Words for Worlds - Issue LXVI
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter. Last week, I’d finally been able to share the acquisition announcement for my next novel: The Sentence, a mash-up featuring anarchism, the death penalty, and science fiction, coming out with Westland in September of this year. The update on that is that I finished the first round of publishers’ edits last week, so we’re on track for the September release. The next update - fingers crossed - should be the cover, in a few weeks' time!
What I’m Reading
So here’s something I’ve never dared to admit in public: I haven’t actually read Douglas Adams; or, I hadn’t read him until the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle voted to read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for our time-travel month. I found Dirk Gently a rather curious book: there was a whole lot going on, and not all of it came together (including at the end, which reminded me a lot of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden). I loved the very niche Oxbridge lore (from the porters to the shenanigans in the SCR), but I did wonder how much of that was accessible to someone not privy to that specific vocabulary.
For me, the two best parts about the book were - first - the stylistic versatility: the opening scene was dark fantasy at its best, the imagery vivid enough that you could touch it. From there to segue directly into wry, almost self-mocking humour (of the Pratchett-ian variety), and then back again to an arc of grandeur at the end, requires consummate skill; and secondly, I did love how Adams uses humour to slip in some truly bleak home truths about the human condition, their impact magnified because of the background context in which they are delivered. His resolution of the famous time paradox by observing, simply, that human beings would alter their world-view just enough to accommodate the paradox - and its comparison to scar tissue around a wound - is something that is going to linger very long in my memory.
A quick note that if the sound of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle interests you - and if you’re in Delhi - drop me a line, and join the group!
I’ve just started an advance review copy of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming, courtesy of Interzone magazine. I’ve read and reviewed Suyi’s previous two novels - David Mogo Godhunter and Son of the Storm: the first was urban fantasy and the second was high fantasy, so I’m really curious to see what happens when Suyi turns his hand to science fiction!
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Audrey Zhou’s short story - “Threshold” - is the best kind of SFnal-eerie, and my pick of the fortnight from the magazine.
The Indian Scene
Congratulations to Tashan Mehta for being one of the winners in the fiction category at this year’s AutHer Awards, for Mad Sisters of Esi. Recognition of genre novels in mainstream awards in the Indian literary scene is a relatively recent phenomenon, and long may it continue.
Recommendations Corner
Sticking with the theme: while Son of the Storm is probably the better-known novel, David Mogo Godhunter is this entirely unique work of urban fantasy, with gods (from the Yoruba pantheon) and humans clashing in modern-day Lagos. A quick summary from my previous review, to pique your interest:
David Mogo is an ordinary Godhunter, scouring the streets of Lagos to find and capture stray gods in return for payment. For this is no ordinary Lagos: here, the city is populated by gods of all descriptions, who arrived there in an event known as the “Falling.” Now, they dominate one part of the city, which has become a no-go zone for humans. Mogo, a “demigod” of unknown descent, considers himself to be an ordinary guy, surviving in the new god-oriented economy by solving small problems, such as those caused by godlings stuck in water tanks.
But all that changes when Mogo accepts a lucrative assignment from Lukmon Ajala, a local Baálẹ̀, to capture two gods and bring them back to him. During the course of his assignment, Mogo realizes that there is more to it than meets the eye. Before he knows it, he is neck-deep into an ancient internecine struggle of the gods, a struggle whose consequences threaten to spill over into Lagos, and from there, into the rest of the world. It is a struggle that will envelop Mogo and those around him: Papa Udi, the old “divinery” (or “wizard”) who has brought him up, Taiwo and Kehinde, the twin gods he was supposed to hunt but who become allies, his absent god-mother (who turns out to be the goddess of war), and the women and men he meets along the way, struggling to survive in a god-besieged Lagos.