Words for Worlds - Issue LXX
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter. Apologies for being behind by a week on this - it’s been a fairly intense couple of weeks of work-travel, and the days have blurred into one.
First up, congratulations to Lavanya Lakshminarayan on being on the shortlist for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award, for The Ten-Percent Thief. The Indian version of the book is, of course, Analog/Virtual, which you can find in bookshops and on Amazon. You can also read this profile on Vogue.
What I’m Reading
I’ve been in Australia this past fortnight, and a book that was recommended to me was Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light. It’s one of those unclassifiable books, but I’d place it at the intersection of indigenous fiction, queer fiction, and speculative fiction. Of interest to SF readers is the middle part of the book - titled “Water” - which explores an alternate future where a separate island is set aside for indigenous Australians to return to, side by side with the evolution of a species known as the “plantpeople” (the name is suggestive).
The axis of the story is a slow-burn inter-species romance between a human being and a plantperson within the larger context of race relations and the ever-present threat of the climate catastrophe. I don’t know if the story finally came together for me, but this is certainly a unique book, which you go into without forming any expectations at all, because it will defy all of them.
In the Galaxy Bookshop - which is Sydney’s specialist SFF bookshop (and it’s amazing!) - I picked up this Alastair Reynolds retrospective. As newsletter readers know, I am of course a huge fan of Reynolds’ novels (especially the Revelation Space series), but this was my first foray into short fiction. And it turns out that Reynolds is every bit as good a short story writer as he is a novelist - on occasion, an even better short story writer, I’d say!
In this book, you have stories from the Revelation Space universe (including an “origin tale” of sorts), stand-alone stories that range from space opera to space opera fantasy to space opera crime to space opera body horror (!), and my personal favourite - “The Thousandth Night” - which is a spin-off story from the Reynolds’ novel that I love most of all, The House of Suns. The House of Suns has what is my favourite scene in all of SF, and in “The Thousandth Night”, you get a glimpse of that same idea, in summary form:
“A death among the line was a terrible and rare thing. When it happened, one of us would be tasked to create a suitable memorial somewhere out in the stars. Such a memorial could take many forms. Long ago, the death of one of our number had been commemorated by the seeding of ferrite dust into the atmosphere of a dying star, just before the star expelled its outer envelope to create a nebula in the shape of a human head, sketched in lacy curves of its blue-green oxygen and red hydrogen, racing outward at sixty kilometres a second. Another memorial, no less heartfelt, had taken the form of a single stone kiln on an airless moon. Both had been appropriate.”
This summer, for reasons that are probably obvious, I am on a Victor Serge (re-)reading project. First up is the novel Midnight in the Century, featuring a group of “old Bolsheviks”, who have sufficiently annoyed Stalin, now living in internal exile, under constant fear of arrest, (further) exile, and assassination - but managing to live meaningful lives nonetheless. The sense of intense space of the Russian landscape (a lot of action takes place in a village overlooking a river and a forest), combined with the utter suffocation of ascendant Stalinism (the final parts are set in a labour camp), makes this a particularly atmospheric novel, even by Serge’s standards. This is a classic example of Serge’s writing, which focuses on the defeat of the Revolution, and searches for a degree of meaning even in that defeat:
“Remember the sunshine of this moment. The greatest joy on earth, love apart, is sunshine in your veins.”
“And thought?” asked Rodion. “Thought?”
“Ah! Right now it’s something of a midnight sun piercing the skull. Glacial. What’s to be done if it’s midnight in the century?”
“Midnight’s where we have to live then,” said Rodion with an odd elation.
The Indian Scene
I’ve written before on this blog about MIT Press’ The Inhumans and Other Stories, which is a collection of Bengali SF from “the radium age” (1900-1935). Here is a new review of the book, which should definitely prompt you to buy and read it!
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Other than the aforementioned review, check out Mikko Toivanen’s “Tiger Style And Other (Post)colonial Metamorphoses,” which takes a look at some recent Southeast-Asian speculative cinema.
Recommendations Corner
Does a set of novels, located in late-20th century Australia, about horses that do not speak but have a rich interior landscape count as “speculative fiction”? I’m going to assume that it does. While Black Beauty is the “horse novel” that has attained a kind of immortality, the Silver Brumby series is my favourite set of horse books. I picked them up second-hand in a street bookshop in Delhi as a child, during my horse fascination phase, and absolutely loved them: from the sweeping landscapes to the adventure (men are always trying to capture “silver” brumbies for their pelt). Later, I found out that there’s a movie based on the books, featuring a very young Russell Crowe.
During my visit here, I found that the books are still quite well-known (a bit of a relief, when you think of how Enid Blyton, for example, was such a generational thing: you hardly find Blyton anywhere in UK bookshops anymore, and nobody really talks about her). I think they’re still easily available online, so if animal stories are your thing, this is a great little gem you can try out.