Words for Worlds - Issue LIX
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
On the last Sunday of November, the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle had its thirteenth monthly meeting - or, in terms of the calendar, we turned one year old. It was also one of our liveliest meetings, because we were reading the wild - and wildly controversial - Blindsight, by Peter Watts. Blindsight is not the easiest of SF novels - in fact, it is probably exactly the kind of novel you wouldn’t want to get to before your reading circle has celebrated at least its first birthday - but that said, it is absolutely teeming with ideas, like flies around a carcass. Disturbing image? Not nearly as disturbing as half the stuff that goes on in that book! As always, if you’d like to join our circle (all levels of SF-experience and SF-curiosity welcome!), just drop me a line.
Over the first weekend of December, I was in Bangalore for the Bangalore Literary Festival. I was on two panels of SF-interest. The first was on AI in modern-day writing (they decided to have two SF writers on the five-member panel - clearly sending some sort of sign!). We covered what has now become somewhat familiar ground; but one thing that has always surprised me when the conversation turns to literary meta-treatments of AI and writing, nobody ever seems to bring up Roald Dahl’s classic and very prescient short story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator. This is one story that has aged particularly well since its publication in 1998, and its the first piece of fiction that I think of whenever AI and writing is the topic of discussion. I think it’s perhaps a function of how Roald Dahl was very much a part of the 1990s generation in a way that he isn’t any longer; but in any case, read this short story, if you can lay your hands on it - it’s classic Dahl, write down to the splash of darkness at the end.
The second panel was on Dystopian fiction (I was in conversation with Shrabonti Bagchi), and notwithstanding the somewhat over-wrought topic (SF is so much more than dystopian fiction!), it was lovely to see that the room was packed to the brim, with a number of people electing to stand/sit on the floor through the session. I think the steady inclusion of SF themes into the mainstream of literary festivals over the last few years has been a very welcome development, and will hopefully help in creating the necessary infrastructure for Indian SF to emerge from playing second fiddle both to Western SF and to Indian literary fiction.
What I’m Reading
Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand the World was one of the most interesting books I’d read in recent times, and with The Maniac, I can now say that Labatut is one of the most interesting writers I’ve read in recent times. As with his previous book, The Maniac defies description, really: I guess you can call it “biographical fiction”? The eponymous “maniac” of the novel is the legendary 20th-century mathematician - and one of the key figures of the Manhattan Project - John von Neumann; the novel proceeds through a set of vignettes, about Neumann, told from the perspectives of teachers, friends, siblings, colleagues, lovers, rivals, and so on. As every chapter is the testimony of an unreliable narrator (to say the least!), the picture of Neumann that is gradually assembled is itself distorted - a bit like when you put many pieces of broken glass together, to retrieve an original design. It’s perhaps fitting, given the intellectual and moral enigma that Neumann himself was.
Labatut’s approach (and of course, the subject matter) reminds me most vividly of Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen - the telling of a tragic story through the tragic figure of one (or more) scientists. It makes for an intensely memorable read.
I first came across Robert Darnton when I read The Great Cat Massacre - a really excellent piece of social history set in the period leading up to the French Revolution. This made Revolutionary Temper an instant buy, when I saw it pop up on my Twitter TL. As with The Great Cat Massacre, The Revolutionary Temper is a social history of Paris in the years leading up to the Revolution. Darnton’s task here is to show how a series of events led to a situation where the social “temper” was one that was receptive to - and ripe for - Revolution: from a gradual expansion of the public sphere to a culture of critiquing the monarchy through songs, from tax debates to wartime defeats, and much more. Despite the wealth of detail, The Revolutionary Temper never feels dense: in fact, it is a beautifully written book that reads like a cross between a thriller and an ironic periodical. Again, much recommended.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
In our monthly non-fiction week at the end of November, we published Ada Palmer’s second column; like her first, this one is also on manga and anime, and a fascinating exploration of how some ethical/moral tenets are inverted in this particular genre of Japanese SF. Give it a read!
I am also particularly proud of commissioning and editing a piece on one of my favourite themes, fungi in SF! Here is Rosamund Lannin’s magnificently titled “Out of the Damp and Dark.”
The Indian Scene
Archita Mittra reviews Gabriela Romero Lacruz’s The Sun and the Void. Interestingly - and I still have no idea how this works - I have seen The Sun and the Void in Delhi bookshops (Bahrisons Khan Market, in particular) - something you don’t normally get with books published by US imprints. So if the review piques your interest, you know where to find the book!
Recommendations Corner
I don’t normally recommend books that are already huge bestsellers in this newsletter, but it’s been a while since Iron Widow came out, and given that Xiran Jay Zhao is one of the very few high-profile global-north-based SFF writers who has taken a very unambiguous stand re Palestine (and, presumably, has done so at a non-trivial risk to their career, given what’s going on in the US/Canada right now), I thought it a good time to re-plug Iron Widow, in case someone had missed it during its initial wave of bestselling-ness. I mentioned Iron Widow a few months ago in this newsletter, when I read it: located within the mecha-pilots Pacific Rim-tradition of SF, Iron Widow is a very enjoyable, very immersive read if you’re looking to just lose yourself for an evening.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by all of it - for the reason that its politics seemed to verge on the didactic at times - but it makes up for that with some superb pacing and genuine atmosphere. I did end up disagreeing with some of its themes, but that is for the best: it’s the kind of generative disagreement that makes you argue with and against a text, and have it linger in your mind after you’ve finished reading it.