Words for Worlds - Issue 77
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
I was in Paris in the last week of August, which turned out to be very fitting in the most unplanned of ways. I was finishing the very last edits on The Sentence, which - as I’ve mentioned before - is inspired by the Paris Commune, and there I was, in the home of the Paris Commune. So of course I betook myself to the Communards’ Wall at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and wrote the last words of the novel there.
Paris is important for the book in another way: in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the south of Paris, there is an anarcho-communist housing complex that I first read about in Eric Hazan’s stunning A Walk through Paris. Ever since I first saw it in 2016, it’s been in my mind, and in the writing of The Sentence, I heavily borrowed from Ivry-sur-Seine when conceptualising how the Commune in the book designs its urban landscape. So I went back there this time, as both a pilgrimage and in gratitude.
On the novel itself: the text is now final-final-final, and all that’s left is a couple of design elements, and the cover - both of which should be done by this week, and then we’ll have the ARCs ready - and the novel will go to print! Still on track for a mid-October release, so watch this space.
Re: Neil Gaiman, Tortoise Media has released (yet) another testimony, which makes for as uncomfortable and infuriating a read as the previous ones.
When Tortoise first published these reports in the beginning of July, a number of people cast doubt on the story because it was Tortoise Media. I think that one thing we’ve seen is that if the more progressive media outlets simply look away (which has more or less been the case so far, but that should hopefully change soon), then the field is ceded to forums like Tortoise.
What I’m Reading
The last three years, I’ve been in Budapest during the third week of August, and I’ve always made it a point to visit the Hungarian National Gallery. The Gallery, in itself, is good, but their bookshop there is an absolute jewel. Unlike most museum/gallery bookshops, which give you a very standard (and often uninteresting) fare, the Hungarian National Gallery’s bookshop always has something you’ll never see anywhere else; in particular, they will always have something new that deals with some aspect of the history of progressive art. This time, I picked up Sjeng Scheijen’s Avant Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935, and read it over the course of my trip.
I know very little about avant-garde art, other than a passing familiarity with names like Kandinsky or Chagall, and even less about Russian avant-garde art, so this was an introduction to a whole new world. I learned for the first time about the lives and times of memorable figures such as Kasemir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, their political and personal rivalries and friendships, and their fate under the swiftly Stalinising Soviet Union. Although the book is primarily about the artists, it’s also a window into those early years of the Soviet Union, and the attitude of the Soviet leadership towards art. Perhaps inevitably, you find that the avant-garde artists considered themselves to be the artistic vanguard (pun not intended) of the Revolution, but the moment it became clear that they were independent-minded and would not accept centralised leadership structures, the Bolsheviks turned against them, and actively sought to portray avant-garde art as anti-Soviet and reactionary.
The book is filled with anecdotes and events that together construct this complex history, and it illuminates with particular clarity the pettiness and the bureaucracy that is at the heart of authoritarian regimes, and which suffocates any attempts at a genuine artistic awakening. Even if you have no interest in avant-garde art, I’d recommend this: both for the historical narrative, but also - well - it might make you interested in avant-garde art!
On to a similar era, in a geographically proximate location. I’d bought Mo Yang’s The Song of Youth at the Delhi World Book Fair in January, and then left it on my desk where it stared accusingly at me for many months. I took the advantage of a long flight to finally get around to reading it, and I’m glad I did. The Song of Youth is a novel about the Chinese student movement on the eve of the Chinese Revolution (it broadly covers the years 1929 - 1936), told from the perspective of a young, woman university student.
I’m going to be up front, and say that this book is not going to be for everyone. It was written in the 1950s. Its style, therefore, is peak socialist realism, didactic at times, and descriptive always. There is the obligatory praise of Mao’s tactics and strategies. And it is, of course, heavily ideological - although its ideology is the ideology of the revolutionary Communist Party, and not the Communist Party that subsequently became the single party of government. But all these things aside, I really enjoyed reading this book because, first of all, it’s well-written: there is continuous movement, the pace never drags (despite being description-heavy), and the Mo Yang is genuinely writing about a truly fascinating historical period. And secondly - leading on from my last point - this novel is a really interesting window into that period in China’s history that featured Kuomintang rule, Japanese aggression, the continuing presence of colonialism, and the rise of revolutionary movements. It’s an excellent complement to the book I’ve discussed recently in this newsletter - The Song of Arirang - which tells the same story, but from the perspective of a Korean revolutionary. Once you account for the biases, Song of Youth gives you a thorough grounding in the years that led to the shaping of contemporary China.
I had two problems with this book. One was that its ideology at times became too on the nose: not just communism, but Marxism-Leninism; making the protagonist read Lenin’s intra-left screed, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, was a bit much!
And secondly, you remember all those annoying books where the secondary characters are essentially ciphers, and vehicles for the protagonist’s development and evolution? Song of Youth does something similar, but in the reverse: it’s the protagonist who is a clean slate, upon which various committed revolutionaries write their thoughts and visions from time to time. In the beginning, I wondered if this reflected internalised misogyny, but later in the book we do find revolutionary women as well; it’s only the protagonist who seems to be perpetually inexperienced, and perpetually being explained things to by people with a more developed revolutionary consciousness. This is exhibited in particular by the repeated description of her smiling “naively” at something. There was a moment, on page 466 of the novel, when after many years in the revolution, she was still smiling naively, and I wanted to throw the book at the wall: how much longer will you be “naive” for? I do wonder if this is a translation issue, and if in the original Chinese it was perhaps something less pejorative (“smiling simply?”), but even otherwise, I don’t think Mo Yang does justice to her protagonist.
We had our monthly meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle this Sunday (as always, drop me a DM if you want to join), and this was our first double-bill: we read Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit and Martha Wells’ All Systems Red together. Ninefox Gambit, of course, has been one of my favourite reads, and I’ve often recommended it on this newsletter; but this was my first re-read - after seven years - and I’m glad that the book has held up, and it wasn’t just my memory inflating its quality. The prose still feels lyrical, and its core ideas of consensus reality and calendrical heresy as terrifying as they first were.
Of course, a few of the pivotal moments don’t quite land as they did the first time, since you know how they end, but on the other hand, you notice the foreshadowing a lot more.
I’ve never read Martha Wells before, and I’m glad I finally did: other than being decorated and loved in the genre, she’s also one of the nicest writers around.
All Systems Red, with its killer “murderbot” who’d rather be watching soap eras than doing its job, was a very fun read in how it upset a whole host of SF tropes, from army robots to evil corporations to planet exploration, but also, the two books matched in a way that I hadn’t anticipated when we made the selections. Our theme was military sci-fi, and both novels subvert the military SF in fascinating - but very distinct - ways. So we had a fascinating conversation in our circle about how they do that, and I’d actually recommend reading these two books together and seeing what you make of them.
Sofia Samatar is one of those few writers who are on my insta-buy list, regardless of genre or price. Opacities - her latest book - arrived yesterday, and I inhaled it in two settings. It’s an epistolary book about the writing life, written in the form of letters to her friend and colleague, Kate Zembrano. A lot of familiar figures cross the stage: Clarice Lispector is one of the most frequent references, but there are many others. I don’t have much to say about this book, other than recommending it to anyone who’s ever been interested in writing or writers (which should be all readers of this newsletters!). And if for nothing else, for this one line, which justifies preserving this book in amber so that it can last an eternity: “only with fragments can you make a universe; this is what we call worldbuilding.”
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
I wrote a little editorial about our Hugo win. And from our non-fiction issue, I recommend Jenna Hanchey’s essay on the concept of time in Africanfuturism (I might be a little biased, as I edited it!), and the Critical Friends podcast issue on the idea of the canon.
The Indian Scene
Congratulations to Amal Singh for having a novella in Psychopomp’s 2026 list (see here) - we’re all looking forward to it! Amal’s debut novel, The Garden of Delights, came out earlier this year, for anyone interested.
Recommendations Corner
Since we’ve talked about Sofia Samatar in this newsletter, why not try her novella, which came out earlier this year, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain? It’s an interesting SF work that juxtaposes physical extractivism (the generation ship, mining planets for fuel) and academic extractivism (centred around the neoliberal university, and unequal knowledge extraction purposes). I wrote a review of it for Interzone earlier this year (unfortunately paywalled, but please subscribe to that excellent, independent SF magazine), and Strange Horizons had a review of it out yesterday.