Words for Worlds - Issue 88
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
There’s no other place to begin than with the detailed piece in Vulture about Neil Gaiman (content warnings: sexual assault, rape, child abuse). This has been a long time coming: after the sexual assault allegations first surfaced in July, there has been months of relative industry silence on the issue (something I noted before on this newsletter). The Vulture piece is so detailed that one hopes that silence will no longer be an option. Gaiman’s own (non-)response on his blog appears to have come directly out of a lawyer’s office, and confirms that if we are to have accountability, it will need to come from the wider SF industry.
At an individual level, it is obviously challenging for people whose lives (and especially, childhoods) have been shaped by Gaiman’s work. While there’s no right or wrong way to calibrate one’s relationship with that work, I do feel that there is an ethical imperative to refrain from further material contributions towards the writer, through buying books or other merchandise. The reason for this is that the publishing industry is embedded within capitalism, and an author’s profitability will substantially determine how they are treated, when it comes to the accountability I’ve talked about above.
There’s little more to say at this point, other than to reaffirm solidarity with the survivors, and hope that they have the support that they need; and, at some point perhaps, to have a larger conversation about the patronage and power structures within the industry that enable or facilitate such behaviour.
On a nicer note: a personal update. I now have a literary agent for THE SENTENCE: John Baker, at Bell Lomax Moreton. In true Lenin-style, where there are decades when nothing happens, and then weeks where decades happen, it all transpired very, very quickly. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, signing with a literary agent is the first, essential step to having your book come out in countries outside India, and in the wider anglophone market. The next step, of course, is for the book to be pitched to US/UK publishing houses, a process that will begin soon.
I’ll write a longer post talking about the process as a whole if/when THE SENTENCE is picked up by a publisher, but for now, I just want to note that this was my 128th agent query, spread out over four years and two novels (THE WALL and THE SENTENCE). The previous 127 had all ended in rejections. It’s a very difficult process that involves a lot of things (including a large dollop of good luck), but you just have to keep at it. But more on that (hopefully) anon.
Speaking of THE SENTENCE, I’m going to be at a number of literary festivals this coming week. On the 24th of Jan at 2 PM, I’ll be at the Hyderabad Lit Fest, speaking on science fiction and alternative futures, at the appropriately named “Orwell Terrace.” The day after, at the Kerala Lit Fest, at 1 30 PM, I’ll be speaking about THE SENTENCE with Priya K. Nair. And then it’s on to the Kalaghoda Lit Fest in Bombay: on 29 Jan, at 5 PM, on a panel about SF and the imagination. If you’re around and attending any of these fests, do stop by and say hello.
And in case you haven’t got your copy of the novel yet, here it is!
What I’m Reading
I got to know of Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism from a review that was shared on Bluesky (the first signs that Bluesky is starting to do what Twitter once did!). I read it over the last one week, absolutely rapt. The book excavates the relationship between “Persianate” poetry, and the progressive/revolutionary movements in central Asia through the 20th century (Hodgkin calls this “the Eastern International”).
The journey takes us through the revolutions in Iran, Turkey, and Russia between 1905-1922, the subsequent authoritarian co-optation of a certain “Persianate” culture by the Soviet Union and the newly-founded nation-states of central Asia, and - subsequently - how Persianate poetics not only outlived Stalinism, but became the glue for a certain kind of post-Soviet, left-wing sociability (the preface talks about how Faiz is still sung in protests and gatherings across national boundaries, something that would be immediately familiar to Indian readers!).
I loved this book on its own terms, but also because there were so many connections that I could make from other readings. The description of how the Russian soldiers came in and suppressed the Iranian constitutional revolution (especially in Tabriz) could have been a seen out of Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand. The real-life historical figure of Abdurauf Fitrat put flesh on the bones of the Fitrat who appears mostly offstage in Hamid Isamilov’s novel, The Devil’s Dance, which traces the tragic fate of the Uzbek writers, poets, and intellectuals who lost their lives in Stalin’s purges. The book’s frequent references to political and literary movements in Khiva, Samarkand, and Bukhara came alive, as I’d visited all these places on a trip to Uzbekistan two summers ago. I read references to Iranian emigres making political trouble in Baku in light of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, which traces the 20th-century relationship between oil and democracy, and where Baku plays a crucial role. And so on. But none of these references are needed to enjoy the book to the hilt.
The best part of the book was probably the ending, and the note of hope: of how there is something about poetry that will resist all authoritarian attempts to contain and co-opt it, and which will spill out beyond the artificial borders of nation-states.
The Indian Scene
Nothing new to report this past fortnight.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
All three issues of our reviewers’ 2024 recommendations are now online. If you’re looking for early 2025 recs to catch up on last year’s SF reading, here’s your treasure-trove.
Recommendations Corner
This Sunday, in our monthly meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, we read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We - the OG dystopia, written more than a hundred years ago, and from within the newly established Soviet Union. I’d last read this book eleven years ago, and it was interesting to return to it after a decade. In particular, now knowing a lot more about early Soviet history than I did then, Zamyatin’s prescience feels all the more impressive. This book was written in 1920 - long before Stalin and Stalinism came to dominate the Soviet Union, and at a time when the likes of Victor Serge and Alexander Berkman still saw their role as offering internal criticism to the new State, which - despite the creeping authoritarian tendencies of the Bolsheviks - represented the best hope for world revolution. Zamyatin, however, seems to have seen things clearly, and seen them whole - in fact, his book was originally written even before the Kronstadt Rebellion, whose military suppression was the turning point for many of the Bolsheviks’ erstwhile left-wing supporters.
This, for me, makes We far more interesting than the more famous trinity of 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451, all of which are critiques of totalitarianism from the outside, and which came much later. Zamyatin’s work is also far more layered than at least 1984, in that it’s not just a critique of State power, but also of the industrial production line (“Taylorism” has been raised to a sacred principle). Yes, parts of it will feel a little dated, but remember, this book was written in 1920-21. For its time, and for the most part, it holds up remarkably well!
You write well Gautam.
Oh, I didn’t know there was a new translation of YZ’s We. Which translation do you like?