Words for Worlds - Issue LXXIV
Hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of the Words for Worlds newsletter!
Right, so the big news up first: for Westland Books, as part of their SF imprint IF, I will be editing an anthology of Indian speculative fiction. We’ve just published an open call for original short stories (up to 8000 words) and novelettes (8000 - 20,000 words) - and both will be paid (Rs 12,500 per short story and Rs 25,000 per novelette). You’ll find all the details in the link, but I just want to summarise a few of the important things here.
Genre anthologies invariably end up being friends inviting their friends and being published by other friends: in essence, a function of who you know in the industry (especially if you know the “big names”). This anthology is going to be entirely on the basis of the submissions we get through the open call, and there will be no special solicitation. Nor will there be “secret windows” for select people, which certain magazines have. Everything goes through the common submission link.
To further cut out the bias, we’re adopting a policy that is a staple feature in the academic world, but (and this has always astonished me) not so in the anthology/magazine publishing: there will be double-blind editorial review. That is, I - the editor - will not know the identity of the authors during the review process, and submissions will carry no identifying marks. So, we especially encourage new and previously unpublished writers to submit - please don’t self-reject, and we actually mean it.
We’re experimenting with these two things (open call + double blind editorial review) because Indian SF anthologies are still very much in a nascent phase, and we’re hoping to set a precedent that is more inclusive than the way genre anthologies work in general. If this works, we hope to do more such anthologies in the future, so once again - please submit your work.
Deadline’s October 31.
And for more, please check out the link, which has all the details as well as the submissions portal.
And now, let’s get back to regular programming.
What I’m Reading
Bécquer Seguín’s The Op-Ed Novel is an utterly fascinating exploration of how Spanish writers in the post-Franco era meshed together their fiction and their op-ed writing. Seguin takes as his starting point (the probably unique) phenomenon in Spain, where major writers of fiction also have regular weekly op-eds in the country’s major newspapers. From here, Seguin explores how these writers (the likes of Javier Marias and Antonio Muñoz Molina) have used their fiction (with its shield of plausible deniability) to test ideas that they then articulate in their op-eds, and how they have used their op-eds to advance ideas latent in their fiction.
Through this discussion, Seguin also provides us with a snapshot of the major literary, historical, and cultural debates in a newly democratising Spain, still haunted by the ghost of Franco’s dictatorship. There is a lot of exploration, in particular, of the pact to forget the atrocities of the regime, and how - at the turn of the century - the law of historical memory upended that pact and sought to reopen that past. For someone who’s always been interested in collective national remembering and forgetting, this was particularly gripping.
The book also spoke to me because it prompted me to reflect on my own writing process, where fiction and non-fiction is blurred in similar ways. My next novel is a science fiction story where one of the main themes is the death penalty, something that I’ve engaged with through non-fiction. Seguin’s deft handling of the debates around the “op-ed novel” in Spain is a helpful reminder both of the perils in such an approach - but also, if you’re going to do it, then the ways in which it can be done.
I should add that this book is an excellent read even if you’re not familiar with the writers (I’ve read one Molina novel, and knew of the other writers only by name). The people Seguin studies are all layered and lively personalities, and the debates they’re engaging in are thoroughly compelling. And oh, some of their more acerbic exchanges with each other were a particular delight to read: it felt that the disagreement (even when personal) mattered, and that there were real stakes at issue. As Yasmin Nair wrote in this brilliant recent piece - “The NYT Book Review is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn’t Be” - “… to enter the world of the Book Review is to stumble into a boring tea party: everyone has nothing but niceties to murmur to each other … If there are opinions, especially negative ones, they are offered tremulously, coddled in several caveats.” This has been precisely my experience of the SF world, and so it was so refreshing to read writers disagreeing with and criticising in the plain and direct terms that Seguin recounts.
On a separate note, by the way, I do recommend the Yasmin Nair piece as a stand-alone read: it’s fantastic.
A copy of Song of Arirang - a book that is only out in the world in August, apparently - mysteriously arrived at an address I had not lived at for the last three years (in Oxford), without a sender. I managed to get the copy as I was traveling in the UK these past three weeks, and whoever my unknown book benefactor is, thank you! This was a captivating read.
Song of Arirang recounts the life of a Korean revolutionary, Kim San, who fought for Korean and Chinese liberation in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1930s, the journalist Nym Wales found Kim San at Yan'an, recuperating from illness, before setting out again on his revolutionary endeavours. She took down his complete life story over several interviews, and Song of Arirang is the result. And not a moment too soon: very soon after, Kim San would be murdered on the orders of his own communist comrades, on (unproven) charges of being a Trotskyite.
The eponymous song of Arirang refers to a Korean dirge that began as a song sung by prisoners on their way to the scaffold, but turned into an anthem against Japanese imperialism. Through Kim San’s eyes, we see the anti-colonial struggles - primarily against Japan, but against European imperialism as well - that roiled East Asia in the first half of the 20th century. San himself was a participant in some of the most momentous events - the Guangzhou Commune (which is a fascinating story in its own right) and the Hailufeng Soviet. This is a story of suffering, but it’s also a story of incredible - almost inhuman resolve - through torture, through deprivation, through violence and betrayal, all for the ideal and the reality of national liberation. It’s also a window into a revolutionary history that - for various reasons - we don’t get to read about much.
In Troy Onyango’s lovely little Lolwe Bookshop in Peckham Rye (which you should definitely visit if you’re in London), I picked up Mukoma wa Ngugi’s We, the Scarred (published in the US as Mrs. Shaw).
We, the Scarred is set in a fictional East African country in the 1990s (it is a clear allegory of Kenya). It begins with one of the protagonists, Kalumba, fleeing into exile when he finds that his name is on a List of opposition activists to be massacred. While Kalumba escapes the massacre, his best friend, Ogum, loses his father in the killings. Ten years later, the Dictator is finally removed from power by the Movement to which Kalumba and Ogum both belonged, and Kalumba prepares to return home. In the meantime, Kalumba’s former lover, Sukena - herself a movement activist - and Ogum have fallen in love, and are preparing to marry. There are also ugly rumours that “the List” was originally given to the police by one of the Movement activists, and that it might have been Kalumba himself. Kalumba’s arrival back home - just as the nation is on the cusp of moving on from its traumatic past - is like a match in a tinderbox, with its potential to shatter the fragile consensus upon which everyone has agreed to move forward.
I read We, the Scarred in one feverish sitting, tearing up at many points. This novel is all the more poignant if you know something about Kenyan history - the parallels to the “First” and “Second” Liberations are stark, and some of the historical references make sense with the context - but even if you don’t, this novel about failed revolutions, national myth-making, exile and return, and how a person’s fate is entwined with a history and a present beyond their control, will linger in your mind long, long after you’ve put the book down.
This week, my Twitter timeline has been beset with wrangling about some “Lists” issued by the New York Times. Literary - and, for that matter, genre tastemakers’ seemingly endless capacity to gate-keep and exclude through their lists, and to draw people’s energies into debating who should be included and who should not, often gets depressing. Chancing upon We, the Scarred in a little bookshop in Peckham Rye, far away from these wrangles, was a salutary reminder of why we fall in love with books in the first place.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
We’ve finished our annual fund-drive, and thank you to everyone who donated. The fund-drive special issue is a raucous one, with a lot of dragons, and you can read it here.
The Indian Scene
Congratulations to Prashanth Srivatsa, whose debut fantasy novel, The Spice Gate, releases this week. Good news if you’re an Indian reader: it is available at the very respectable price of Rs 509, and you can get it here - and hopefully, as there is an India price, it will be available in your local bookstore as well. Having had the privilege of reading beta-versions of this novel, I recommend it highly, and here’s the blurb to whet your appetite:
Relics of a mysterious god, the Spice Gates connect the eight far-flung kingdoms, each separated by a distinct spice and only accessible by those born with a special mark. This is not a mark of distinction, but one of subjugation: Spice Carriers suffer the lashes of their rich masters and the jolting pain of the Gates themselves.
Amir is a Spice Carrier dreaming of escape. But something is stirring in the inhospitable spaces between the kingdoms. As Amir makes his plan for freedom, he’s drawn into a plot that threatens to unravel the power keeping the gates in balance.
Gods, assassins and thronekeepers all have a vested interest in the spice trade, and Amir will have to decide what kind of world he wants to live in … if the world survives at all.
Recommendations Corner
Since there is a lot of fiction in this newsletter, I want to depart from usual practice and recommend a non-fiction piece that I found utterly compelling: Kit Eginton’s review of Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature: A Commons Poetics. I can’t recall if I’ve recommended it in a previous edition of the newsletter in the SH section, but I don’t mind recommending it again: through the frame of the review, Eginton has some really sharp insights about contemporary utopian SF, and its relationship with capitalism.