Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter.
Starting this issue off with some personal news: the British Science Fiction Association announced its 2024 awards long-list late last month, and I’m on the ballot in the best short non-fiction category, for my Bombay Lit Mag essay on world-building. It’s my first time on the BSFA long-list, under any category (I’ve been writing critical non-fiction for around a decade now, and fiction since 2020), so it was quite a pleasant surprise. If you’re a BSFA member, and like the essay, do consider voting for it - and even otherwise, I’d love to hear what you think of it, as this one’s pretty close to my heart.
Speaking of which, I kicked off my 2024 critical writing with this short review of Samit Basu’s The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, for India Today. Unfortunately, the book itself does not yet have an Indian edition, although it is available on Amazon, if you’re in the mood to spend a little.
What I’m Reading
After Blood in the Machine, this is the second book in recent times that aims to rescue the Luddites from the contempt of history. Unlike Blood in the Machine, which was a specific intellectual history of the Luddite movement, Breaking Things at Work ranges across space and time, with the Luddites anchoring a broader narrative of the use of technology as a means of subordination and control (rather than “innovation”), and the struggle against it: we go from the Luddites in early 19th century England to Taylorism in early 20th century United States, all the way up to modern-day containerisation. The books go well together, and even better when read alongside Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital.
As I wrote above, I finally got around to reading this one. (Slightly) longer thoughts in the review, but this was quite enjoyable: after the near-future (ambiguous) dark utopia of Chosen Spirits/The City Inside, this was a return to a more familiar style - SF with a touch of irreverence, and private laughter both at the conceits of the world, as well as of the genre.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
We had our annual special issue on criticism in SF at the end of January, curated by our Reviews Department - for obvious reasons, one of my most anticipated issues of the year. You can access the cornucopia of SF criticism here. Check out, in particular, the round table on A Traveler in Time, which is a brilliant collection of the lifetime work of Maureen Kincaid Speller, our much-missed reviews editor who passed in 2022.
The Indian Scene
Nothing stirring so far, this month. I regret to say that I have not yet gotten past Chapter One of Aditya Sudarshan’s Idolatry - no fault of the book, and every fault of mine, for being stuck in the midst of an extremely busy work-fortnight.
Recommendations Corner
I normally recommend books in this space, but on this occasion, I want to recommend a really good essay that I read in the Endnotes journal earlier this month: “Forest and Factory,” by Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez. Neel and Chavez primarily take issue with contemporary utopian projects on the non-fiction side, but - as the sub-title of the essay - “The Science and the Fiction of Communism” - suggests, their critique applies equally squarely to utopian science fiction as well. In fact, one of the projects that they single out for critique - “Half-Earth Socialism” - also forms of the basis of Becky Chambers’ widely-read and much-beloved Monk and Robot series. In imagining Utopia, fact and fiction have always been intertwined.
The focus of the essay’s critique is best summed up in an early paragraph, which I think is better read as it is, than any attempts at paraphrasal:
Despite their apparent divergences, all tend to operate according to a shared logic that is utopian not because it is imaginative but because it lacks any real substance or depth. Though their forms seem multifarious, such stories cast a single shadow onto that same flat surface, off-white. In other words, these utopias are unified less by the positive content of the worlds that they envision than by the fact that they all share the same glaring absences etched onto the same fictive flatness: first and foremost, we find the absence of "politics" itself, in the sense of some strategic sequence of struggle stretched between the immediate world and the envisioned utopia—after all, "utopia" is a non-place not because it cannot be envisioned but because no path can be stretched from here to there; and second, we find negative imprints left by questions that all such utopias refuse to ask. How, exactly, will production of anything other than simple handicrafts be conducted at both the social and technical level (without deferring to the magical fix of "direct democracy" and "full automation"). Or: how might such a system arise not despite but through the inherently uneven and disorderly revolutionary process itself? This is a selective refusal of rigor that, at best, arises when authors use familiar or commonsense notions to paper over their failures of imagination and, at worst, serves to disguise the reactionary impulse that haunts the utopian imagination. In this sense, such utopias compose what philosopher Emil Cioran referred to as an "idolatry of tomorrow," in which the very attempt to dream up the future in all its detail "blocks our ability to have a future at all."
What then follows is a detailed and painstaking effort by the authors to chart that path, and to also show indicate the mechanics of utopia. If this sounds tedious, it is anything but: the examples are fascinating, the thought experiments complex and rewarding (my favourite - unsurprisingly - involves mycelia), and I’d absolutely love to see a science-fictional utopia built atop some of these principles: it’s as if somebody else has done the hard work of world-building for you (hmm, and now that I’ve put it that way, it feels tempting!).
The only caveat is that you do need to set aside some time to read this through, and parts of it will have to be read again. The argument is inevitably dense on occasion, and the essay is long. But it is also the classic example of something that rewards effort: and it’s an essay, I think, that should be in the toolkit of every genre writer engaging in serious, future-oriented world-building.
What a great essay on world-building. https://bombaylitmag.com/weaving-the-rainbow/
From Stephen King's throw-away comment (which must stir the hackles of any fiction writer) via your encouraging statement that "it is world-building, that makes the speculative fiction story both coherent and compelling." to the final weaving of the rainbow out of the three essential strands › estrangement ›› reflective equilibrium and ››› side-shadowing. ~ Many thanks for a brilliant reflection on the 'literature of horizons', and sprinkling viable seeds for thought.
And very best wishes in the BSFA awards!