Words for Worlds - Issue XXX

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

This week, I remembered once again the thrill of doing a bookshop run in a city that is simply full of them, and each one with its unique identity. From the home-curation of Champaca, to Bookworm with its whole room devoted to genre, to the delirious chaos of New Blossom (Elena Ferrante next to Andy Weir) to the nostalgia of Old Blossom, to the one-roomed wall-to-wall collection of Select, I’d make a thousand trips to Bangalore just to spend a day in the bookshops.

What I’m Reading

I don’t normally tend to enjoy Booker Prize-winning novels: heavy themes and weighty writing aren’t generally for me. But I had my eye on Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida for a while, and the Booker tipped me over the edge. And I’m glad it did: this novel is a ride and a half.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is told from the perspective of a murdered Sri Lankan photographer of the Civil War, who is stumbling through an afterlife-y limbo, trying to find out who is responsible for his murder. Through his eyes, as through a mirror darkly, we see the violence, the brutality, and the absurdity of the War. There is, of course, a tradition of writing to which this belongs: parts of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida reminded me of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound, which also begins with the awakening of a dead person, and deals with the massacre of communists in 1960s Indonesia. A more distant analogy is Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Read, where one of the narrative points-of-view is of a murdered person.

But The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is very much its own book; its style - humorous, irreverent, light as breath on glass - is reminiscent of something that Joseph Brodsky wrote in his introduction to the work of Danilo Kis:

By virtue of his place and time alone, Danilo Kis is able to avoid the faults of urgency which considerably marred the works of his listed and unlisted predecessors. Unlike them, he can afford to treat tragedy as a genre, and his art is more devastating than statistics.

At the same time, though, there are moments of gravitas that stand out all the more: for example, in one passage, we are told that a dead person’s ghost can only move in those parts of the physical world where there name is remembered and spoken of; and as their name fades from people’s memory, they can move less and less in the world. It is quite impossible to describe just how moving this was, amidst the themes of war and violence that the book deals with.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read this year - right up to the ending, which Karunatilaka sticks brilliantly - and I’d very much recommend it.

Oh, one final point - this is definitely a genre novel, although it’s not marketed as such, for obvious reasons. Since this is primarily an SF newsletter, just leaving it out there that if you’re a genre reader, you’ll find a lot to love in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

The Elder Race is a science-fantasy novella by one of my favourite writers working in the field today: Adrian Tchaikovsky. It takes the classic SF theme of a more technologically-advanced civilisation grappling with the question of when - or when not - to “intervene” in the affairs of another (think Prime Directive, the Strugatsky Brothers’ Hard To Be A God, some parts of the Culture) - and gives it a new, fresh avatar.

The Elder Race stands out because of Tchaikovsky’s deft and sympathetic handling of one of the protagonists’ interior landscape: Nyr Illim Tevitch is an anthropologist stuck on the planet that he is supposed to be studying, (involuntarily) cut off from communicating with his own society, treated as a wizard by the people he is among, and asked by a rebellious princess to help slay a “demon.” Unsurprisingly, he grapples continuously with depression, loneliness, self-doubt, and often paralysing indecision about what is the right thing to do. This focus on interiority, along with an inversion of many classic fantasy tropes (princess, demon, wizard) makes this a classic Tchaikovsky read: compelling and memorable.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We recently published our final special issue of the year: it’s on the theme of Music in SFF. I especially liked Sessily Watt’s review of Janelle Monae’s “Dirty Computer”, classified as a “sci-fi emotion picture.” It is an excellent treatment of a form that almost resists analysis.

The Indian Scene

Nothing in particular stirring this month, so far. Yesterday, in Bangalore, I was in a panel on Indian SF, with TG Shenoy, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, and Shrabonti Bagchi. It was quite a fun conversation, and the video should be out in time for the next newsletter.

Recommendations Corner

Since NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (discussed in the previous newsletter) is doing the rounds in the bookshops these days, I thought it would be a good time to recommend Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days. I first came across Nganang a few years ago, when I read Mount Pleasant, a fascinating - if slightly uneven - novel, set in a colonial Cameroon during a period of social and political upheaval. Dog Days is closer to the speculative end of the spectrum, where the protagonist - Mboudjak the Dog - explores the streets of 1990s Youande. I actually feel that Nganang’s lightly ironic, humorously dry style is more suited to the SF-adjacent, magical-realist themes of Dog Days than it is to historical novels such as Mount Pleasant; the distance offered by the animal protagonist, and the opportunities that it affords for satire, are what make this a memorable read.

On that theme, recently, Brittle Paper published a list of “Twelve African Books About Animals,”, which features many SF-adjacent novels, and is worth a look.

Until next time!