Words for Worlds - Issue LXXIII

Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of Words for Worlds.

A writing update: I have a new short story out, in the July issue of Grimdark Mag. It’s called ‘Waiting for the Witnesses,’ and it’s a science fiction deep-time rendition of C.P. Cavafy’s memorable poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians.’ If you can give it a read, I’d love to know what you think.

It’ll require you to get a copy of the magazine ($4), which would be a nice way to support an independent zine, but if that’s difficult, drop me a message and I’ll send you a copy of the story.

In another update, we had our June meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle on the 23rd, and it was something of a landmark meeting: the book was Gigi Ganguly’s BIOPECULIAR, and we had the author, editor, and publicist all present - and all of whom have been, at various points, a part of the Circle. I think one of the dreams for any reading circle is to have that local author-local editor event, something that indicates the symbiotic relationship between book clubs, writers, and publishers, which is so essential to the genre flourishing.

The Circle also had some tiny part to play in the book itself, as it originally brought the writer and editor together, so that made it even more meaningful! We didn’t start this Reading Circle thinking of book deals and published work, but it’s a very delightful by-product indeed!

What I’m Reading

Enayat al-Zayyat was an Egyptian writer who died by suicide shortly before her first - and only - novel was published. After that, she was erased from the archives of Egyptian literary history - until the poet Iman Mersal came across her name, and determined to go in search of her. Traces of Inayat is part-memoir, part-biography, part-detective story, and part-cultural history. By piecing together fragments of Enayat al-Zayyat’s life, Mersal also pieces together the literary and cultural ferment in Nasser’s Egypt, and - especially - how women were compelled to navigate this space.

Incidentally, if you’ve read Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door (popularly labeled the first Egyptian feminist novel), it may interest you to know that the two were close-ish family relations! It’s one of the vagaries of history that these were two Egyptian women writers in succeeding generations - one canonised, and the other forgotten.

Traces of Enayat is a beautiful and haunting book. It’s also the latest in what I’d call the genre of political-confessional books by Egyptian women writers. The other two I’ve read are Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn (about the Egyptian revolutionary movement of the 1970s) and Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius (about combating sexual violence during the Tahrir Square protests). Each of them has been unique and memorable, and you can almost see the strands that tie these books together.

A second unclassifiable book for this week’s newsletter: Bini Adamczak goes back in time to the crucial moments of early-20th century communist history, and asks: “what if?” Had a different choice been made at the time, might the future have been different? Was it even possible to make a different choice? She begins with World War II, and the impossible decision that the remaining non-Stalinist communists have to make, to side with Stalin in order to defeat Hitler, and then moves in a reverse chronology, through the inflection points of history: back to the Show Trials of the late 1930s, the purging of the left opposition in the 1920s, and all the way back to the violent suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion.

Adamczak is interested in what Walter Benjamin would probably call the “detritus of history”: the forgotten and the forsaken, in this case, the communists who were opposed to the totalising Soviet State:

… they were incapable of materialising themselves in lasting, visible traces, of institutionalising themselves in architecture, laws, customs, thought patterns, manners of speaking. They are only – almost only – present as absences. In brief: they are gone. And their absence comes painfully into the consciousness of those who sense it , who dare to add to the discomfort of the present by asking which inheritance we could have accepted, what our departure point might have been had these communists survived, just a bit longer, just a bit more successfully. The past would be a different one and with it the present, palpably, perhaps a little, maybe even significantly.

There is an immersive melancholy that pervades the book (there is a particularly beautiful comparison at the end between Kronstadt and the destruction of Salvador Allende), but for all that, it is not a dirge. In the interstices between loss and defeat, Adamczak reveals the chrysalis of what could be possible. It’s a very Serge-ian work in that sense (and Serge makes a cameo appearance): claiming no easy victories, but also, not giving in to the luxury of despair.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Our annual fund-drive continues (it’s in its last two weeks now), and we’re very close to meeting our base goal. One of our fund-drive pieces that I loved is “The Phonetics of Draconic Languages,” by Leah Nodar, bringing my favourite amount of whimsy to the genre.

Is it an essay? Fiction? Narrative non-fiction? You decide!

The Indian Scene

“I Will Meet You When the Artifacts End,” a new short story by Amal Singh in the latest issue of Clarkesworld magazine.

And if you’re in Bangalore, then on 6th July at 5 PM, Champaca Books is hosting Gigi Ganguly for a discussion of BIOPECULIAR (details here).

Recommendations Corner

Our science fiction reading circle’s July pick is the Ghanaian novelist Kojo Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars, so I just wanted to take a moment and recommend it to the wider world as well. Kojo Laing is much better known for Search, Sweet Country, but my own favourite has always been Major Gentl. It belongs to that sub-genre of African writing that uses the techniques of speculative fiction and magical realism to critique authoritarianism and its absurdities (think Wizard of the Crow or Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote), wrapped up in a dose of dark humour. If you know the form, you’ll recognise it immediately - and if not, this is an excellent place to start!