Words for Worlds - Issue 78
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
The Journey Planet fanzine has brought out a special issue dedicated to workers’ rights in SF - something that is not discussed nearly enough. This edition is edited by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk, whom you may otherwise know as the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog. I have a short essay in it, called ‘Gesturing Towards the Labour Question,’ where I argue that contemporary SF tends to approach the labour question indirectly, through four literary techniques: absence, displacement, congealment, and transcendence. You can read the essay - and indeed, the whole issue - here.
An update on The Sentence: the text is ready. All that’s left is to finalise the cover and the blurb, and we will be ready. By the time the next newsletter rolls around on September 30, I hope to have concrete details with cover, blurb, and pre-order links, along with a bit of history about this novel.
And I can’t not talk about the passing of Elias Khoury yesterday. I’ve often said that if you put a blade to my throat and told me to name an all-time best novel list of exactly one, I would name Gate of the Sun. I did a long-ish Twitter and BlueSky thread on Khoury and what he meant to me; his passing his shattering, but all I can think of now is the gift of his words, which I have been reading and re-reading since yesterday.
What I’m Reading
I’ve known of Steven Salaita for many years: indeed, from the time that he lost his academic job for his pro-Palestinian stand, was hounded out of academia, became a school-bus driver, and eventually found his way to the American University in Cairo. I read every word he wrote for its moral and ethical clarity and its unbending courage (in particular, there’s nothing quite like this piece). So when I heard he’d published his debut novel, I bought it immediately.
If you’ve read Salaita’s non-fiction, Daughter, Son, Assassin will feel like a seamless transition. It moves between a man who has been left for dead in the desert of a nameless Middle-Eastern Kingdom known only as “the Kingdom” (it is obviously Saudi Arabia) by its secret police, after a previously friendly arrangement between them turned sour (think, “a case of conscience”); and, many years later, his daughter, growing up in Virginia/DC, who seeks for the truth of her father’s disappearance, and then, revenge for it. The novel has all the themes that Salaita has been preoccupied with: complicity and courage, direct and hidden violence, and the ruthlessness of power. The staccato shifts in point of view might be a little challenging at first, but you get used to them quite quickly.
In the House of the Interpreter is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoir about his school days at the prestigious, colonial Alliance High School, in the very years that the Mau Mau independence struggle intensified (Ngugi’s own elder brother was a fighter on the Mau Mau side). A young Ngugi here struggles to reconcile his grooming as a future loyal apparatchik of the Empire with his obvious loyalties towards his people: more than once, Alliance High School is described as a haven where he is safe from the storms outside - until the storms come knocking. If you’re interested in Kenyan history, the end of Imperialism, or just the shaping of the future author of The River Between, The Wizard of the Crow, and Petals of Blood, you’ll love this book. It also has a series of really fascinating snippets about the time - for example, the impact of Nasser’s victory at Suez on faraway Kenya, and the Kenyan people.
Joseph Andras, what can I say! A few newsletters ago, I wrote about Faraway the Southern Sky, one of my stand-out reads of the year. And now there’s Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, yet another stunning novel. This one’s the story of Fernand Iveton, communist, freedom-fighter, and the only “pied noir” to be executed by the French during Algeria’s War of Independence. Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us traces Iveton’s arrest for planting a bomb in a factory (it was designed so as not to kill anyone, only send a statement), and subsequently, his custody, torture, and show trial by the French. Andras’ prose is … well, you live in it, is the closest description I can give, but you have to read the book to experience it.
Incidentally, the book absolutely tears apart France and French hypocrisy in every manner imaginable, so of course the French literary establishment, in an act of supreme chutzpah, awarded it the Prix Goncourt. And obviously Andras declined it, saying that prizes and competitions are antithetical to the act of literary creation (I wish I had a tenth of that moral clarity!).
This book is actually best read alongside Henri Alleg’s brilliant and devastating Algerian Memoirs, which provide you the non-fiction foil to the fiction. Alleg was the man who exposed the fact of French torture in Algeria to the French public, and played no small part in the Algerian freedom struggle. In this book, you’ll find a first-person account of what Andras fictionalises.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Try Electra Pritchett’s review of Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain - a really intriguing novella that I discuss in my labour question piece as well.
The Indian Scene
Nothing stirring this week, as far as I know.
Recommendations Corner
There’s no real theme, as such, for this newsletter; but this month, for the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, we have the theme of SF x Romance. We’ve paired a graphic novel (On a Sunbeam) with a long-ish short story, just published a couple of months ago: Amal Singh’s ‘I Will Meet You When the Artifacts End’ (Clarkesworld, July 2024). Our group has really enjoyed the story, so here it is for your reading pleasure as well.