Words for Worlds - Issue 92
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
This week, I was delighted to come across a particularly lovingly crafted review of THE SENTENCE in Science Fiction Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (see here). As befits a critical journal, the review takes a detailed look at the novel’s structure and style, and also places it in conversation with the genre’s previous forays into the intersection of law and science fiction. Take a look, and if it intrigues you, you can get the book here.
On that note, this is the last fortnight for voting in the Locus Book of the Year awards (one of the few SF awards that is entirely publicly voted on). If you’re inclined to vote for THE SENTENCE in the science fiction category, go forth here.
What I’m Reading
This is one of the books that I hadn’t heard about or was looking for; I chanced upon it in a bookshop, and picked it up on the strength of the blurb. As readers of this newsletter know, I’ve been dipping into the post-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde of late, and so a story that promised a love triangle involving (in some way) Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov, and the Margarita of The Master and Margarita, seemed irresitible.
I was disappointed. After setting up a fantastic premise and context, the novel went down a very predictable road. Mandelstam features at the beginning of the novel, as a placeholder to introduce Bulgakov to Margarita. He then vanishes from the page (having been exiled), and we rarely hear of him again. Meanwhile, the “triangle” (so to say) involves Bulgakov, Margarita, and Ilya - a Soviet police agent, who - of course - wields significant power over both of them.
What the novel then turns into is an account of life under Stalinist terror/a totalitarian system - a theme that has now been so well-traversed, that it feels positively tedious. At times, I felt that I was reading a novelised account of The Lives of Others, and I think we can agree that nobody wants to read (yet another) novelised account of The Lives of Others. Besides, if you did want to read about perilous intimacies under Stalinism, Victor Serge is right there; why turn to an American novelist writing seventy-five years later? The novel would have been a lot better if we’d received more insight into Bulgakov himself - had it been, say, a novel about Bulgakov and his relationship with Margarita. But by the end of it, it’s not really clear whether Bulgakov and Margarita have been chosen for who they were, or whether any other overlapping couple from that era could have stepped in and done the job just as serviceable.
To be fair, the novel does have a remarkable twist at the end which rescues it somewhat - but not, in my view, enough to salvage it as a whole from the charge of derivativeness.
I’m almost done with Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi’s fantastic account of the global struggle against the Vietnam War, and how it was also a battleground between competing visions to rebuild an unjust world on the one hand (the anti-imperialist vision), and partially mitigate suffering within unjust structures on the other (the human rights vision). Mohandesi notes how the anti-imperialist vision was ascendant throughout the sixties, and the human rights vision - which we now consider to be ubiquitous - was peripheral and marginalised. However, a combination of State repression, infighting, intellectual exhaustion, and internecine conflicts between a unified Vietnam, Cambodia, and China, finally led to the triumph of the human rights vision - whose consequences we are dealing with to this day.
Other than the core argument, what really struck me about the story told in this book was just how widespread, and how deep, the struggle against the Vietnam War was. We’ve all heard stories of how it went down in the US, of course, but Mohandesi talks about struggles in Europe (especially France), how they were connected to the May ‘68 revolutionary movements, and - perhaps most interestingly - how the Vietnamese leaders were in constant engagement with the global anti-war movement: it wasn’t just a one-way street.
The complicity of western regimes - especially that of (then-West) Germany in the war felt starkly relevant to today’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. The echoes, however, went beyond just that: at one point, Mohanedesi chronicles how international students took a leading role in the US-based struggle. As I witness the US government unconscionably trying to crack down on international students for their support for Palestine so many years later, the parallels have never felt sharper. I was reminded of Yesterdays’ Tomorrow, the book that traces the history of the left through inflection points - from the Kronstadt Rebellion to Stalin’s terror. I wonder what traces a chronologically updated version of that book would draw, from Vietnam to Palestine.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Try this excellent essay from last week, ‘The Monster of the Week as Realism’, by Francis Van Ganson.
Also, watch out for our special issue dropping later today, on ageing in SF.
The Indian Scene
Tobias Toll’s IIT-Delhi lecture on immortality and and sudden death in popular science fiction now has a transcript online.
Recommendations Corner
I’ve been really intrigued by Takaoka’s Travels, a fabulist story set in 9th century Japan, and involving a voyage to India (it was originally published in 1987, but the English translation is just two years old). For more, read Prashanth Gopalan’s excellent review here.