Words for Worlds - Issue LVI
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of Words for Worlds.
What I’m Reading
For our Delhi Science Fiction Reading Group (as always, DM me on Twitter if you want to join!), this month’s pick was the classic Roadside Picnic, from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - the doyens of Soviet SF. Roadside Picnic was my first ever Strugatsky novel. It was recommended to me by Chandler Davis, whom I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter, and I think I was a teenager when I read it. I read a few more Strugatskys in the intervening years (Hard To Be A God, The Doomed City, One Billion Years to the End of the World), but this was my first re-read, almost twenty years on.
My Roadside Picnic re-read was a lot like some of my recent, classic SF re-reads (Solaris, The Dispossessed): the book retained much of what had made it compelling to my teenage self, who was just falling in love with SF (in this case, the delicious eerieness of the Zone), but the writing style felt anachronistic, and almost jarring at times. In Roadside Picnic the misogyny is quite off the charts as well: it never ceases to surprise me how so many writers of that era could think through so many complex ideas, but remain as indifferent to this aspect as the Strugatskys’ aliens are to humanity.
It did make for a good book club read, though: most people were pulled in by the sense of weird, and there were interesting discussions about the sense of nihilism, Russian-literature style, that permeated parts of the story. The Gollancz SF Masterworks edition also has an excellent Foreword by Ursula Le Guin, and an Afterword by Boris Strugatsky, which do a great job of locating the book within its time, and the broader context of Soviet censorship. The Afterword, on particular, has some brilliant remarks on the sheer banality of censorship and State repression, when it comes to the arts.
On the non-fiction front, I read Ole Birk Laursen’s Anarchy or Chaos, a biography of MPT Acharya, which has just come out in an Indian edition. I knew of snippets of Acharya’s fascinating life before, but Anarchy or Chaos does a really good job of tracing his life and work’s arc from beginning to end, and contextualising it in the context of inter-war Europe (where he lived) as well as the Indian freedom struggle (which he participated in).
In many ways, the Acharya that comes through Laursen’s book reminded me of one of my favourite historical figures: Victor Serge. There is that same sense of peripatetic wandering, no fixed homeland, complete intellectual honesty, and a perennial distrust of power, no matter who wields it (and the last one, of course, creates a perpetual outsider status). The difference, of course, is that Acharya is one of us - Indian, home-grown - and that’s what makes Anarchy or Chaos so powerful and moving. This one is a must-read.
What’s Happening At Strange Horizons
I had a lengthy critique of the Foundation TV show in the last edition of the newsletter; on Strange Horizons, Abigail Nussbaum comes at the show from the perspective of a non-book reader, and makes some interesting points about how the show comes up short on its own terms, even bracketing the manner of the adaptation.
The Indian Scene
Samit Basu’s new book, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, has been formally released. For the moment, we have to make do without an Indian edition (although you can still order it through Amazon India). After the near-future world of Chosen Spirits/The City Inside, this feels more like a return to the Pratchett-ian irreverent speculative fiction that has long been Basu’s characteristic style and pitch.
Recommendation Corne
Since it is Strugatsky week, here is my personal favourite from their ouvre: Hard to Be a God. Here is a summary from a review I wrote back in 2015, when the English translation was first released:
An unnamed planet in the Noon Universe has not yet progressed beyond the Middle Ages. Anton is one among fifty "operatives" sent by Earth to implant themselves into the society and culture of that world. The operatives are commanded to be non-interventionist gods; while they take the roles of nobles and barons in the various petty realms and kingdoms, they may only observe. Despite their ability to wield the powers of a civilisation a millennium ahead, they are forbidden from interfering with the natural progress of history. "Natural," that is, according to the "basis theory" (which, although never explicitly stated, is the Marxist materialist conception of history), which—as the book's characters repeat almost like a litany—postulates the inevitable progress from feudalism to monarchic absolutism, to capitalism, and ultimately, the communist utopia. The pain and violence of feudalism must be suffered by its inhabitants, in order to pave the necessary way to utopia.
After my experience with Roadside Picnic, I’m way of how it will read, but I’m also confident that the ideas will be utterly gripping.