Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter!
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been on an intense journey, re-reading - and writing about - James Baldwin. The initial trigger for this was an invitation from The Hindu to interview Nicholas Boggs, the author of the brilliant new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story (which I’ve written about previously, on this newsletter). I conducted the interview over Zoom in early June; it was a deeply moving experience, with Boggs bringing years of painstaking effort - and love - to the conversation. The interview is now finally out, in three formats: if you get the physical Hindu newspaper, it is in the Sunday, 19 June edition; a slightly longer version is in the e-paper (paywalled or unpaywalled with patchy formatting); but what I’d really recommend - if you have the time and the inclination - is to listen to the full video interview on YouTube.
As readers of this newsletter have probably gathered, finding Baldwin (again) at the age of 37 has been, in many ways, a life-altering experience for me. I’m so grateful to have had the chance to traverse some of that emotional landscape with perhaps the greatest Baldwin scholar in existence, and we talk about Baldwin’s life, his art, his loves (for him, these were never separate), how he moved through the world, his views on Palestine and on the false notion of “public safety,” and much else. For those who get the chance to read or watch any of the interviews, I’d love to know what you think.
This year, I’m honoured to be chairing the jury of the Otherwise Award, a longstanding SFF prize that seeks to acknowledge works that explore and expand our understanding of gender. Our reading list is drawn from public recommendations; so, if you want to recommend a work (published in 2026, or in 2025 but was not considered by last year’s jury), please do so using the form here. A reminder that it should be a work of SFF (can be any format), and should expand our ideas around gender.
Finally, a reminder that public voting for the Ignyte Awards is still open, and ‘The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction’ is on the ballot. You can vote for it (it takes a minute) - if you’re so inclined - here.
What I’m Reading
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of my favourite science fiction collections; but it’s only now that I got around to reading his other collection, Stories of Your Life (the eponymous story is, of course, more famous as the film Arrival). Much like Exhalation, this one begins with a Le Guin-style fantasy-science fiction crossover, drawn from the myths around the Tower of Babel. After that, we move into the science fiction proper, where you get the familiar Ted Chiang: cerebral, farsighted, deftly weaving in the awe and terror of the universe into the everyday. I do think the stories in Exhalation are more memorable, and linger longer in the memory, but it would be interesting to read the two books together as the complete Ted Chiang ouevre.
Womb City was our pick for the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle this month, and our meeting was yesterday. This is one of those occasions when I really felt the importance of reading in company, and talking about what we read. When I finished the book on my own, I was quite ambivalent about it, finding it borderline incoherent at times, and the world not quite hanging together. But after two hours of intensely picking it apart with nine other readers who’d read it as closely as I had, I came away with a vastly higher opinion of the book, and the skill involved in crafting it.
Womb City is set in a medium-term future Botswana. In exchange for public safety, a section of the population (predominantly women) is microchipped and subject to regular psych evaluations (including by their spouses), which aim to prevent crime before it happens (objectively, it works, with crime down significantly). Meanwhile, tech has advanced enough to allow for a certain kind of immortality: the consciousness can be separated from the physical body, everyone is given three “lifespans” of seventy years each, and can - in theory - “body hop” several times during these lifespans. But the access to all this technology is mediated through class, race, and nationality (a particularly macabre twist on today’s visa regime): the higher you are in the hierarchy, the less time your consciousness spends in limbo between lifespans, the more chance you have of keeping your family and your memories intact through body-hops and lifespans, and the more power you have to evade the city’s public-safety/surveillance panopticon.
Nelah, a young woman and a rising-star architect in her third lifespan (with no memories of her past), is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Elifasi, a senior officer in the police department. She has tried - and failed - to conceive thrice, and on this, the fourth occasion, Nelah and Elifasi decide to pay for a Wombucator, one of a set of “water-well wombs” that are part of a mysterious complex dedicated to the god Matsieng, and site of the equally mysterious “murder trials” that “allegedly use horrid practices to catch criminals who go undetected by technology” (in a rather macabre twist where neoliberalism meets AI meets myth, the “wombucator” is switched off, and the foetus killed, if prospective parents fall behind on their monthly payments). Meanwhile, Nelah starts a romantic relationship with Janith Koshal (“Jan”), the son of a powerful businessman, and who is in the throes of a divorce. Nelah’s relationship with Jan - which she carries on while duping the psych evaluations and her husband’s scrutiny - allows her to live life in the expansive way that her marriage does not.
(CW: graphic gore and violence to follow)
But all of this goes terribly wrong when, on a late night drink-and-drug fuelled drive out of town, Nelah and Jan run over and critically injure a seemingly innocuous passer-by, a young woman called Moremi. Knowing that their DNA is all over Moremi, and that discovery will mean an eternity in “consciousness jail” and no more body-hopping, after some dithering, Nelah - at Jan’s urging - kills Moremi; to get the DNA off, they flay her and then bury her in pieces. Jan’s wealth and influence gives him access to devices that can override Nelah’s microchip and prevent evidence from coming out; but what Nelah and Jan don’t reckon with is that within a day, a resurrected Moremi returns, driven by a quest for vengeance that includes violently murdering all of Nelah’s family, her lover, and - ultimately - her unborn child in the Wombucator (as a twist, Moremi is only visible to Nelah and to her next victim). The second half of the book is then a race against time, as Nelah and Jan try to discover what brought Moremi back to life, and to stop her before she runs through the list of victims and gets to the Wombucator; but in the process, they will discover terrifying truths about their city, about Matsieng and the Murder Trials, and about the entire reality that has been constructed around them.
(CWs over).
It has taken me this much space to summarise the book because - as you’ve probably gathered - there is a lot going on. The initial world-building sets us up for a classic science fiction novel centred around issues of technology, AI, and gender: fresh and innovative, to be sure, with a touch of noir, but (comfortingly) familiar. The turning point is the murder: the story rapidly moves into the domain of body horror, and then - nearer the end - to a portmanteau of the crime and the chase novel, of magical realism reminiscent of the old classics of Amos Tutuola or Ben Okri, and straight up mythological fantasy. There’s no genre that can contain Womb City: it needs its own, new genre.
In the reading circle, some of us compared it to the great Ghanian novelist, B. Kojo Liang’s Major Gentl and the Achimoto Wars, another unclassifiable classic. But with so much going on, and so many different themes and styles coming at you from a bewildering range of angles, does Womb City manage to hang together, to cohere as a matter of form?
On my initial reading, I felt that it did not. It felt almost like a pastiche of interesting ideas that failed to come together to create a story. In the reading circle, however, my perspective changed: someone raised the point that in Womb City, there is a striking mismatch between technological progress and the state of society. On the one hand, human beings have effectively become gods - able to change bodies like old clothes, preserve consciousness, live for an age. On the other hand, not only have social fault-lines remained just the way they were, but indeed, technological progress is now used to entrench them, make them even more impermeable. The technology is miraculous, but your class, your gender, and your nationality mediate how much of it you access, on what terms you access it, and whether it plays a liberating - or fettering - role in your life. Humans can play god, but having a child is still a sign of social status, the wealthy still have work-arounds to the “rule of law,” and erstwhile visa regimes have now become body-hopping regimes to prevent everyone from choosing a white, Swedish male body to “hop into.”
This is, of course, a familiar argument: that ultimately, the way technology impacts us will be determined by who controls it, and on what terms. The fascinating thing, I think, about Womb City is that the incoherence of the world of extremely advanced technology that can create utopia, but which coexists and facilitates our present-day social hierarchies, is reflected in the incoherence of its form. In other words, the novel’s choppy rhythm, style and resistance to familiar genre conventions is the only formal vehicle that can adequately communicate the incoherence of the world that it develops.
We began our discussion by talking about an obvious comparator work - Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale - and the longstanding black and indigenous critique of that novel. As William Gibson noted, “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” and Atwood appeared to have been wilfully unaware of the fact that her near-future, warning “dystopia” had been the reality of black and indigenous women’s lives in Canada and the United States for centuries. But while in one natural way Womb City - by virtue of its positionality - is an answer to The Handmaid’s Tale, our discussion on form made me think of another way in which it surpasses its famous genre predecessor. Atwood’s dystopia is a familiarly comforting, clean-cut division between the oppressor, the oppressed, and the rebel.
Womb City’s dystopia, by contrast, is patchy, uneven, and - again - resists easy classification. Nelah, for example, is both a heavily microchipped and surveilled woman, while also a successful architect. The surveillance structures themselves can frequently fail or be gamed - reminding us of that memorable line from Andor about how unnatural tyranny is, and how it needs constant effort to be maintained. Again, there are people who do quite well out of the surveillance structures set up in this world, and they are not always men. In essence, Womb City paints a dystopia that is a terrain of constant negotiation, stresses, and friction, of complicity and of collaboration, instead of a pristine structure where effective resistance can only take place through an organised rebel movement. To draw a comparison with the classics, if The Handmaid’s Tale is 1984, then Womb City is Brave New World - a more nuanced, layered, realistic - and therefore, genuinely terrifying - dystopia, which takes subtle hegemony as seriously as it does naked coercion.
Through the journey, Womb City also has a number of callbacks to classic science fiction that will delight genre regulars: predictive policing reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s pre-cogs, using mnemonics to overcome psych-evaluations in the tradition of Alfred Bester, inverted allusions to the eternal debate around our ethical obligations towards the simulations that we create, a debate that has occupied names such as Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds, an ending that - without giving the game away - puts us in the mind of Naomi Alderman’s The Power, and so much else. Womb City offers us a vision of dystopia that is both familiar and defamiliarised just enough to be thoroughly disconcerting: brutal, violent, uneven, chaotic, gendered, and with the tiniest of cracks that let in the potential for some kind of redemption, within the folds and interstices of this messed up world.
I’ve long been an admirer of Tanvir Ahmed’s acute critical work, which I edit for Strange Horizons (we share a similarly agonised relationship with the works of Guy Gavriel Kay), so I jumped at the chance to read some fiction by him. The Night Sweeps the Mountains Away is a little jewel of a novella that took me back to my childhood, reading folk tales from Central Asia: it takes the classic dual structure of the quest and the war, integrate them into one, and - most memorably - moves forward through the story-within-a-story technique that everyone in this part of the world has grown up with (I experienced it first in the Panchatantra). Reading this brought back a very specific childhood memory for me: hot summers in Delhi, the cooler in my parents’ bedroom, and a carton of ice-cold mango frooti. It was basically a slice of the time that formed me.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
We successfully completed our fund-drive. Thank you to everyone who donated. If you’re an Indian reading this, we’ve had problems processing donations on Indian credit cards thanks to Stripe, and are working on alternative payment methods - so keep a watch on your emails for that!
The last piece that we published in the fund-drive was one that I edited, and I’m particularly proud of: “Not so Domesticated,” an essay by Fayth Tan, brings together two of my favourite themes in SFF: fungi and extractivism. Give it a read! The entire fund-drive issue has a set of brilliant pieces, and is really worth a read.
The Indian Scene
Congratulations to Prashanth Srivtasa for the publication of his new story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “The Teahouse.” Give it a read!
For anyone waiting on updates on Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, the initial reading process is done, and we will soon be meeting to finalise our shortlist. Reading 230 pieces (out of which around 30 were novelettes) takes a while, so thank you for your patience!
Recommendations Corner
Reading Tanvir Ahmed’s novella sent me down a rabbit-hole seeking that lost childhood, and it was Reddit that came to my rescue: my one memory of the book - other than its cover - was a character called “Yarti Gulok,” whose name translates to “half an ear.” It turns out that someone on Reddit was looking to reunite with Yarti Gulok as well, and another helpful soul pointed him to the Internet Archive, which has a copy. Amazon tells me that the book is still available somewhere in the world, but understandably, at a frightful price now; so the Internet Archive upload is a rare treasure. To anyone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure, I do recommend immersing yourself in the travails of Yarti Gulok - whatever age you are, it will be unlike anything else you’ve read.