studying wildlife conservation with an interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation. Her monograph Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published in 2021. She has written extensively on issues of caste and indigeneity in the environmental sciences and academia in India. Ambika completed a PhD thesis in Anthropology from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and currently teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar in India. Susan and Ambika speak of how social hierarchies impact what ‘earth' means to its various inhabitants. For some a safe haven, for others a dangerous, hostile place. In the Indian context, this is evidenced by the deliberate invisibility of caste in environmental studies and in Indian academia. The exploitation of nature and the perpetuation of caste hierarchies are inextricably linked, with purity and pollution playing significant roles in determining access and exclusion. The lives and livelihoods of people of marginalised communities are often entwined—in a daily connection or a daily struggle—with the fabric of nature itself. Caste and class determine access to land, water, forest, pasture land. The ‘environment' is conceptualised as apolitical and asocial, like a kind of a local terra nullius. The social is absent from environmental studies and discourse. Nature is seen as separate from, and devoid of, humans. Indigenous worldviews, like that of the Mishmi in Arunachal Pradesh, where Ambika has worked, challenge this dichotomy, seeing instead a continuum of human, non-human, and spirit worlds. However, for a long time, wildlife conservation research and practice has ignored these communities and their knowledge. The conservation model of ‘protected areas' is offshoot of the dominant ‘development' practices. The state and scientists view the forest as a place to be measured and mapped, assigning it economic value. Both protected areas and infrastructure like dams and highways cut through geographies inhabited by indigenous peoples, making them ecological refugees.  The same notions of purity and pollution lead to the idea that people need to be evicted in order to conserve, a dark history of our national parks in our country. In finding answers to how we can approach repair and reparation in these academic and other conflict zones, Ambika speaks about the need to shift power structures, change our classrooms, to push for diversity among students, teachers and practitioner, to revamp our syllabi and be active in frontline activism. Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai is trained in natural and social sciences with masters' degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London funded by Ford Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. She has two co-edited volumes, Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care (2023) and More Than Just Footnotes: Field Assistants in Wildlife Research and Conservation (2023). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

We start Season 4 of The Subverse, which will focus on “Earth”, with a conversation with David George Haskell, a writer and biologist. We focus on his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, which explores the story of sound on Earth. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the PEN E. O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In it, David writes about how, three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. The wonders of Earth's living voices emerged after hundreds of millions of years of evolution that unfolded in communicative silence. From the ancient cricket Permostridulus which bears the earliest known sound-making structure, a ridge on its wing, this sonic creativity was spurred on by some amazing marvels, anatomical and otherwise. They range from insect wings and flowering plants to ciliary hair and even human milk. Now, both land and water are far from silent; fish drum and twang, whales sing, birds chirp and wings buzz. The sonic diversity of the world is rooted in the divergent physical worlds and social lives of animals and the happenstances of history. Every species has a logic, a grammar, to its sound making. And still, the process of hearing is one of unity at the cellular level. Sound also travels across oceans, creating a sort of global unity in sonic communication.  Sound is ephemeral, instantly dissipating, and yet can be older than stone. So, in listening to animal voices around us, we are taken back into deep time and legacies of sonic geology. But it is also a ledger of loss. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world's acoustic riches. As we get noisier, we diminish sonic soundscapes, bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. This sensory crisis is an important measure of the environmental crisis, and a powerful untapped tool for environmental justice. How do we create a poetics and politics of listening? We tend to think of experiences of beauty and of creativity as somehow separate from politics and ethics, but Haskell points out that they are deeply intertwined. We are embodied sensory beings. As a species, we need to gather and celebrate the voices of non-human beings. Technological advances have allowed us to record these soundscapes to check on the health of ecosystems. But when we get too reliant on technology, we ignore the wisdom of the people who have lived in the forest for centuries and don't need gadgets to gauge the health of the forest, or to protect it. David spoke of the generative capacity of sound which comes from life and interconnection. He closed with an invitation to take a few minutes of each day and listen, without judgement or expectation, and let sound do its work. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

In today's episode, we bring you Stories from the Subverse. Siddharth Pandey, a writer, artist, and historian, extols the wonders of moving, and allowing oneself to be moved. The simple act of walking becomes radical, with the potential to shirk Nazi commands in Munich, to reclaim fresh air and majestic mountain views from imperial exclusivity in Shimla, to change, create and stir the imagination. As he moves through the mountains, Siddharth challenges their apparent immobility, not just in the liveliness that they host and nurture, but in their very genesis. Every step he takes literally shaping perceptions and perspectives, the scene constantly adjusting itself, illustrating another gift of movement: the affordance of variety, of diversity, and of perpetual newness. A transformative magic Siddharth explores in his book, Fossil. Attuned also to non-generative transformation, Siddharth tackles the ostensible contradiction in celebrating the glory of mountains as we hurtle forward into the maw of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the work of Harvard critic Elaine Scarry, he shows how beauty “decentres”, for we are no longer the focus. Our initial focus on the beautiful object is followed by a cultivation of care; an act of movement in a growing field of relations. Music is an important expression of the innate rhythms and cadences of these landscapes. From the Himachali folk songs that Siddharth's mother sang to him in his early childhood, to the sense of vastness and longing so typical of the desert panoramas of Rajasthan, or the uplands of Celtic Europe. Earthy tunes that seemed to literally stem out of the landscape they sang of. Mountains far near and far inspired a need to compose. And Siddharth heeded that call, creating tunes that captured journeys through his beloved Himachali landscape and beyond. Some of these tunes are generously intertwined in this story. This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website. We also thank Vaaka Media for their logistical support. Music in this story: The piano compositions in this story, A Ride to Annandale and a fragment of Flow, have been composed and performed by Siddharth Pandey. The Himachali folk song Udi Jaaya has been performed by the folk artist Anita Pandey (on the vocals) and Siddharth Pandey (on the piano). About Siddharth Pandey: Siddharth Pandey is a writer, cultural historian, visual practitioner and musician hailing from the Shimla Himalayas. Educated in India and the UK, he holds a PhD in Literary and Material Culture Studies from the University of Cambridge. His first book Fossil was published in 2021, and was a finalist for the 2022 Banff Mountain Literature Awards.

In this episode, Susan Mathews narrates an eccentric story of fire, an intangible and odd element. She begins with lines from William Blake's “The Tyger”, which invites us to partake of creation and the paradoxes of the divine, with an equal measure of wonder and terror evoked through fire. But fire is more than just combustion and volatility, a chemical reaction or an ecological stimulus. The history of fire and the history of life are twin flames. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan write in their wonderful book What is Life? that one answer to the titular question is that life is the transmutation of sunlight. It is the sun become the green fire of photosynthesizing beings, the natural seductiveness of flowers and the warmth of the tiger stalking the jungle in the dead of night. The character of burning over deep time is one with twists and turns. It started with a spark of lightning but for fire to become a planetary force, it needed oxygen and fuel. Stephen Pyne, a prolific historian of fire and the first guest in this podcast season, outlines three fires. Plants set ablaze by lightning were the first, humans aiding and abetting fire the second and the third fire is where humans  burn lithic landscapes. No longer bounded by season, sun or natural rhythms, this fire without limits made us geological agents. It is also a fire of empire and slavery, of loss and destruction. From a celestial and originary green fire we now see terrifying red plumes and a rising blue fire of the  oceans. The world is out of pyric balance. So how do we rewrite this story? In the second half of this episode, Susan introduces some exciting ideas that help us think through fire differently, starting with the myth of Prometheus. In this tale, the role of Pandora is often ignored, downplayed, or forgotten. Elissa Marder, in an article entitled Pandora's Fireworks describes Pandora, created out of clay and water, as a kind of counterfire (anti puros), a technological counterpart to divine fire. Pandora establishes the defining limits of the human and reminds us of our connection with the rest of the biosphere. From Pandora's pyrotechnics, we move to the ‘pyrosexual', a term she borrows from the work of Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff in their article titled Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire. Clark and Yusuff peel back the metaphors of fire and sex and suggest instead a deep, conjoint history of sexual desire and fiery consummation. By contextualizing the ‘pyrosexual' within the wider economy of earth and cosmos, they seek ways to escape industrial capitalism's current hyperconsumptive cycles of accumulation. They remind us that plants are sexual beings and challenge more ‘orthodox' environmentalisms that curb desire and renouncing of pleasure. Fire being a boundary between biologic life and inhuman materialities, it offers a track that restructures the asexual-sexual binary with lateral forms of agency and modes of desire. What else, they ask, can we do with a planet of fire? Susan ends with a tribute to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a poet and writer who inspired much of Season 2 on water and this one on fire. In a powerful piece published in Harper's Bazaar this year, she writes that menopause is a powerful lens through which to look at this hot planetary crisis. Apart from the similarities, such as planetary hot flashes caused by toxic environments, menopause is also a liminal space of possibility. She asks whether underneath all this heat, we are meant to learn something about change. Special thanks to Tushar Das and Brown Monkey Studio who added the wonderful effects and sound designed the episode. 

In this episode, host Susan Mathews has a revealing conversation with Professor Pompa Banerjee on fire and gendered and ritualised violence in historical and current practices.  Prof. Banerjee teaches courses in early modern literature and culture at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her work focuses on the literary and cultural dimensions of Europe's cross-cultural encounters in the global Renaissance, especially in the ways they shape identity in the age of discovery. She also studies the unexpected crossings between European witches and Indian widows, and has written extensively on these subjects as well as early modern literature and travel, Shakespeare, and modern Indian adaptations of Shakespeare. In this episode, we spoke of fire's symbolism and its role in ritualised violence, embodying and enforcing socio-political ideologies that dictate gender roles for women. We refer specifically to her book Burning Women: Widows, Witches and Early Modern European Travellers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), where she pores through European travel narratives from 1500 to 1723, where representations of Sati were conventional, even de rigeur, in travelogues of India, and which coincided with successive waves of witch-hunts in Europe. Despite these synchronous occurrences, the ritualised burning in both cases and the burning as public spectacle, these early travel narratives make no correlation between widow burning and witch burning, what Prof. Banerjee terms as a ‘literary haunting'. One reason for this erasure is that practices were coded very differently—the sati's burning as a heroic sacrifice and the witch's burning as legitimate retribution. While both women were considered insensible to pain, one was through ascension to literal divinity while the other was through the machinations of the devil. In these theatrical burnings, female bodies become sites of storytelling and ideological reformation. In both practices, the woman is placed centre stage, as it is the witnesses who provide validation and who receive the story being told. The Sati's deathless love for her husband, itself a tool of economic control, became instrumental in recasting the ideal European wife. We also speak of how the British, in the later colonial period, used narratives of the barbaric practices of brown people to assert their moral right to rule. Finally, we delved into the possible origins of this connection between female subjectivity and deviance. We spoke of the exclusive power women held and hold over the hearth and life-sustaining domestic functions and how these were reconstructed through male fantasies as dangers. Fire has been used in contradictory motifs of resurrection, purity, cleansing, punishment, deification and transcendence, a running theme of course being the disciplining of female desire and sexuality. Women's bodies become the sites of dispute every time society undergoes upheaval. And the only way to counter these narratives are understanding them and remembering how they've been used in the past. You can find more about Prof. Banerjee's work at the University of Colorado at Denver website: https://clas.ucdenver.edu/english/pompa-banerjee The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at www.darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Dear listeners, this week we return to The Subverse. In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Bhumika Saraswati, an independent photographer, journalist and filmmaker. We look at how extreme heat is embroiled in caste and labour in India. We speak about Bhumika's present visual project which focuses on dalit women in agriculture in Uttar Pradesh, India and the impacts of heat, and an earlier short film she had done on workers in crematoriums during the covid-19 pandemic in New Delhi, India, an occupation which is surrounded by fire and heat hazards. The presence of both the women in the fields and the workers at cremation sites is a consequence of various historical, social and economic conditions and even government practices that reinforce caste-based labour practices. Whether it is discussions of those who are ‘most vulnerable' to heat in air-conditioned rooms, or people visiting a crematorium only interacting with the priest, these are people made invisible or seen through a mainstream gaze, in life and in media. Bhumika navigates the restrictions placed on her as a single woman visiting places with high crime rates, to explore the intersections of caste, class and gender that dalit women in agriculture contend with. In the midst of life-threatening levels of heat, limited protective gear and restrictive clothing, they grow the food that sustains us all. Bhumika captures the sisterhood between these women and the ingenious ways they make their limited resources work. We also briefly touched on how the caste system has restricted access to water and how certain kinds of violence are tied to the lack of basic amenities provided to certain citizens. In 2022, Bhumika was awarded a UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Work and in 2023, she was awarded a Human Rights Press Award by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Journalism School of Arizona State University, United States of America for her short documentary film, Lives of Sex Workers and Their Children. You can find her on Instagram @bhumikasaraswati and on X at @Bhumikasara, and for the project on women, heat, communities see @heat.southasia. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this episode, we speak to short story writer, editor and novelist, Vajra Chandrasekera. Vajra's work is largely in the realm of speculative fiction, and he has published over a hundred pieces since 2012 in various formats. Notably, his work has been featured in Analog, Clarkesworld, West Branch, and The Los Angeles Times. He has also been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his short story, The Translator, at Low Tide. Additionally, he was also nominated for the British Science Fiction Association award for Best Non-fiction. His debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors was released in July 2023. His short stories have been featured in several anthologies including The Best Science Fiction of the Year, The Apex Book of World SF, and Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction. Vajra was also part of the editorial team at Strange Horizons, and in his role as fiction editor, worked closely with several writers from all over the world. He's also passionate about initiatives that protect the political and artistic freedoms of Sri Lankan writers and artists who have been censored and imprisoned by the state.   In this episode, we sit down to discuss some classic desi themes: colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and overblown family drama. We also touch on destiny, friendships, revolution, and terrible science fiction adaptations.   You can follow Vajra on Twitter at @_vajra and on his website Vajra.me. Read Vajra's Work:  The Saint of Bright Doors (Novel) The Translator, at Low Tide Theses on the Scientific Management of Goetic Labour Rhizomatic Diplomacy Terminus  Running the Gullet On the Origin of Specie Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

  Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In this episode, we speak to doctor and speculative fiction writer Usman T. Malik. Usman's work has been published extensively, and featured in platforms such as Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Black Static, and Nightmare.  In 2014, he became the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction for his work The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family. He also won a British Fantasy Award in 2016 for The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn. The story was also nominated for Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. He has also received Locus award nominations for his stories In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro and The Fortune of Sparrows. In 2018, he received another Stoker nomination for Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung. In this episode, we discuss the importance of accurate history, authentic storytelling, the often missed nuances of desi stories, and the horror of everyday realities.  You can follow Usman on Twitter @usmantm Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In the sixth episode of this season, host Anjali Alappat talks to journalist, editor, and author Payal Dhar.  Payal Dhar primarily writes for middle grade and young adult audiences, and her extensive catalogue of work includes Satin: A Stitch in Time, Slightly Burnt, Hit for a Six, There's a Ghost in My PC, and It Has No Name. More recently, Payal has published two books in the Sands of Time series: The Prophecy and The Key. Payal's work has also been featured in anthologies like Shockwave! and Other Cyber Stories, Year's Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2014, and Music of the Stars and other Love Stories. Payal also edited Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a collection of short stories by Indian and Australian writers. In this episode we chat about retelling and redefining stories, the difficulties of being the chosen one, found family and the dynamics of those relationships, and physics of world building. You can follow Payal on Instagram at @Payal.dhar Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In the fifth episode of this season, host Anjali Alappat speaks with Saad Z. Hossain, the author of the best-selling Djinn series, which includes Djinn City, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, Kundo Wakes Up and Cyber Mage.  Saad's debut novel, Escape from Baghdad! was a finalist at the Grand Prix de L'imaginaire in 2018. The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday also received critical acclaim and was a finalist at the Locus Awards and the IGNYTE awards in 2020. Kundo Wakes Up, the sequel to The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, was published in 2022, and made it to the Locus list of Best Novellas for 2022. It was also longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards that year.  In this episode, we discuss classic literature, writing for fun, the importance of a snarky protagonist, Jane Eyre vs. Jane Austen, A.I in developing countries, philosophy, broken people, and of course, djinn. You can follow Saad on Twitter @saadzhossain Authors, books and media referenced in this episode: The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Mansfield Park by Jane Austen Persuasion by Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas  Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In episode four, host Anjali Alappat chats with author and editor, Shweta Taneja. Shweta is best known for her urban fantasy Anantya Tantrist series, but has also received recognition for her work in children's books. Her non-fiction book—They Found What?/ They Made What?— was a national best-seller. She also recently published a new sci-fi novel for kids called Kungfu Aunty vs Garbage Monsters.  Additionally, Shweta's short story, The Daughter That Bleeds, was nominated for the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire in France in 2020. She also won the Editor's Choice Award for Best Asian Science Fiction (2018) in Singapore for the piece.  Her book They Made What? They Found What? Earned her the Publishing Next Award in 2021 and nominations for the Valley of Words Awards and the AutHer awards. She was also honoured with the Best Writer Award at ComicCon India in 2013 for her graphic novel, The Skull Rosary.  In this episode, we discuss world-building, dark humour, writing urban fantasy for an Indian audience, Tantrism, patriarchal power structures, and forging your own destiny,  You can follow Shweta on Twitter @shwetawrites Authors, books and media referenced in this episode: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Going Postal by Terry Pratchett Buffy the Vampire Slayer Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In episode three, host Anjali Alappat talks to Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, science fiction author, data scientist, and researcher. Yudhanjaya is the author of The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, Numbercaste, The Inhuman Peace, The Inhuman Race, and The Salvage Crew.  More recently he was awarded the Gratiaen Prize for Literature for his yet-to-be published book The Wretched and the Damned. Yudhanjaya has been nominated for a Nebula award in 2022, and in 2021, he was featured in Forbes' 30 under 30 list.  Yudhanjaya is also the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organisation created to counteract misinformation and propaganda in Sri Lanka.  In this episode, we discuss A.I, his non-traditional road to publication, how real life can be as absurd as fiction, colonialism, space economics, the horrors of reality TV, poetry, and the importance of forging connections.  You can follow Yudhanjaya on Twitter @yudhanjaya Read Yudhanjaya's work: The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne Numbercaste The Inhuman Race The Inhuman Peace The Salvage Crew  Omega Point The State Machine   Authors, Books and media referenced in this episode: The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett The Dark Tower series by Stephen King Dark Souls  BioShock System Shock Final Fantasy 7 Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson The Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In Season 2, we continue our conversations with South Asian sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. In the second episode of this season, Anjali Alappat speaks with author and editor Tashan Mehta. Her debut novel, The Liar's Weave, is a wonderful mix of myth and magic, chronicling the exploits of a teenage boy in 1920s India who has tremendous power and poor judgement — a potent mix. We discuss relearning how to write, plurality in storytelling, astrology taken very seriously, the desire to shape your own destiny, the complexity of sibling relationships, and the power of lies. We also touch upon her soon-to-be released book, Mad Sisters of Esi, an epic story that includes god machines, a festival of madness, a museum of collective memory, a whale of Babel, and of course, sisters. Tashan's short stories have been featured in several anthologies including the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume 2 and Magical Women. Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Arcx is all about literary inspiration. In Season 2, we continue our conversations with South Asian sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction writers, tracing their ideas from conception to execution. In the first episode host Anjali Alappat chats with author, editor, lawyer and critic Gautam Bhatia. Gautam's debut novel, The Wall (2020), and its sequel, The Horizon (2021), are filled with fascinating world building, complex characters, and fabulously convoluted plotlines. If you love twists and turns, beautiful prose, and some good old fashioned anti-establishment thinking, these are the books for you. Additionally, Gautam is part of the editorial team at Strange Horizons magazine, and his work with them has resulted in several award nominations. His writing has also featured in publications like Interzone Magazine, Mint, British Science Fiction Association Magazine, Scroll.in, The Caravan, and more. In this episode, we discuss how all fiction is political, unlikable protagonists, urban revolution, the foibles of human nature, betrayal, and origin myths. You can follow Gautam on Twitter @gautambhatia88 Arcx is a series of the Subverse, the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, The Subverse explores the progression in the use of metals and its impact on the trajectory of human evolution,the role of fire and its symbolism in understanding artefacts, art history, culture, and dance. Susan Mathews speaks with Prof. Sharada Srinivasan, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, who studies archaeological artefacts and metallurgy.  Through the study of artefacts, we can better understand the history of technology and the progression of metals in civilization. This also helps inform the conservation of artefacts and get better insights into archaeology and art history. In her own work, she has made landmark contributions such as the analysis of bronzes in South India using lead isotopes to identify its metallurgical characterisations and studies on ancient mining and metallurgy in South India. We looked at the fire element in several ways. First, we explored the trajectory of human evolution and its intrinsic links to the increasing ability to master fire. The progressive use of metals and metallurgy was pivotal, and we find that presently no device or pursuit lacks an element of combustion technology. From the hearth to kilns and fiery furnaces, unknown forms and embellishments were forged for the good and for the bad. We spoke about some of these contradictions in the application of heat to metal and some of the gender divides that followed this fiery progression. Prof. Srinivasan brings up interesting illustrations of the ancient art of lost wax casting in India, the making of carnelian beads and the role of women in ceramics, such as Kota women from the Nilgiris. The conversation covered fire symbolism and cultural references in Vedic literature, Buddhist iconography, Tamil Sangam poetry and the Nataraja bronzes. Professor Sharada Srinivasan was elected as an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Archaeology in 2021. She received the Padmashri, India's fourth highest civilian award, in 2019 and has made pioneering contributions to the study of archaeology and history of art from the perspective of engineering applications.  

In this episode, Susan Mathews speaks with Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat about the unequal distribution of the effects of heat. For this, we travel to 19th and early 20th century colonial India where heat is a persistent problem for the British empire and a burgeoning climate science is sutured to racial difference. These histories inform contemporary crises as knowledges of heat continue to evolve in an unequal world. Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an associate professor at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics with joint appointments in the Departments of History and Anthropology. His current work focuses on the experience of thermal inequality in contemporary India and the United States, the history of how heat has been studied and its effects over the long twentieth century. He is also director of the UCLA Heat Lab. With accelerating climate change, one of the fallouts is extreme heat. In this conversation, Dr. Venkat defined thermal inequality, which is not just the differential impact of heat, but the unequal distribution of heat effects. These effects are filtered or mediated by our environments, by our lives and by the social and political infrastructures that determine how vulnerable we are to heat. The UCLA Heat Lab employs interdisciplinary methods to study the experience of thermal inequality. We spoke in some detail about a journal article he wrote in 2022 on race and thermal sensation in late colonial India. We discussed ‘tropicality', how central the problems posed by heat were and how various kinds of bodies were understood to be differentially affected by heat, producing both biological variation and pathology. Meteorology and racial ideology intersect in the late 19th and early 20th century and climate science is sutured to racial difference. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at  for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Prof. Robert Romanyshyn—an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and an author of eight books including Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies (Frankenstein Prophecies). Romanyshyn's special area of concern is the psychology of technology, especially in terms of the climate crisis and impact of digital media on our social structures. Much of his life's work has been devoted to understanding Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a gothic horror tale that, as he points out, has been prophetic in many ways. In his book Frankenstein Prophecies, he asks eight questions that uncover how Shelley's classic work haunts our world. Combining Jungian theory, literary criticism, and mythology, he seeks answers to the query at the heart of this book: who is the monster? In keeping with the theme of fire in this podcast season, we spoke of the symbolism of fire—both ambiguous and double-edged. In Greek myth in particular, the symbolism of fire is bound up with the myth of Prometheus, one of many stories which explains how humankind came into possession of fire. We zoomed in on the fire related metaphors in Frankenstein (exemplified in the subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus', alluding to the Greek fire myth), and how many of these speak to our present ecological crises. There's fire as lightning that struck down a tree early in the book; the use of electricity and galvanism; the digging up of the dead in cemeteries and charnel houses as analogous to the mining of fossil fuels; solar light versus moonlight; and the Monster running away to the Arctic north, promising to burn in a pyre after Victor Frankenstein's death. We also discuss a different kind of fire, which is not just a burning down or a melting away or extraction of fossil fuels, but a counter-fire. Counter-fire as in the hope left in Pandora's jar. In speaking of this fire, Romanyshyn also speaks of splendour of the simple, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miracle in the mundane, fire as living spirit, and Natura Naturans, the Anima Mundi. Robert Romanyshyn has published essays in psychology, philosophy, literary and education journals, written a play about Frankenstein's Monster, done radio and TV discussions as well as online interviews, webinars, podcasts and made a DVD movie of his trip to Antarctica. In addition, he has given keynote addresses at conferences, lectured at universities and professional societies, and conducted workshops in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand. Check out his website at https://robertromanyshyn.jigsy.com. For his courses, check out www.jungplatform.com . The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at www.darknlight.com  for episode details and show notes.

In Season 3 of The Subverse, we are journeying into ‘fire'. In this opening episode, we speak with Prof. Stephen J. Pyne, a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, U.S.A. Pyne has written over 40 books, most of which are centred around fire. In this conversation, we focus on his book The Pyrocene: How we Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, published in 2021. Apart from being such a prolific scholar of fire, Stephen J. Pyne spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park, 12 as crew boss, with another three seasons writing fire plans for other national parks.  He lives in Queen Creek, Arizona. His next book is a fire history of Mexico. Susan and Stephen discuss how fire is, for humans, our defining ecological trait. We are unique fire creatures on a unique fire planet, and as keepers of the flame, we need to somehow get the right mix of fire in the world to balance our interests and those of others. In his book, Pyne proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. The book renames and redefines the so-called Anthropocene according to humanity's primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. As he states in the book, “the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene.” In the narrative he lays out, the pyric prism he uses is what he terms as an ecological three-body problem. The history that Pyne narrates chronicles three fires. First-fire is the fire of nature that appeared as soon as plants colonised continents, about 420 million years ago. Thanks to cooking, a dependence on fire became coded into hominin DNA. Second-fire was an act of domestication, perhaps the model for all pyrotechnologies, in which people had transformed wildfire into hearth and torch. Third-fire is qualitatively different. Pyne points out that third-fire burns lithic landscapes no longer bounded by ecological limits. With a source of combustibles, which are essentially unbounded, inadequate sinks for the effluent, from cooking food and landscapes, we are now cooking planets. The sum of Earth's three fires is creating the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age, and instead of ice amassing more ice, fire is generating more fire. This pyric transition also means that fire vanished as a serious object of inquiry. Fire with its flame, glow, heat, and crackle has been reduced to the most elemental chemical and physical expressions, each isolated and engineered, so that what had been ‘fire' became ‘combustion,' and combustion has become only its constituent parts. What we erased were traditional and indigenous knowledges of living with fire. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In part two of our Water and Caste series within the Stories from the Subverse, anti-caste intersectional feminist researcher-activist Swati Kamble speaks with four remarkable Ambedkarite anti-caste creators on how Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Mahad march inspired and shaped their lives, artistic journeys, and creative repertoires. We are introduced to Madhubani artist Malvika Raj, Padma Shri awardee and photojournalist Sudharak Olwe, artist Rajyashri Goody, and folk artist Shahir Nandesh Umap. All four guests discuss using art for resistance, how to archive and retell forgotten and often erased stories of anti-caste resistance, and how to retain these events in collective memory. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Stories from the Subverse, where we uncover hidden and marginalized stories through a more personal storytelling lens, returns with a two part series. Part one of this series has been conceptualised, scripted, and hosted by Swati Kamble, an anti-caste intersectional feminist researcher-activist. In part one, Swati guides us through the history of Mahad Satyagraha, the march for equality, dignity, and access to water, led by anti-caste leader and statesman, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar on 20th March 1927. Swati speaks to advocate Disha Wadekar who provides legal and historical perspectives on how the Mahad Satyagraha influenced the anti-caste movement and played a pivotal role in the making of the Indian Constitution and how the framing of Articles 15 and 17 of the Constitution was grounded in the people's struggle to have equal access to water.  Swati also speaks to Hira Kanoje, or Grandma Hira, whose fiery speeches Swati grew up listening to on the birth anniversaries of anti-caste revolutionaries at the labourers' colony in Mumbai where they both lived, as neighbours.  In this moving conversation, Hira ajji narrates her experiences as a young child who experienced untouchability but defiantly fought against it. Whether it was by drinking water from a forbidden pot at school or sneakily entering a village temple, she and her cousins were silent revolutionaries, whose stories remain undocumented. By including her narrative, we seek to honour her, and the unsung feminists and anti-caste activists like her. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Susan Mathews speaks with architect and planner Dilip Da Cunha. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2017, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha founded a design platform called Ocean of Wetness. The organisation is dedicated to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. Our chat was a wide-ranging one, starting with the premise in many of his works: the line which separates land from water, which he terms “as one of the most fundamental and enduring acts in the understanding and design of human habitation.” He calls this the first colonialism, which took a wetness that is everywhere and turned it into a land and water binary. This led to the invention of rivers and source, course, and flood, leading us to see a river that flowed between two lines and flooded. Alexander's eye represents the cartographer and surveyor, and Ganga's descent is rain, colonised by river. Rain is no longer seen as feeding wetness but contained in gutters. Da Cunha invites us to acknowledge wetness all around us, not contained in a place, and embrace living between the clouds and aquifers. He writes that “water is the first principle in the nature of moist things.” The city reinforces the line which separates water from land on the earth's surface and it has become the quintessential settlement while reducing other modes of habitation to less settled or unsettled, creating hierarchies. He writes, “those educated with the map, inhabit a surface articulated with rivers, and their extension in pipes and drains.” All this calls for a new imagination, driven by the celebratory event of rain — a re-heralding — and gradual steps, including learning from indigenous and other communities who have extended and nurtured ways of living with wetness. Dilip da Cunha is based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. He has authored several books, such as Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), co-authored with Anuradha Mathur. His most recent book (and the subject of our conversation), The Invention of Rivers: Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. In 2020, he received the ASLA Honour award and the J.B Jackson Book Prize for his work. To learn more about his remarkable work, visit www.mathurandcunha.com. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

We continue to explore relationality when it comes to water, and learn more from three women who have made water, and bodies of water, their life's work. The politics of kinship can be complicated, but how would we approach our bodies of water if they were kin?  In this episode we go deeper into what fascinates them about water - the flow of tides; properties like its solvency; its creative force; acoustic camouflage that can soothe us; and the thrill of bioluminescence. Not all memories are pleasant, and we hear more about the fears that being in water, or in deep spaces, can invoke, and what it takes to let go. We also hear more about underwater acoustics, and how the sonic signatures of marine creatures are chaning with the the changing climate.  Our guests are: Sejal Mehta, an author and editor based in Mumbai, India who has a debut non-fiction book on intertidal wildlife called Superpowers on the Shore, published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2022;  Divya Panicker, an oceanographer whose work focuses on cetacean distributions, habitat use and behaviour off the southwest coast of India and Tasneem Khan, a biologist, photographer, adventurer, and educator who has spent the last decade facilitating interdisciplinary initiatives in the fields of ecology, conservation,education, and science communication.  The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

Water has played a central role as a resource and property in our dominant worldviews. It has made and unmade empires. In our nation-building, watercourses, waterways, oceans, rivers and freshwaters have all played leading roles, part of a continued and relentless drive to choreograph and subjugate our waters. But it is the indigenous, the subjugated, and the oppressed who seem to best recognise water's power as both a life force and a catastrophic threat. For them, water is kin, creator, and protector. In this episode, we wanted to explore relationality when it comes to water. The politics of kinship can be complicated, but how would we approach our bodies of water if they were kin? So, we asked three women who have made water, and bodies of water, their life work a range of questions. We wanted to see through their eyes how water has shaped them and how they have shaped their relations with water.  In part one of this episode, we will hear descriptions of their work and play as it relates to water, how it has shaped them as people, and why they consider their projects or interventions so important. Our guests are: Sejal Mehta, an author and editor based in Mumbai, India who has a debut non-fiction book on intertidal wildlife called Superpowers on the Shore, published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2022;  Divya Panicker an oceanographer whose work focuses on cetacean distributions, habitat use and behaviour off the southwest coast of India and Tasneem Khan, a biologist, photographer, adventurer, and educator who has spent the last decade facilitating interdisciplinary initiatives in the fields of ecology, conservation,education, and science communication.    The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.

In this episode, Susan speaks to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a writer, independent scholar, poet, activist, and educator based in Durham, North Carolina, United States of America.  Her most recent book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 2020, part of adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press, flows from her previous works in a poetic continuum, with water playing a central role. In Undrowned, Alexis takes us through 19 thematic movements, lessons from marine mammals, and kindred beyond taxonomy. From echolocation to the evolution of dorsal fins, each movement takes us deeper into listening, breathing, practicing, surrendering, refusing, honouring our boundaries, slowing down, and taking care of our blessings, amongst a range of other meditations. Gumbs disrupts and critiques our mostly unthinking and unexamined acceptance of capitalist narratives and discourse. As a queer Black feminist love evangelist, as she describes herself, and a marine mammal apprentice, she draws on archives of Black feminist practice and theorists. Gumbs asks in the book, “What indentation am I making on the surface of this Earth, even if it is so far underwater no one can see?”, something we all need to be asking ourselves. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n' Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes.