Hello everyone!
As we head into the last month of the year, a shout-out to writers in the final stages of edits. I’m in that stage right now, and every evening when I look at my words, I swing between self-love and self-loathing like a pendulum. It’s a wild ride, and solidarity across the continents to everyone going through that. It will get done. :-)
Onwards.
What I’m Reading
Both he and the world were different now - he’d lost wonder in exchange for confidence, and confusion in favour of understanding.
The best science fiction gives you that “oceanic feeling” - a sense of vastness and of wonder. Science fiction also affords writers a chance to create and explore worlds richer and more complex than our own, to put flesh on ideas that exist only as shadows in our minds. Essa Hansen’s Nophek Gloss is an accomplished debut that joins the tradition of visionary science fiction, while also telling a personal, coming-of-age story that is visceral and compelling.
Nophek Gloss is set in a multi-species multiverse that is held together by trade and warfare, both equal and unequal. A variety of species rub shoulders in a variety of universes, and Hansen’s treatment of the multiverse is reminiscent of Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: it is not something that we can contain in the categories that are known to us. Gender, species, ageing, memory - the building blocks of the world we think we know - are all fluid in Nophek Gloss, the multiverse bearing testimony to Saint Oscar’s famous lines, “you hold that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. I hold that nothing is ever purely itself, and that the point where it becomes so is known as death.”
The story is that of Caiden, a young man whose home planet is destroyed and whose people are slaughtered by a race of slavers called the Casthen. Caiden survives, unwittingly commandeers a spaceship, and falls in with a motley crew of aliens that soon become his chosen family. In his quest for revenge, however, Caiden realises that the Casthens’ economic importance to the Multiverse rules out any simple fantasies of vengeance; and that he must first negotiate the Multiverse’s complex - and violent - structures of power, before justice can be done.
Moving seamlessly between the personal and the existential, the familial and the multi-versal (sorry!), Nophek Gloss is a wonderful read, and I’d put it in my top three of the year.
The Indian Scene
Short stories! Earlier this month, Rupsa Dey published “The Land of Eternal Jackfruits” in Clarkesworld Magazine, a story about consciousness and sentience, life and death, unified around the theme of the jackfruit. At times, it is reminiscent of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, an eternal favourite of mine. The respected short story critic, Charles Payseur (follow his reviews!), has called it “a complex piece with a slow, thoughtful pacing and an emotional, powerful ending.”
Later in November, Tamoha Sengupta published “Love Laws and a Locked Heart” in Fantasy Magazine, a little vignette exploring eternal themes of coming of age and forbidden love.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons?
Our monthly non-fiction issue, featuring an article by Cat Rambo and regular columns by Kuzhali Manickavel (listening and reacting to old fantasy radio shows) and Mame Bougouma Diene (the myriad drumbeats of Afrofuturism). The MexicanX special issue goes live in a few hours, and I’m really looking forward to that.
Recommendations Corner
By moments grim, haunting, terrifying, heartbreaking - and sometimes all of these together - Taduno’s Song is a novel quite unlike anything you’ve read. By theme and style, it’s closest to magical realism - in the tradition of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, for example (although far grimmer) - but magical realism crossed with the darkly funny anti-authoritarianism, in the tradition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s The Wizard of the Crow, Ahmadou Diallo’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, and Kossi Efoue’s The Shadow of Things to Come (all wonderful novels).
The eponymous Taduno is a dissident singer, who is exiled by the President of his repressive one-party State. On returning from exile, he finds that his existence has been completely erased from the memories of his fellow-citizens, and even from the memory of the regime and the President – who, suspecting a trick, has decided to hold his partner in secret custody until he is found. With his vocal cords damaged in an earlier police beating, Taduno struggles to recapture his voice and regain his identity, so that he can save his partner. The quest takes him through the city of his childhood and youth, the neighbourhoods that knew and now disown him, the mansions of the rich and the squares of the homeless, and the underground prisons of “Mr. President.”
Warning: this book will break your heart - again, and again, and again.
Quote Corner
Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me.
Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
Have you read Amal el-Mohtar's Pockets? It was moving and poetically so fantastical.
Hi Mr. Bhatia, I'm quite new to the SF genre as a whole but I'm fascinated by it. I wanted to know how does one, considering you have written an SF novel, build a world from scratch in the SF universe? Are there any specific rules to follow?
PS: I have read your books on Indian constitutional law but yet to read your novel :)