Indian dystopia

Manil Suri's The City of Devi is probably the first Indian dystopic novel.

It imagines an India in a post-apocalyptic globe; however, the forces that have plunged Suri's world into chaos are the hackneyed forces of terrorism.

Alas, Indians, even when they imagine destruction, imagine it in terms that are no longer considered that hip or relevant.

Anyhow, India and Pakistan are on the brink of a nuclear war in the post-apocalyptic world of Suri's imagining. 

Amidst the (same old) communal riots (between Hindus and Muslims) that convulse India, the heroine, Sarita searches for her physicist husband, Karun.

Their year-old marriage remains unconsummated and Sarita sets out to look for Karun with a pomegranate in her hand, hoping to reignite Karun's libido once she finds him (horror!)

Karun has yet another lover who also yearns for him and wants to win him back to herself. 

Seems like the sought-after Karun is a Bollywood hero and lo and behold, there it is--the key to the secret of why Suri's plot sounds so garish and gimmicky: It's Bollywood stupid! 

According to the New Yorker Magazine:

Suri's take on apocalypse is broadly satirical: a flashy Bollywood superhero ignites the conflict; class lines are firm, even in the dim confines of a bomb shelter; a religious zealot holds thousands in thrall to a gilded beggar girl with a birth defect.

The Age of Miracles

There is a reason why Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel The Age of Miracles is scheduled to be released on June 21 (2012).

June 21 is the longest day of the year and the novel, an apocalyptic meditation on the end of the world, predicts that in the aftermath of massive earthquakes that shook Japan on March 11, 2011, the earth will be experiencing slower rotations and 48+ hour days.

The scientific rationale is as follows:

We now know that the massive earthquake that struck that country on 11 March shifted the planet inches on its axis, shortening the earth's day by a fraction of a second. In The Age of Miracles, which is told through the voice of a 10-year-old Californian girl named Julia, an earthquake shakes the planet but causes the opposite effect [...] The earth's rotation slows and days lengthen, first by six minutes, then 12, then 24. As the phenomenon – known as "the slowing" – takes hold, days stretch to 48 hours, and gravity weakens, with birds ceasing to fly and astronauts stranded far from earth.

Maureen Dowd puts Thompson's novel in an emergent literary tradition called "cosmophobia," which is literally a fear caused by a conviction that a cosmic disaster--like collision of stars--is imminent.

But, as Dowd suggests, voicing the skepticism of scientists David Morrison (Senior Scientist at NASA), cosmophobia is just another largely imaginary fear which isn't going to materialize into reality anytime soon, but will generate money for those who pedal it successfully.

Indeed Thompson's novel has struck a pot of gold in both the U.S. and Western Europe, and has fetched her a pre-release advance of 1 million dollars.