Words for Worlds - Issue 84

Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of Words for Worlds!

A few more updates about The Sentence, which has now been just over a month out in the world (get it here!). The launch event with Kanan Gill at Crosswords, Bombay, was fantastic: some fantastic questions, both from Kanan and from the audience, and a chance for me to talk about one of my favourite concepts in the novel: moral luck. I sometimes describe The Sentence as a book about “impossible choices” to avoid putting off people with a term such as “moral luck,” but this newsletter is a safe space after all!

The Sentence will be coming to Bangalore later in December - there will be an event at Champaca on the 22nd with another quite special interlocutor, so keep a look-out for that!

Some coverage: here is a very nice review in The New Indian Express, which gives you a summary of the novel (and is spoiler-free!). And here’s a review-conversation with The Hindu, which I really enjoyed doing: talking about the relationship between allegory and SF, the influence of law upon the novel, its world-building, and so on. Give it a read!

Oh, and yes, if you haven’t yet got a copy, and any of this sufficiently intrigues you, a reminder that it’s available here.

I’ve been heartened by the positive responses to the novel - heartened enough to try and start re-querying it with US/UK agents in 2025, in the hope that it will eventually find its way outside India (so far I’ve been personally emailing proofs to interested folks, which I absolutely don’t mind doing, but I’d much rather prefer it in bookshops). I’m not exactly hopeful, given past experiences, and knowing what one knows about how these things work, but we shall see.

What I’m Reading

It’s been a busy reading fortnight. I read Anton Hur’s Towards Eternity on a twelve-hour, and loved it. It’s premise - and many of its themes - are classic SF (planetary destruction and generation ships, post- or trans-humanism, cloning), but Hur enfolds them within what can only be called a love letter to poetry, music, and words, as constitutive of personhood. The result is a work that is alternately melancholic and alternately soaring, and really stays with you after. One of my stand-out reads of this nearly-done year.

I read this on a twelve-hour train ride (yes, it has been that kind of a fortnight!). I’ve long been a fan of Robert Jackson Bennett: he does something really challenging really well, which is writing in the register of fantasy, but also bringing in SFnal concepts (see, for example, Foundryside for a really good exploration of AI in a fantasy setting). It’s a really unique style, and he replicates it in The Tainted Cup (the SFnal element here includes various plant-based technologies). The Tainted Cup has the added benefit of being a locked-room murder mystery within a fantasy setting, so if I had to describe this book, it would be Keigo Higashino meets Jeff Vandermeer, and I don’t think there can be a better sales pitch than that!

And now a book with a very different tone (although keeping in with the anarchist threads running through this newsletter!): Alexander Berkman’s 1920-22 diaries from the Soviet Union are a stark chronicles of the swift descent of the Bolsheviks into totalitarianism, as it happened: a bit like Victor Serge, Berkman was an anarchist who decided to extend critical support to the nascent Soviet regime, thinking that for all its incipient flaws, it represented the best hope for human emancipation - but quickly enough, found that position untenable, and indeed, found his own position untenable (Berkman fell foul of the regime a lot sooner, and was deported). Thus, this is a critique of the Bolsheviks from the left.

Other than being an eyewitness account, and a remarkable chronicle of personal courage (Berkman refused an order to translate a Lenin tract despite threats), The Bolshevik Myth is also useful in puncturing a common position that seeks to separate Stalinism (bad) from Leninism (good), and which locates the Soviet Union’s totalitarian turn in Lenin’s premature death and Stalin’s rise to power. Berkman shows that this was assuredly not so. The final section - on the Kronstadt Rebellion - is particularly haunting.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

For our November non-fiction issue, I was really happy to commission and edit “To Fact from Fiction: The Representation of Climate Change in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Dog War II” (the title is quite self-explanatory). Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian writer whose novel, A Time of White Horses (set in Palestine leading up to the Nakba), I read around a decade ago, and absolutely loved. I’ve always been miffed by the fact that his foray into SF - Dog War II - has not been translated into English, despite winning prestigious awards for Arab fiction. Well, here we have the next-best thing: an essay on the novel, and which locates it within a broader tradition of Arabfuturism and Arab climate fiction writing.

The Indian Scene

Nothing this fortnight, but stay tuned for the final 2024 issue of the newsletter, where I’ll recap all the fantastic English-language Indian SF that’s been published this year (I think it’s been the most prolific year ever by that metric).

Recommendations Corner

We’re reading House of Suns for our Delhi SF reading circle this month (message me if you’re interested in joining!), and while Reynolds of course is not a “lesser known” writer by any stretch, this book is among his lesser-known works (compared to the Revelation Space of Prefect Dreyfuss series); but it is my absolute favourite among his novels, especially when paired up with his short story featuring the same characters, “The Thousandth Night.” House of Suns has that vastness, that grandeus, and that sense of awe that you really crave from science fiction: the infinitude of time and space and the terrifying and wondrous smallness of humanity compared to it. It’s (one of) the books I’d use as a gateway drug into the genre for someone interested.