Words for Worlds - Issue 90

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

I spent the weekend in Odisha, talking about science fiction and The Sentence at the Walking Bookfairs bookshop branches in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. Walking Bookfairs is a really lovingly curated bookstore (I actually found a physical copy of On Earth in Poems there!), and if you’re passing through either of the two cities, do check it out (the Cuttack outlet is just above a bus terminal!).

From Chandigarh, to Mysore, and now to Bhubaneswar/Cuttack, I’ve really enjoyed these bookshop discussions in Tier-2 cities. They are well off the literary festival “circuit”, and that’s exactly why it’s been so nice: at every event, the questions have been different, and they’ve made me think deeper both about my work, and also about the genre. In the Cuttack discussion, for example, we went fairly deep into the connection between law and transitional justice, and how science fiction deals with that theme.

Also, I’ll also remember Cuttack fondly because of the grizzled gentleman who, after the event, bought all of my books (fiction and non-fiction) for this daughter, in one go. This has never happened to me before, so it was quite the moment.

Finally, a reminder - as ever - that if you’re looking to read The Sentence but haven’t yet, here’s [a] place to get it (The Sentence) - as well as, of course, the infinitely preferable local bookshop.

What I’m Reading

I’ve always been fascinated by the lives of Virendranath Chattopadhyay [“Chatto”] and M.N. Roy, two of the revolutionaries who struggled for India’s freedom, and whom history has largely forgotten (Chatto far more than Roy). Kavitha Rao’s book takes a look at their intertwined lives, tracing their separate and overlapping trajectories in alternate chapters. Along with the lives of these individuals, she also opens up a window into the world-spanning revolutionary politics of the 1920s and 1930s, from the United States to India, from Berlin to Moscow.

Alongside Ole Birk Laursen’s biography of M.P.T. Acharya, Anarchy or Chaos, we now have studies of three of the great Indian internationalist and left-wing revolutionaries of the era, whose stories (and the movement they were a part of) have been submerged for too long. Rao’s book paints vivid portraits of two remarkable - but deeply flawed - men (the story of M.N. Roy’s disastrous Comintern-sponsored intervention into the Chinese Revolution was particularly poignant), who endured great hardship and privations in their commitment to combining internationalist left-wing politics with the struggle for India’s freedom. The result was death for one (Chatto was executed in Stalin’s great purge) and obscurity for the other (Roy found himself marginalised from Indian politics on his return to the contrary). So we have books like Rao’s to thank for excavating the stories of these people for us.

It’s been six years since I was last at Kolkata’s iconic Seagull Bookshop. The layout of the bookshop has changed, but the sheer uniqueness of its collection has not. Among the books I picked up - and the first I began reading - is Venus Khoury-Ghata’s The Last Days of Mandelstam, a thinly fictionalised account of the slow death of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, another one of the victims of Stalin’s purge (he died in a labour camp).

A few months ago, I’d read Ralph Dutli’s biography of Mandelstam, which helped provide the context for the fragmentary, staccato prose of this book. Reading Victor Serge’s account of the privations suffered by dissidents who were internally exiled by Stalin also helped to understand and complete the portrait. Predictably, in this book, a lot of other memorable characters from early Soviet history have walk- on role: Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akmatova, and many others.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Maria Haskins returns to SH with her column on recent SF short fiction. If you enjoy reading short stories, then Haskins’ column is a superb way to stay in touch with the genre, while also reading a few excellent stories.

The Indian Scene

Check out the Indian Express’ weekend Eye issue, dedicated to flash science fiction, with some familiar names. Some of those stories are paywalled, but you should be able to get to them simply by buying the weekend issue of the paper!

Also, an update on the IF Anthology of Indian SF, which I’m editing along with Westland India. We sent out our final acceptances earlier this week - which means that the ToC is now ready. The next step is to send back edits to the authors, and wait for them to send back their final versions - before we move, at last, to publication.

Recommendations Corner

Grimdark Magazine announced last week that they will be publishing an original novella by Essa Hansen, titled “Casthen Gain”, set in the Graven universe (or multiverse), which will come out in July. That gives you enough time to thoroughly acquaint yourself with the amazing Graven Trilogy, which begins with Nophek Gloss. This multiverse spanning story, with prose that is almost physical in its vividness, will give you everything, from found family to time paradoxes, from sentient spaceships to twisted love, and a lot of delicious combat scenes. Go check it out!