Words for Words - Issue LXIV

Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.

A quick note if you’re reading this, and are a BSFA voter: the shortlist voting for the 2024 Awards ends today. As I’d mentioned in the previous newsletter, I’m on the long-list for best non-fiction, for my essay on world-building. If you enjoyed it (enough), do consider voting for it.

Earlier this month, I was at the Mathrubhoomi Literary Festival in Trivandrum. One of my panels was the somewhat ambitiously-named Can Stories Heal the Land, and one of my co-panelists was one of the authors of Ikigai - yes, that book you see front and centre every time you make a trip to the bookshop. Probably my first time co-paneling with a globally bestselling writer; what was even better, though, was that the discussion soon turned to speculative fiction, and then stayed there (from solar-punk to utopian fiction to alternate worlds). I feel like Mathrubhoomi could have saved us some head-scratching by just having a panel on SF - maybe next year!

In the festival bookshop (which was excellent), I also discovered - and picked up - what seems to be Malayalam SF: V.J. James’ Anti-Clock. The blurb indicates that it will be an absolutely bonkers ride.

One of the highlights of the Fest was learning that Deepak Unnikrishnan’s brilliant Temporary People (which I reviewed for Strange Horizons when it came out in 2017) now has a Malayalam translation, done by none other than Benyamin. Temporary People is so unique in what it does with language, that I cannot even imagine how it might be translated; but then, if anyone can do it, it’s Benyamin.

The illustrator, by the way, has written a graphic novel on AI, which I also picked up at the bookshop - more on that in the next newsletter. If you’re ever in the vicinity, this is a fest I’d recommend attending: it has a much more organic, non-corporatised feel to it than some of the bigger lit fests around the country.

A final piece of personal information: the French Embassy organised a night of science fiction and fantasy reading by French and Indian SF writers. Samit Basu and I were there, and I read from both The Wall and The Horizon. It was nice to have an event like this dedicated specially to genre - another sign that things are slowly changing in India, with respect to the acceptance of English-language Indian SF writing? Although, of course, the flip side of such readings is that you have people come up and tell you “I’ve been reading SF for so long, and this is the first time I’m hearing of this book!” Bittersweet, always.

What I’m Reading

For our Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle this month, we read Octavia Butler’s Kindred. There is invariably a sense of deja vu when you read such a book: you keep feeling like it’s a story you’ve read before, and then you realise that the book you’re reading was the first to do it. Kindred reminded me, in part, of Underground Railroad, of Roots (which was written at around the same time), and - more recently - of Agnes Gomillon’s Seed of Cain. Our discussion focused a lot upon how the novel explores family, and - more directly from an SF perspective - the ways in which it subverts the classical tropes of the time travel novel.

As always, drop me a line if you want to join the reading circle!

I’d read Jasmine Days - Benyamin’s fictional take on the Arab Spring - a few years ago; I picked up the sequel at Mathrubhoomi, and read it from start to finish on my flight back from Trivandrum. Al Arabian Novel Factory takes place in the same nameless Arab city in the aftermath of the (repressed) revolutionary protests, with the Jasmine Days manuscript being one of the protagonists of the novel. It’s a memorable companion story to Jasmine Days (the metafictional part of it works particularly well), and I can think of few better treatments of a revolution’s afterlives. The book it reminded me of most is Amjad Nasser’s Land of No Rain: I think it would be a very interesting project to read the two together.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Shinjini Dey’s review of Owlish - a really intriguing novel - is well worth your time (and will hopefully prompt you to pick up the book!).

Also, on that note, it’s Hugo-nominating season again, and SH is - as ever - eligible for best semiprozine.

The Indian Scene

The anthology Ecoceanic - co-edited by Tarun K Saint and Frencesco Verso, and featuring stories by - among others - Vandana Singh, looks intriguing, and is just out. That’s a beautiful cover as well.

Recommendations Corner

This week, it just had to be. Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People came out in 2017 and - as he disarmingly admitted during his panel at Mathrubhoomi - he hasn’t written anything sense, but honestly, it doesn’t matter; this book is enough to whet your appetite for a decade, given how many times it deserves to be read. Unnikrishnan does magic with language, in ways that remind you of how Binyavanga Wainaina dazzled, or Dambudzo Marechera lacerated. Through the framing device of Malayali workers in the gulf, and at the intersection of speculative fiction/magical realism, these vignettes are truly some of the most memorable pieces of short fiction I’ve read. Leaving this with a sampler of what you’re in for, once you pick up this book:

Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs died at the scene, but the surviving nouns, tadpole-sized, see-through, fell like hail. Some accurately ... [but] there were also mistakes. Because the nouns had been expelled so violently, many ended up mangled, some unrecognizable. These damaged nouns, like Wifebeater and Veed and Secret Police, were everywhere, unclaimed, hanging off rafters, store signs, pedestrians.