The Science Fiction Dimensions of Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s Postcolonial Science Fiction focuses on the science fictional dimensions of Rushdie’s later novels, Fury, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown and Luka and the Fire of Life, and Rushdie’s first unpublished novel, The Antagonist, to show how the author’s oeuvre moves towards a more consistent engagement with science fiction as a generic form and an ideological investment. I demonstrate how Rushdie recreates personal and national histories in a science fictional setting and mode. It is my contention that the failure of his first novel Grimus may have led Rushdie away from SF for some time, although he returns to it with a much firmer conviction and a much stronger voice in his later novels, showing his commitment to this imaginative form which he describes in Fury as providing
the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and metaphysics . The science fictional mode is the most appropriate vehicle for expressing these thematic and ideological concerns and the organising feature of Rushdie’s oeuvre. I reread the later novels in light of recent critical engagement with SF as a vehicle for reimagining national histories and as a potentially subversive tool for social and political engagement in a fictional realm.