Words for Worlds - Issue LXXI

Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter. I’m still traveling, but trying to return to normal service at least as far as the newsletter goes!

What I’m Reading

I picked this (and some other books) up from an anarchist bookshop in Sydney called Jura Books (did you know that Sydney has an anarchist bookshop? Now you do!). Their anarchist collection is comprehensive and fascinating, and I’d recommend checking it out if you’re ever in those parts.

Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope is a political biography that is written with painstaking attention and deepest love. Apart from providing fascinating details about Serge's life, as well as an extremely readable account of the decay of the Russian Revolution, starting from 1918, this book is also very useful for a deeper understanding of Serge's fiction. As I mentioned in a previous issue of the newsletter, I'm presently working my way through Serge's novels as part of a summer re-reading project, and what Weissman does brilliantly is link the novels to the specific episodes in which Serge was an observer-participant, and demonstrate exactly what and where the overlaps are (a very different example, but it's reminiscent of Michael Farr's The Tintin Companion!). It makes the reading of Serge's novels an infinitely richer experience.

By the way, speaking of radical bookshops, here’s another: the New International Bookshop in Melbourne, fittingly located in the basement of a building called Trades Hall, the world’s oldest trade union building. I thought it would be a go-to place in Melbourne, but the people I spoke to either hadn’t heard of it, or had never been. So here’s another place worth visiting if you’re there.

I suppose if 290 pages of a disintegrating relationship between a 54-year-old married man and a 19-year-old woman, in the backdrop of a disintegrating East Germany, can hold your attention, there must be something to it? But gosh, did this become draining after a point- moments of dazzling prose and insight notwithstanding. I loved Erpenbeck's End of Days, which is what prompted me to pick this up, but this was a struggle at times. 

It's an International Booker Prize winner, and although I've long become disenchanted with literary awards, it still feels jarring when there seems to be such a disjunct between the quality of a work (yes, yes, subjective, I know!), and the accolades showered on it by the bevy of literary tastemakers.

I’m probably one of the very few SF readers who didn’t fall in love with Vandermeer’s Annihilation, and for that reason, haven’t picked up more stuff by him since. I came across Shriek in the Kinokuniya Bookshop in Sydney, and what drew me to it was that the plot heavily involved fungi (just see the cover!). Now the book itself does have a lot of fungi-related plot points (a mysterious species called the Grey Caps who live beneath the human city of Ambergris, a kind of fungal symbiosis involving one of the story’s two major protagonists, and vividly described fungal weapons, to name a few). It also has a fantastic premise - one of the protagonists is writing an after-the-fact memoir about her presumed-dead brother - except that the brother isn’t dead, and comes by later to add editorial notes to her draft (we get these editorial notes through bracketed interventions in the text). It’s a very novel way to tell a two-pov story!

That said, the story itself didn’t hang together at times; it was very densely written, which worked for parts, but in other parts, just bogged the reader down; and there were far too many moments when the stories of Ambergris and the Grey Caps - which were the fascinating parts - felt overwhelmed by the inter-personal relationships between the two Shriek siblings, and Duncan Shriek’s ex, Mary Chabon, which quickly grew a little exhausting. I feel like this book could have been so much more than what it finally became.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Check out Mikko Toivanen’s essay on contemporary Southeast Asian cinema here. Also, some advance notice that SH’s annual fund-drive - which forms the bulk of our funding, and keeps us afloat - will be starting from Sunday, the 9th. It involves a special fund-drive issue, and rewards including (but not limited to) signed book copies, becoming a “patron of the arts” by sponsoring a short story or a poem, and more. Keep an eye out for the launch!

The Indian Scene

Nothing much happening this past week.

Recommendations Corner

There’s no real theme this week, so I just thought I’d recommend the criminally under-discussed Azanian Bridges, by the South African writer Nick Wood, who unfortunately passed away a few months ago. Azanian Bridges is an alt-history novel where apartheid in South Africa didn’t end, and instead, continued into the present day. I reviewed it almost a decade ago, and here’s a summary of the plot:

Azanian Briges is the story of an apartheid South Africa, sometime around the year 2010. Two white psychologists invent an "empathy enhancer"—a machine that allows the transmission and amplification of brain waves in a way that the operator of the machine can tap into the subject's "experiences" without the mediation of language. Soon, the secret is out, and a desperate struggle begins for control of the machine: between the African National Congress, that sees it as a potential tool of liberation, and the apartheid regime, that sees it as a risk, or a weapon—or both. The struggle is conducted in the townships and ghettoes of South Africa, in the capital of Zambia (where the black protagonists travel to politically liaise with an increasingly influential China), and finally, in the torture chambers of the regime.