Words for Worlds - Issue XV
Hello everyone, and welcome to Issue XV of the Words for Worlds newsletter. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been discovering the wonderful world of sub-genre labels: while I naturally knew about the existence of “grimdark” and “hopepunk”, it’s been a while since my epic-fantasy-tome-reading days, so I had no idea about the creation of labels such as “noblebright”, “grimlight”, and “nobledark” (at least some of those began life as self-conscious parodies). All of this is for a piece on contemporary genre labels (a kind of guide-for-the-perplexed) for The Hindustan Times, which should be out in next weekend’s edition: this one was quite fun to write, I’ll admit.
What I’m Reading/Watching
I’ll get to that (personally) unexpected last-word addition in a moment, but I’ve been reading S.J. Morden’s newly-released Flight of the Aphrodite. It’s a well-paced and enjoyable variant on the broken-down-spaceship-First-Contact SF tale. It’s also quite firmly within the domain of what we understand to be “hard” science fiction, and will definitely be catnip to those who like that style (both in terms of content and in terms of tone).
Now to watching. It’s always funny how so much of what you discover - which you end up loving - you discover just by chance. When I was in high school, now more than two decades ago (yes, I’m old), along with quite a few of my classmates, I was caught up in the mania around the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: I must have watched it twenty times or more. Last month, I suddenly had an inexplicable Crouching Tiger craving again. First, I discovered that there was a sequel to the original movie, which I watched. Reader, it was so utterly unmemorable, that I have already forgotten most of it; in fact, I remember more of the OG movie from 2000 than I remember of the sequel that I watched two weeks ago.
Cravings un-satiated, I went looking for more, and began exploring wuxia TV series. After bouncing off Word of Honour and The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017), I started watching The Legend of Fei (based upon this book by Priest), largely because of its interesting-looking Wiki entry. Within three episodes, I was completely hooked, and ended up watching the entire series (51 episodes) over two weeks. The story is your pretty classic martial arts/fantasy tale, with its quests and its battles, magical objects, heroes and villains, and the complete absence of gravity. But what I think really elevated The Legend of Fei was a haunting music score, a lot of humour (ranging from the subtle to the mischievous), antagonists with depth and intelligible motivations (the lead antagonist, Shen Tianshu, was brilliantly done), and most of all, the two leads, played by Zhao Liying and Wang Yibo. The dynamic between the two - ZL as the talented but remote martial artist and WY as her playful and impish companion with his own murky past - was delicious, and the way their arc played out was perfect. I also thought that Wang Yibo’s acting in the role was particularly good - there was an alive-ness to it that made everyone else around him come alive as well.
One thing I definitely did not discover by chance is the anime, Attack on Titan. Ever since I published The Wall a year and a half ago, people have looked at its blurb and asked me if it is inspired by Attack on Titan (having now watched most of it, I see why the question keeps coming up). Good friends have also urged me repeatedly to watch it; and so, looking for something different in between Legend of Fei and my next Wuxia watched, I finally decided to take the plunge. I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll write my impressions in the next issue of the newsletter (spoiler: I think it’s great). Just for now, there are indeed some thematic similarities between Attack on Titan and The Wall, although not the ones that might appear evident from the blurb. At the same time, I could never have that high a body count in my novels without my stomach turning. So.
What’s Happening at Strange Horizons
Among other things, we had the release of our second podcast on criticism and critique in SFF, titled “Critical Friends.” This one’s about building trust as a reviewer (and in reviewing more generally), so give it a listen. I also edited (albeit with a very light touch) and published this mind-bending essay by Jo Lindsay Walton called “Wages for Dreamwork.” If the title intrigues you, I can promise that the essay will intrigue you even more. Finally, I just want to draw attention to our fiction editor, Vajra Chandrasekhara’s donations tweet thread in light of the ongoing situation in Sri Lanka.
The Indian Scene
Nothing stirring this week - or nothing that I’ve seen from my online trawling at least.
Recommendations Corner
Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel. Borges and Octavio Paz both called this the “perfect novel”, and when you read it, you can kinda see why. A man is marooned upon an island, where he sees a group of people go about their business, seemingly without paying any heed to him. But soon, something appears to be very wrong: two suns appear in the sky, characters seem to be living in the wrong time of the day and the wrong season, and then … well, I won’t spoil it for you. This mid-20th century Argentinian novel is an all-time classic, dealing with themes around memory, identity, and the nature of reality, and it’s been a formative influence on my own writing (there’s a tribute scene in The Wall to The Invention of Morel, which readers may recognise). Here’s a very old review of mine, with (flagged) spoilers.
Quotations Corner
“I still don’t get what a nation is.”
Attack on Titan