Words for Worlds - Issue LXIX
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
A writing update: the new issue of Interzone has a double-header review by me: of Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, and Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming. I call the first an instance of prefigurative SF (in the anarchist sense), and the second one is at the intersection of climate SF and First Contact.
This issue also has a short story by Prashanth Srivatsa, so there’s some solid representation there. You’ll need to buy the e-book to read, and I would encourage it, as Interzone is one of the finest independent SF magazines around, and they survive on subscriptions.
An event update: if you’re in Delhi, this Friday (the 10th of May), Westland is launching Gigi Ganguly’s BIOPECULIAR, and also its SF-dedicated imprint, IF (BIOPECULIAR is the first book that will sail under the IF banner). I’ll be in conversation with the author about the book, and about Indian SF in general, so come by if you’re free. It’s at Kunzum (GK), starting at 7 15 PM, and the details are here.
What I’m Reading
A new Alastair Reynolds novel is always an event for me; this one in particular, because it’s a continuation of one of my favourite series, the Prefect Dreyfuss series: with its combination of police-procedural (in space) and direct democracy (in space), its my ideal combination. Machine Vendetta does not disappoint, although I will say it has strong Book 3 vibes in that you will need to read the previous two novels for a lot of stuff to make sense (this is a hint to pick up those two books, and then this one!).
As with the other Prefect Dreyfuss novels, though I was left wanting a bit more detail about how direct democracy in the Glitter Band actually works, and how the mysterious “polling cores” function. You get tantalising glimpses of what seems to be a bounded democracy, with Dreyfuss and his colleagues enforcing the bounds, but that in turn raises so many fascinating questions that I’d pay good money for Reynolds to devote an entire novel to exploring how this actually works. Alastair, are you listening?
I read this for a book club on Utopian fiction. Peach Blossom Paradise is a novel set in turn-of-the-20th-century China, during a brief period when reformists were in the ascendancy, before they were brutally suppressed by royalists (it ends with Sun Yat Sen’s successful revolution). “Peach blossom paradise” refers to utopia as expressed in certain classical Chinese poetry, and in a turn of irony that is one of the characteristics of this book, the “peach blossom paradise” of the novel is a little hamlet that’s run by seven bandits, and to where the novel’s protagonist is taken after being kidnapped for ransom.
One wonders - and we wondered in the book club - whether Peach Blossom Paradise is more utopian fiction, or anti-utopian fiction: certain events towards the ending reminded me of Les Miserables, where, after all is said and done, and the revolution has failed, what seems to matter is a turning inwards for redemption. Peach Blossom Paradise is a bit more complex than that, though, and I’d recommend reading it and seeing what you make of it.
This book should come with a healthy dose of trigger warnings, though (in particular, graphic sexual assault), and one of its significant weaknesses (in my view) is that the male writer, writing a female protagonist, falls into a male-gazey perspective a little too often.
Another book club read, this one focusing on translated books. Vladivostok Circus is quite a unique read: its set in Vladivostok, and is centred entirely on a troupe performing the Russian bar, with the narrator an outsider who is spending a season with them as a costume designer. This one was spare, and it felt almost Japanese in its narrative austerity, with the quotidian dominating to a point where you felt, by the end, that nothing had really happened other than the granular texture of everyday life (which was the point). There were parts of it that were beautiful, but I’m not quite sure what I felt about it as a whole.
Coming across Carlo Rovelli’s clear stance on Palestine prompted me to finally get to one of the many books of this lying around my house. This one is a collection of essays, written over the years, ranging across themes: from the cosmos to the nature of scientific error, from religion to the history of ideas. The scientific essays are wonderfully accessible, but my favourite parts had to be where Rovelli confesses to being a student radical in Italy in the 1970s, including being detained by the police. And there’s one particularly beautiful line describing a time such as that, which I immediately noted down: “I was part of a collective discovery of a spectrum of colour, and those colours have stayed with me.”
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
In the last week of April, we published our special issue on neurodiversity in SFF. A collection of short stories, poetry, essays, and reviews, which you can read here.
The Indian Scene
Apart from the pieces and events I flagged at the beginning of this newsletter, in the latest issue of Strange Horizons, you can read a new short story by Varsha Dinesh: “Those Who Smuggle Themselves into Silvermoon.”
There is also a new short story by Amal Singh in the latest issue of Asimov’s Magazine: “Arazem-2 is Waiting for a Letter.” You’ll need to purchase the issue to read the story, but again - it’s not much, and it’s money well spent, towards sustaining the SF short-story ecosystem.
Recommendations Corner
It’s Alastair Reynolds week, so here’s my all-time favourite Reynolds novel, House of Suns. It’s also the novel I’d recommend people to start their Reynolds journey with: it’s stand-alone, but also, classic Reynolds: the adventure spans the galaxy, it spans six million years (literally), and immerses you in the vastness of both space and time, while also dealing with those eternal themes of ambition, revenge, and love. It also has the best scene in all of science fiction that I’ve read (no spoilers, so nothing more!).