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 m...

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 u...

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 h...

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...

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...

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 a...

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-di...

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, e...

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 cro...

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 t...

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 th...

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...

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 S...

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...

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 membe...

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...

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 doc...

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 publi...

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 Stor...

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 Mi...

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 th...

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 polit...

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...

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...

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 F...