Words for Worlds - Issue LXXII

Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter (the seventy-second of the name!).

I’m not the biggest fan of lists - especially “top-X” or “best of-X” lists. So, I was initially a little skeptical when Scroll asked me to recommend a list of fifteen science fiction novels. Finally, a satisfactory hook presented itself: I thought of all the people whom I’ve buttonholed at informal gatherings, unsubtly steered the conversation towards SF, and then heard them say, “it’s always seemed interesting to me, but…” The list I put together is an attempt to respond to what has often followed after the “but.”

Take a look at it (here), and let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts! I’ve tried to be as representative as I can in terms of gender, race, and region, but of course, this is, at the end of the day, a very subjective enterprise.

A collateral result of the Scroll piece (in particular, my byline) is that many people have discovered this Substack over the last couple of days. A warm welcome to all new folks - I hope you like this little SF-ish corner of the internet!

What I’m Reading

I had never read anything by Joseph Andras. After Faraway the Southern Sky, I will read everything by him. Faraway the Southern Sky is a short - but utterly immersive - novella that alternates between a young Ho Chi Minh wandering the streets of Paris in the 1920s, and the Gilet Jaunes protests in modern-day Paris. The unnamed narrator moves through the topography of Paris, converting it to political geography: the spaces of contemporary protest overlap and retrace the footsteps of Ho Chi Minh. Think of Eric Hazan’s A Walk Through Paris, except turned outwards the colonies, in particular, Vietnam.

Andras’ absolute mastery of French colonial and anti-colonial history, as well as his painstaking research into Ho Chi Minh’s life, and the early year of the Vietnamese freedom movement, all come together in shards of staccato prose that makes you feel that you are walking the streets of Paris with Ho Chi Minh, dreaming of a free Vietnam. Viet Thanh Nguyen - no slouch himself, when it comes to propulsive prose - puts it best in his cover praise: “Andras writes with the swiftness of lightning.”

On the SF front, I am a little bit of the way into Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers. Newitz is a writer with great range - from the Cory Doctorow-style techno-utopian critique in Autonomous, to the alt-history of abortion in the time-traveling The Future of Another Timeline (she’s written a non-fiction book about urban history as well). The Terraformers is an altogether different novel: more deliberate and reflective than Autonomous or The Future of Another Timeline, altogether more a novel of ideas.

Terraforming, of course, has a long lineage in SF. It’s a virtuous necessity in Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, while in most recent novels such as Plutoshine, we see a more skeptical vision, tied to capitalist greed and human ambition. In The Terraformers, there appears to be a bit of both: we see the care and the biome-preserving consciousness of the terraformers themselves, but embedded within a darker, interstellar political economy that creates new worlds for investors. More when I finish!

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, our annual fund-drive is on; we’re the one of the only SF magazines in existence that are entirely crowdfunded, and definitely the only magazine now heading into its twenty-fifth year with this model (see a brief note by yours truly, explaining this). The fund-drive is our annual crowdfunder, so if you’re minded to donate, please head over to the Kickstarter.

Out of the pieces in the Fund Drive special issue (we publish these as we hit our funding milestones), I want to recommend this conversation between Will Shaw and Bodhisattva Chatopadhyay, about the latter’s book of translated Bangla SF, The Inhumans (I’d covered this book in the previous edition of the newsletter). The Inhumans has been published as a part of MIT Press’ Radium Age series.

I’d also recommend Angel Leal’s poem, “Wildlife and Rainforests Inside My Father.” Oh, and if you’re a Blade Runner fan, here’s an essay on queerness and assimilation in Blade Runner 2049, by E.E. Murray.

The Indian Scene

I was rather bemused to find out via a social media announcement that one of my friends had edited an SF anthology, for which other friends had been solicited to write, and written stories, and that it’s ready and coming out this October! But then, this is the writing industry - “not for beginners,” as the meme goes.

In any case, if you’re interested in this SF collection about art in the future, which markets itself as having a “strong South Asian presence”, you can check out the Deep Dream anthology, forthcoming from MIT Press.

Recommendations Corner

Yoss was one of my fifteen picks for my Scroll article, and although I’ve recommended him before in this newsletter, I think it’s fitting to come back to him, because he’s so unknown in the English-speaking world - and that’s entirely our loss. Here’s my summary from the Scroll piece:

Yoss is a Cuban biochemist, punk rocker, and science fiction writer (there, you can now dispel your image of SF writers being inveterate geeks). His books – translated from Spanish – are rip-roaring fun. A Planet for Rent is a mosaic novel of interconnected short stories, with the common premise that Earth has been turned into a vacation resort for highly advanced alien species, and we are the exhibits. Think Roadside Picnic, except that we actually get to meet the aliens, and they don’t think much of us. What results is a darkly comic, melancholically funny set of interactions (including one wild story about an indescribable alien sport).