The Silent Accord
Chapter I: A Sliver of Stillness
In the late 1930s of the century, there came an age when people no longer heard the wind.
Not because it ceased to blow, but because the noise of everything else had grown too vast. Cities drummed endlessly—advertisements whispered from vapour screens, traffic sang its daily hymn, children recited lessons aloud to omnidirectional recorders, and even plants were encoded to emit ultrasonic greetings, detectable by smart shoes to suggest footpath mindfulness.
There was no room left for silence.
That was when silence—pure, unstructured, uncorrupted emptiness of sound—was commodified.
It began in Dzerzhinsk, a city that had once been famous for its toxic past and now leaned towards innovation to cleanse itself. A man named Pavel Yurev, former acoustician and part-time mystic, stumbled upon the accidental technique to extract silence from heavily resonant chambers using a fusion of sound-cancellation fields and deep-earth resonance siphons.
Read More
The Empathy Room
“if you feel pain, you‘re alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being”
– Leo Tolstoy
Planet Earth, 2100 AD
EdenLand was waiting; the impact was just sixty seconds away. The asteroid, now broken into several enormous chunks, was initially almost half the size of Earth. The ever-alert Asteroid Tracking System had taken care of most of the broken parts. Some have turned into space debris, and some are now accidental satellites of the EdenLand Space Station.
Only one of them would strike the planet in sixty seconds. The impact effect is predicted to be minimal, the lush tropical forest area just outside the main city of EdenLand being the calculated impact zone. It’s hilarious that way. The planet’s terra firma has undergone a huge change in the last fifty years. Much of Europe and parts of the Middle East are now submerged landmasses. Severe climatic changes have made most of [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
10 GOTO 10
The Basement Computer Room
Only a week ago, I was a programmer writing code in a tight, claustrophobic basement of a company that had always been on the verge of going bankrupt but never did. And today, I was strapping up my bags for the deep magma explorer submarine, which would take us down the volcanic corridor and up near the Arctic ice caps. It was almost unreal.
When the company finally went down, I could not stop myself from breathing a little sigh of relief. The competition was too tough, and I knew we wouldn’t make it another year. It was inevitable, and yet I forced myself not to imagine the possibility of the events that came after. Lisa, the company’s chairperson and chief executive for the last twenty years, called us all in the hall of the topmost executive floor to break the news. As usual, I got some weird stares from all the female employees and a tiny number of males in the audience. Lisa found [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
And So, I Brought Her Dandelions
The coffee pot was steaming. The buns are being toasted in the oven, and the silverware is shining, ready to be filled with hot food for breakfast. Nitara was dressing Kyra for school, doing her ponies and tying them with pretty blue ribbons. Warm sunlight streamed in through the high glass windows, the fresh morning breeze inviting a workman like me to a crisp, exciting day ahead. The world was unmindfully spinning out just another day. Everything was overly perfect, immaculate, sublime. To the point of perfection where a man begins to slip into the eerie realm of unease…
Is it really happening? Is it not? Am I in a surreal state of bliss? What if I wake up point-blank to a mundane, gloomy morning, in stark contrast to this happy day? I’ll get into depression, I’m sure. What if cats were actually dogs and dogs were wolves, what if roses were dandelions and dandelions really were snakes? Well, I’d [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
An Introspection of ChatGPT in the light of Intellectual Property Rights
PRELUDE
Artificial Intelligence(AI) is a major area that calls for the development of policies in India. The flourishing AI industry and the various AI-centric initiatives of the Government make the matter of policy-making regarding AI a matter of extreme importance. While the present policy processes strive to foster the rapid development of AI for the purpose of securing social well-being and promoting economic growth, India tends to lean towards digital inclusion. However, the risks and deficiencies of data-driven decision-making are a massive obstacle to the development and establishment of AI applications.
Although Artificial Intelligence performs such tasks that demand complex cognitive abilities very easily, it can never be said that it will function flawlessly while performing the task. For Example, AI-driven tools like LSI-R (Level of Service Inventory- Revised) or COMPAS (Correctional Offender [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
Ashen Bloom
The silence was unnatural. For weeks, the comms had buzzed with static and fragmented signals, but now they were dead. On the bridge of the Bayonet, Commander Daniela Reyes stared at the blank screen with her jaw clenched. She tapped at the controls desperately as if sheer will could coax a response from Earth. The absence of the chatter they’d expected—traffic updates, mission control, a simple welcome home—was more than unsettling. They were close now, just breaching the solar system’s edge, and the silence gnawed at her.
“Sparky, talk to me,” she said, as dread coiled in her gut.
“It’s not the array, Commander! I’ve checked it multiple times—rerouted power, recalibrated the antennas!”
Charles Kowalski, Chief Engineer and systems specialist—better known as Sparky for his knack with sparking systems under pressure—grunted from his station. The console was alive with diagnostics as [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
An Interview with Sami Ahmad Khan
Kalpabiswa is thrilled to engage in a direct conversation with one of the leading voices of contemporary Science Fiction. I, Debraj Moulick, a humble devotee of Science Fiction, am honoured to share the interview of Dr. Sami Ahmad Khan. Let me take this moment to introduce…..
Sami Ahmad Khan is a writer, academic, and documentary producer. He is 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). His future-war thriller Red Jihad (Rupa, 2012) won two awards, and his second novel, Aliens in Delhi (Niyogi, 2017), was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. His fiction has been the subject of formal academic research and a part of university syllabi in India and the US. He also holds a PhD in Indian SF, and is the author of Star Warriors [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
Conan Doyle Subverted and M. R. James Trans-created: Two Novels of Hemendra Kumar Roy
Introduction
This article explores how two works of Bengali adolescent and young adult literature by the same author, Hemendra Kumar Roy (1888–1963), each reference, in a different way, two different works of British popular fiction, subverting one and creatively reworking the other.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2) and Amabasyar Raat (‘New-Moon Nights’, serialized 1933, book 1939)
‘New-Moon Nights’ begins with a newspaper report of strange occurrences in the large village/small town of Manaspur near the tiger-infested mangrove region called the Sunderbans in pre-independence, and therefore pre-partition, Bengal. On each of the previous new-moon nights, a woman, invariably one wearing expensive jewellery, has disappeared. Till these disappearances began, Manaspur, despite being near the Sunderbans, had not been plagued by tigers. However, precisely at the stroke of midnight on each night of disappearance, [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
Level Killing Fields
There was consternation in Heaven. The Divine Counsels had requested a meeting with the Devil’s Advocates over a technicality. “Technicality, my foot,” twittered the imps and the cherubs. “It is all about gender equality.”
Sulochana, the matron in charge of the Kosmic Kanya Klub (KKK), was having a tough time keeping her kanyas under control. In her time, Sulochana had been an apsara married to a gandharva called Chitragreev. She had spent a goodly number of years on Earth, carrying out Divine instructions.
Angira, one of the kanyas, came rushing in. “They are not even honouring the astrological configurations,” she blurted out in disbelief.
“I know, isn’t it blasphemous?” Mithra had joined the conversation.
Angira was swift to agree. “It is!! When I was born, they took me away from my mother the same day, saying that I had been born to become a widow. Any man who married me would die. Thus, to protect its citizens, the State could, and would, take me away.”
Read More
Madam Madex
Library, Japan
19th March, 1939
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!1
Suzuki follows his routine of visiting all the alleys of the library. He starts his tour on the second floor, checking the refurbished book section, followed by the textbooks, and ending with the reference section. He comes down to the ground floor, where he spots an individual with a ponytail in the reading section; he pats the research scholar.
“It’s 10:00; I need to shut down the library. Visit the hostel library if you want to continue studying.”
He passes across the research paper section, switching off all the lights, and spots a girl in a ponytail busy with a few stacks of paper.
Suzuki knows her; she is Hana Saito, the youngest researcher in the Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo. Saito looks up and smiles towards the librarian.
“Is it late again, Mr Suzuki?”
Suzuki displays his left hand. “Go to your quarters; it’s already late.”
Read More
ProtoTyke
Child sex crimes had decreased by 89% since the commercialisation of ProtoTyke. The new technology faced significant public backlash due to concerns about its ethical implications– ‘could we really say we were deterring sexual predators if they were taking part in their perversions, albeit synthetically?’ became the moral discourse of the time.
Shelby Lifton scrolled through the hate mail and death threats she received in her inbox daily. She did not foresee that her degree in Information Technology would lead her here, but she liked fixing bugs, resolving glitches and coding software. It had nothing to do with what she believed, or any mission to serve humanity– she was simply good at her job, and enjoyed it. In fact, if you were to ask her about her position at ProtoTyke, she would tell you that she had no moral stance on the issue one way or the other; she had an ethically neutral viewpoint [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
Sensory Cracks
Young geneticist Anja, accompanied by her Shih-Tzu, set out on Klavebod Brygge for her usual afternoon walk. Almost widowed by cars, the street of the Danish capital was abundantly populated with cyclists and guarded by modern, glassy buildings such as Krystallen. She admires her cheerful, floral, sleeveless dress, specially chosen to change her mood, in the asymmetric building with a rhombic skeleton. Shows off my legs, she thought, but immediately her eyes were drawn to the reflection of the slate paving Otto Monsted Plads, the minimalist square nearby, so she took a few steps in that direction. She looked at Krystallen from that side for the first time and found it haughty, propped up on one elbow, boasting of the hundreds of windows that mirrored the area without fail. In one of them, located close to the ground, he saw a column of German soldiers marching. They had the Hitler symbol on their sleeves. She even thought she [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
The Fiction Machine: A Generative AI Framework for Bengali Science Fiction Storytelling and Research Assistance
Abstract
This article presents a novel Generative AI (GenAI) project aimed at preserving and promoting Bengali science fiction literature through automatic story generation and an intelligent research assistant. It addresses the dual goals of (1) generating Bengali science fiction narratives in the style of renowned Bengali authors, and (2) creating a virtual assistant to aid researchers, readers, and writers in exploring Bengali sci-fi literature. The system is designed to function locally on consumer-grade GPUs, incorporating a curated corpus of original Bengali science fiction stories, dynamic style modeling, and semantic search. I describe the architecture, methodology, tools, and challenges faced in building this multilingual and culturally aware GenAI system.
- Introduction
Bengali science fiction (known as Kalpavigyan—a term coined by editor Adrish Bardhan in the 1970s) boasts a 190-year legacy that remains largely [আরো পড়ুন]
Read More
Kalpabiswa Newsletter Year 10, No 1
Tong Ghar, the final frontier across all impossible dimensions, is buzzing with the latest update. Well! Happy New Year, 2025, and greetings from one of the biggest festivals in this part of the galaxy, Durga Puja, to our readers across the space-time continuum.
Read More
