Carmel Miranda took up writing late in life, and her novel CROSSMATCH won the Gratiaen Prize 2020 for Creative Writing in English in Sri Lanka, where she is based. She is addicted to crime fiction and murder mysteries, and in her day job, she puts people to sleep for surgery.

Carmel’s story ‘Terms and Conditions’—in which babies are born in artificial wombs managed by corporations—features in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION. The anthology’s editor Tejaswinee Roychowdhury interviewed her to find out about her literary influences

How do you perceive speculative fiction vis-à-vis the world around you?

I feel that speculative fiction is basically a distorted version of the world around us. It’s not escapist but actually about our world—potentially newer or alternate versions of the real world.

Who and/or what are some of your influences while writing speculative fiction?

Some of my influences are Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. I was drawn to the work of John Wyndham whose stories take place in very ordinary domestic settings rather than in distant galaxies.

Tell us about the creative process behind your story.

The inspiration for this story came from my medical background. What if we could use technology to aid in the biological phenomena of pregnancy and gestation, both for the convenience factor and to prevent some of their devastating complications? Some years after I wrote the story, I read of a robot that was developed for exactly this purpose.