Words for Worlds - Issue LXVIII
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter! There’s some joyous news on the Indian SF front (a new imprint!), but we’ll get to that below.
A quick note before we start: Blaft magazine has just put out a call for anti-caste speculative fiction: see here. The deadline is May 15th - a month - so if this is up your alley, now’s the time to get writing!
What I’m Reading
I never thought Singapore would be a place I’d be remotely interested in reading about - or that it could even be a remotely interesting place worth reading about. Someone says “Singapore” and what you tend to think of is a city manicured to the point of tedium, an artificial order achieved through decades of internalised authoritarianism. Of course, I was wrong: like any other place on earth, Singapore has its own palimpsest-like history, and Singapore: A Biography does an excellent job of bringing it to life.
From the early settlements to the colonial era, from World War II to the struggle for independence (and beyond), the book captures both the grand sweep of history, but also, at a more granular level, the struggles and movements that characterised each era. There are fascinating sections on pirates and piracy, secret societies, women’s movements, and of course, the communist movement, especially as a part of the anti-colonial struggle: one of the book’s strongest qualities is that it accords a hearing to those inevitably left out of the national narrative.
There are, of course, limits to that: at times, it is quite evident that the book is operating within the confines of the national narrative. For example, it is critical of colonialism, but passes lightly over the repressive strategies deployed by the British to crush the nascent leftist movements in the 1920s; and there are other moments where the blunt edge of critique is visibly softened. This is, after all, not a radical work of history in the vein of E.P. Thompson or Howard Zinn, but also, it is not dishonest about its omissions: the gaps are visible to an alert reader, who can then go and fill them on their own.
I read this book just after Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency, which I’ve written about in a previous newsletter, and I think the two complement each other wonderfully; in fact, State of Emergency perhaps fills in those very gaps that Singapore: A Biography was constrained to leave.
This isn’t a book recommendation, but it is a recommendation of a beautiful essay on literature. Remembering Kampala, by the always-wonderful Carey Baraka. Makerere University in Uganda (pictured above) has always fascinated me, ever since I read about the famous conference on literature in the early 1960s, and how basically everyone who would go on to become a major figure of African English-language writing was present there. Like Gottingen for physics at the turn of the 20th century, 1960s’ Makerere felt like a time and a place out of legend, something you yearn to be a part of.
In this essay, Baraka goes deep into the real-life time and the place: not just Makerere but Kampala, and the culture of literary magazines (unsurprisingly, some Indians are heavily involved), the anti-colonial and left-wing politics, and how inextricably literature is connected with all of that. This manages to be a moving (but unsparing) portrait of some truly remarkable individuals, an unsentimental love letter to a city (Kampala), and a fitting ode to a literary movement.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Last week’s short story - “The Jaxicans' Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37,” by Stephen Granade, is a lot of fun.
The Indian Scene
And the exciting news! Earlier this week, Westland Books announced the launch of a dedicated SF imprint called If. I believe this is the first ever SF imprint to come out of an Indian publishing house, and it can only mean good things for the genre. I’ve known of this being in the works for a while, but it’s still exhilarating to see it announced.
We also have the first book of the imprint announced (today): Gigi Ganguly’s collection of short stories, titled BIOPECULIAR (and props to Westland and If for starting out with a short story collection!). I’ve had the pleasure of blurbing this, so I can definitely recommend the book: you can get it here.
Recommendations Corner
And staying with the Singaporean theme, here’s Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore. Because it’s Singapore, you obviously have AI and tech-inspired SF, as well as the sea playing a big role, but it’s a lot more than that: and as with any set of stories that come from a different context, unsettling in the best of ways.