Words for Worlds - Issue LXVII

Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter. Before I get into it, I just wanted to flag a really interesting short piece I read last week: “Kundera and the Nobel Prize.” It’s a fascinating little window into the politics behind Kundera not winning the Nobel Prize, unintended consequences, the pain of literary exile, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. If you love Kundera’s writing - like I do - then it will be especially poignant; but even if you don’t, the piece stands on its own. Happy reading!

What I’m Reading

For some reason, I had not clocked that Seth Dickinson’s Exordia was out - and indeed, has been out since January. Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant fantasy series (three books out, a final one due) has been one of my favourite series in the genre, and the first book, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, has strong claim to being my favourite fantasy novel, ever (more on that below). Exordia is Dickinson’s first foray into science fiction, and although not everyone can straddle the fantasy-SF divide like a Le Guin, I’m very curious to see how he fares. I started reading this earlier today, and when the opening line is “what do you do when you meet an alien in Central Park?,” its’s hard not to read on.

Part of my background reading for the monograph I’m working on, on Kenyan constitutionalism, this is the most detailed and granular study of the Mau Mau that I’ve read (even more so than David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged, which was pretty granular!). And it’s a very hard read: Elkins meticulously chronicles what was called “the Pipeline” - in essence, the system of concentration/detention camps that the Imperial British government set up across Kenya. The stated goal was to tackle the Mau Mau militants, but what the British actually did was to put virtually the entire Kenyan Kikuyu population into some form of detention camp, classifying them by code (“white”, “grey”, and “black”).

Elkins’ description of the torture and the mass killings in the detention camps bring to mind Primo Levi’s description of Nazi concentration camps, and one gets the feeling that the only reason why the mid-20th century British imperialist State has gotten away without a Nazi-equivalent stain on its historical record is that there was nobody who could drag the British to a Nuremberg Court.

The other thing that this book brought to mind is the ongoing genocide in Palestine: the way in which imperial British officials referred to the Mau Mau could be superimposed onto how Israeli government officials refer to Palestinians, and they’d fit like a glove: it is the same dehumanisation, the same blithe acceptance of “collateral damage” (i.e., the massacre of civilians), and the same clash of civilisations language. I’d recommend this book, if only because it permanently shatters the last vestige of illusion that one might have in … many things.

The Indian Scene

Nothing this fortnight.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Catherine Rookwood’s really detailed and layered review of Nicola Griffith’s Menewood: Griffith has been long enough on the scene to be considered one of the genre’s contemporary titans, and this is a really good introduction to what she does, and how she does it so well.

Recommendations Corner

Since we are on the subject of Seth Dickinson this week, here’s a plug - for the second time in the history of this newsletter, I think - to read The Traitor Baru Cormorant. This is by no means the kind of under-the-radar book that I often feature in this section of the newsletter: it’s published by Tor, was a bestseller, and won the Crawford Award for debut novel. But for all that, it hasn’t quite made its way into the canonical fantasy novels of the last decade, and - perhaps understandably, given the inordinate length of time Dickinson is taking to finish the series - seems to have faded away from genre consciousness even more in the last couple of years. In India, at least, I haven’t seen it anywhere on the shelves, and have hardly heard it in discussion.

In any case, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is the only fantasy novel I’ve read that takes the political economy of Empire seriously. The book is loosely based on the events of the South Sea Bubble, and Dickinson achieves the seemingly impossible feat of writing a can’t-put-it-down fantasy story where the protagonist is an accountant, and whose first major victory is achieved through currency manipulation in an imperial colony. In a genre in which every second novel these days claims to be anti-colonial and anti-imperial, The Traitor Baru Cormorant is one that actually takes the trouble to understand how colonialism and imperialism actually worked.

PS. The exquisite slow-burn romance is an added bonus.