Words for Worlds - Issue LVIII
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
What I’m Reading/Watching
As a teenager, I had a Philip K Dick phase, and one of the books that I read out of his vast oeuvre was one called The Penultimate Truth (spoilers alert). I don’t remember much of it, but I have vague recollections of humans being forced to live in crowded warrens underground, and under the belief that overground has been made completely radioactive and uninhabitable after a nuclear war. It turns out as the book unravels that the overground is nothing of the sort, and this is only a rumour spread by a few individuals [the eponymous “penultimate truth”], who stay on the surface and lord it over all the world in their massive, personal demesnes. It was a very striking story, which is why the outline has still stuck with me, although the details are very hazy.
All of which is to say that, when I started watching Silo on a friend’s recommendation, it was strikingly reminiscent of The Penultimate Truth: all of humanity living underground in “the Silo,” in the belief that above ground will immediately kill you, and indeed, this seeming to be the fate of those who are “sentenced” to go overground and clean the Silo’s filters. I haven’t checked online reviews, and I remember very little of the Dick novel, so I don’t know how much of an overlap there really is. But that is also perhaps why, having watched two episodes, despite it being tautly paced and very well-made, it feels that there’s something missing: I feel that Silo is undoubtedly slick and very competently done, but in some way, it just seems to be working within the confines of a far too well-worn premise, one that the genre has come at a hundred times, without adding anything new.
I haven’t been able to read much fiction the last couple of weeks, but Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine reads like a cross between a tragedy and a thriller, and it is beautifully written. It is the history of the Luddite movement, and their revolt against the mechanisation of labour that - at the beginning of the industrial revolution - was depriving them of their livelihoods.
I am familiar with parts of this story from elsewhere, but Blood in the Machine has the merits of synthesising the historical material within one place; in that context, one thing I think will never cease to be both surprising and infuriating is just how much of the industrial revolution depended upon outright military coercion, often unleashed by a country upon its own citizens. Blood in the Machine is full of examples like that, although - on a nice note - it has chapters dedicated to the exploits of Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, all of whom were supportive of the Luddites to various degrees and in various ways.
Perhaps the most interesting part, in this respect, was the location of Frankenstein as a pro-Luddite text, a grim musing on how technology can eviscerate human and social relations. I like the idea of a Luddite tradition of SF, of which Frankenstein was the first, great exponent.
The Indian Scene
In Kalpabiswa - the Bengali science fiction and fantasy magazine - Archita Mittra has a short (flash) story titled “The Churchyard Girl,” in the genre of ghost stories, with a little Rabelais-ian twist at the end. Speaking of which, if you read Bangla, check out the rest of Kalpabiswa as well; and of course, subscribe, donate and all that.
In non-fiction, Mittra also has reviews of J.R. Dawson’s The First Bright Thing and Hannah Witten’s The Foxglove King, in the November issue of Locus Magazine.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
This experimental poem in our 13 November issue - “In the Future, My Mother Teaches Us How To Speak the Alpha-Numeric Language” - will either beguile you, or leave you completely baffled, but nothing in between.
Recommendations Corner
In the last newsletter, I had recommended some works of Palestinian SF. This time, here is a work of Palestinian fabulism (or, alternatively magical realism/fantasy). Sonia Nimr’s Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands combines the story-within-a-story form with the form of the episodic/mosaic novel, with themes of the battle and the quest intersecting with each other. You’ll find many familiar genre themes here, but also, of course, a uniquely Palestinian lens through which they’re tackled.