Words for Worlds - Issue LVII
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of The Words for Worlds newsletter.
What I’m Reading/Watching
I spent the week of the 25th-31st October in Kenya. Over the years, I’ve read a fair bit of Kenyan literature, so I didn’t take Kenyan novels with me on my trip; once there, however, I ended up visiting two stunning bookstore - Prestige Bookshop and Cheche Books (a Pan-African, feminist bookshop) - and of course, utterly gave in to temptation. It’s going to take a while to get through the entire haul, but by way of beginnings:
I picked up River Spirit because it belongs to one of my favourite sub-genres: historical fiction set right on the cusp of colonialism (think The Hundred Wells of Salaga, Swallow, Segu, Mount Pleasant, Seasons of the Shadow, and so on). River Spirit came with rave reviews, and it did not disappoint: it’s set in Sudan, during the Mahdist War, and tells the story of one family caught in crossfire as the Egyptians, the British, and the Mahdists battle for control over the country.
The premise is familiar enough, but the context, of course, makes it entirely new. River Spirit also has one of the most bittersweet late twists I’ve come across in this sub-genre - an ending that really lingers in your mind. And then there’s the prose: stiletto-sharp, sneaking up on you when you least expect it: “He would not want to spend time with me, and I would not want to spend time with his desire to be elsewhere” (pg 173). All in all, a great addition to my historical fiction recommended reads.
I’m not much of a noir reader, but when I saw this in Prestige Bookshop - and when I saw that the editor was Peter Kimani (of The Dance of the Jacaranda fame), I couldn’t not. I read this in my Nairobi hotel room by night, and I was terrified. Each story is set in one neighbourhood/locality of the city, and while I don’t yet know Nairobi well enough to make associations, the stories were atmospheric enough to cast a pall of eeriness into my well-lit room in the heart of downtown. While the collection’s big draw, obviously, is Ngugi, it’s the stories by the authors you probably haven’t come across before that really stand out - as is the nature of things.
Long overdue, but this month, our Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle is finally getting around to this classic (it sneaked in via our SF-horror quota, of all things). I’d tried to read Echopraxia a few months ago and not made headway, but prescribed reading for a book club does tend to focus your mind a bit! I finished Blindsight, and I don’t think I’m the first one to feel that it re-ordered quite a few of my brain cells. It’s ostensibly a first contact story, but first contact with an absolutely unintelligible civilisation (think Tchaikovsky but wonkier, and The Story of Your Life but far more sinister). Add to that the fact that the “human” crew is pretty much borderline alien themselves - taken up and spliced together in a way that reallllly stretches the definition of what we think of as “human” (one of them, for example, has four different, cleanly split personalities, out of which any one can be “top” at any given time, depending on what the circumstances require). Oh, and the captain of the ship is a literal “vampire.”
Despite all this chaos, the book does hold together surprisingly well, right up until the ending; and it has its moments of grandeur and awe that mark out this style of SF writing. It’s not quite Reynolds or Tchaikovsky in that the focus is more on the eeriness and, yes, the horror of contact, but there are moments - particularly the moments of fleeting intelligibility - that make you pause, hold your breath, and go whew. The great thing about Blindsight is that its utterly unique SF - you’re not going to find a lot like it in the contemporary genre!
I have a bit of a weird history with Attack on Titan: when The Wall first came out in 2020, a lot of people saw the blurb and assumed it was “inspired” by Attack on Titan (the less generous ones insinuated it might be a rip-off). At the time, I hadn’t read or watched AoT (and in fact, if you read the book, you’ll realise soon enough that the similarities end with the existence of a large wall), but the non-stop comparisons annoyed me enough to actively not want to watch it.
I was finally persuaded to do so earlier this year by a menagerie of friends, and, well, I was hooked (apart from being relieved that The Wall was not a rip-off, even unintentionally - and also, as an author, I do not remotely have the stomach for violence that is needed for a dark manga/anime!); I binge-watched the four seasons at an even faster pace than I had binge-watched The Expanse; and I was desperately waiting for the finale, which came out on November 4.
As for the finale itself, I felt slightly let down - I didn’t hate the ending, as a lot of the manga fans do, but it felt a little … unearned; of course, that might be because of the inordinately long waiting period for an eighty-five minute finale. That said, though, I think the series as a whole is one of the most powerful pieces of storytelling I’ve experienced: there’s no one who treads the fine line between excavating human darkness and out-and-out nihilism quite as well as the Japanese writers do, and AoT is an outstanding exponent of how that needle can be threaded across a sprawling, vast narrative. Collective guilt, expiation, revenge - these are not always the easiest themes to explore without falling into either didacticism or kitsch, and AoT avoids both traps. And of course, some outstanding music and unforgettable character arcs don’t hurt!
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
The big one is our special issue on Caribbean speculative fiction, out earlier this week. As with all our special issues, it has a bit of everything - stories, poetry, non-fiction - so get stuck in!
The Indian Scene
There’s a cornucopia of new stories over the past couple of weeks. In the November-December issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Prashanth Srivatsa has a short story called “Meet-Your-Hero.” I beta read this a long time ago, and it’s a banger.
Prashanth also has a short story in the new Cast of Wonders issue called “Crystal Hexagons on Windowsills.” Remember that time in childhood when we were turning eleven, and there was a tiny part of our minds that genuinely believed that maybe, just maybe, there really was an owl, and the owl really was on its way to us with a letter (yes, this was long before JKR’s spectacular heel turn)? Well, this story is about the ones who didn’t get the letter, and for those who still remember those childhood days (I do!), it’s deliciously bittersweet.
In the new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amal Singh has a short story called “Karantha Fish”: as with Amal’s short stories in Clarkesworld, that we have previously featured in this newsletter, this one combines the familiar themes of myth and the natural world, woven together in a SF-nal context.
Other than the Cast of Wonders short story, the other two - Asimov’s and F&SF - are both paid-for magazines, but I would recommend getting them: the short story market is hard enough at the best of times, and paying for fiction is the only way that these magazines will survive (and, by extension, venues for Indian authors to publish in will survive).
Recommendations Corner
I can only end this newsletter by recommending Palestinian SF. First up, the all-time classic, Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (and seriously, screw you, Kirkus Reviews - what the heck is a “minor classic”?), a magical-realist novel set in post-1948 Israel, told from the perspective of a Palestinian citizen; by turns hilarious, haunting, tragic, and uplifting, this one is truly ageless.
Then Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, which imagines the literal erasure/disappearance of all Palestinians from the State of Israel, and what follows. Seems to be of particularly acute relevance at this time.
In Comma Press’ “+100 series”, there is Palestine +100, a series of short stories in which Palestinian writers imagine their world in 2048 (one hundred years after the Nakba). This is right up there at the top of my short fiction recommended reads: the stories are vivid and affirming, and not reduced to the immediacy of suffering: this is speculative fiction/Palestinian futurism, call it what you will, and it should be read on its own terms.
And lastly, of course, there is Strange Horizons’ special issue on Palestinian SFF, from two years ago.