Words for Worlds - Issue XXXVIII

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new issue of Words for Worlds. This weekend, I was at the Kunzum bookshop’s Vasant Vihar branch for an event on Indian SF, along with Tashan Mehta and Rajat Chaudhari. The conversation - and then the audience discussion - was excellent, and Kunzum have promised that this is only the first of many SF-themed conversations they will have, so if you’re in Delhi, stay tuned. Also, the Vasant Vihar branch has one of the best-curated SF collections out of all Delhi bookshops, as well as decent anime/manga collection, so if you haven’t already - go check it out sometime.

Earlier in the week, I spent a day at the World Book Fair. My earliest memory of the book fair is the year 2000, and finding Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, before it was available in regular bookshops. Many things have changed in the intervening twenty-three years: my views on Harry Potter, the shifting of the Book Fair to a single, shrunken, brutalist building in Pragati Maidan, and fewer thrills of discovery, now that bookshops are better stocked, and the Internet is a thing.

But for all that, the magic is still there, and it’s there in the little, indie, radical stalls - The People’s Publishing House, Aakaar, and the like - where your eye can fall upon something, and your heart is instantly lost.

What I’m Reading

Our Delhi Science Fiction Book Club’s March read is Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds. Jingfang is a Chinese SF writer. I was introduced to her through the remarkable novelette, Folding Beijing, which is part of a Ken Liu-curated anthology of modern Chinese SF. Vagabonds is a novel-length work of near-future SF the alternates between Earth and Mars. It’s quite a tome - weighing in at 600+ pages - and I’m around 250 pages in. The premise is somewhat similar to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, with Mars playing the role of Anarres and Earth doubling up as Urras, although Mars is less anarchist and more state-socialist (at least, from what I’ve read so far). It’s also starker - and in some ways, bleaker - than The Dispossessed, but - like its predecessor - very much a novel of ideas, with characters and dialogue feeling almost like a secondary concern at times!

The first of my Book Fair finds. The Sickle and the Scalpel is a thinly-fictionalised biography of Dr. Komarraju Acchamamba, one of India's first women doctors, a communist who later became a Congress MP, and a campaigner for women's rights. Set in Andhra Pradesh, the novel covers the events of the 20th century, up until Acchamamba's death in 1964 (the same year that Nehru died). While Acchamamba's name is changed to Sharadamba, the book's pages are littered with historical characters: the real-life Durgabai (later Durgabai Deshmukh) is one of Sharada's friends, and her own eventful life is chronicled in some detail; Nehru has a walk-on role; and so on. 

A significant part of the novel is devoted to Sharada's life as a founder-member and leader of the Communist Party, at a time of great revolutionary upheaval - in India in general, but in Andhra in particular, where - of course - this culminated in the Independence-era violence around Telangana. Reading this part of the book reminded me strongly of memoirs such as Arwa Salih's The Stillborn (Egypt) and Hiwot Teffera's Tower in the Sky (Ethiophia). Whether it is India or Egypt or Ethiopia, there are remarkable similarities when it comes to women's experiences in a Communist Party, and the gap between the egalitarian principles of communism (which are what draw them to the Party in the first place), and the leadership's inability to surmount internalised patriarchy. This slow process of disillusionment - and eventually, a break - with the Party is portrayed with great empathy in The Sickle and the Scalpel: Sharada's interior landscape is complex, and the way that her internal struggle plays out even as the Party itself repeatedly causes her harm - first, by forcing her into a marriage she does not want, and later by expelling her for disagreeing with the strategy of violent in Telangana and depriving her of her lifelong community - leaves one feeling a cross between anger and weary acceptance of how it has ever been thus. 

There are times when the narrative drags a bit, as it can't seem to make up its mind whether it is a novel or a biography. The density of detail can cause the eyes to glaze over a bit, especially as this is - after all - *meant* to be fiction. That complaint aside, however, this is a book well worth reading: other than bringing to life a remarkable - and not talked-about-enough - figure of 20th century Indian history, it also provides a snapshot into Andhra history, and Indian communist history, in its first few decades. Large segments of that history - with their chronicled missteps, hubris, and self-inflicted catastrophes - are immensely frustrating, but at the end, the central figure of Sharada/Acchamamba reminds us that even within the constraints, people can make their own histories.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Thrice a year, SH platforms Samovar, an issue dedicated to SF in translation. The first of this year’s issues came out on February 27. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I really liked “A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair”, which is about exactly what its name suggests: it is a short biography of - you guessed it - a conscious chair!

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring these past couple of weeks.

Recommendations Corner

I’d mentioned Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing above. The novelette is also available in Invisible Planets, an anthology edited by Ken Liu (of The Dandelion Empire fame). Invisible Planets was my introduction to Chinese SF that was not Cixin Liu and The Three-Body Problem (although this anthology does - inevitably - have two Cixin Liu stories). Here you’ll find stories by Chen Qiufan (who has also written an excellent novel, Waste Tide), more work by Hao Jingfang, and a series of other stories, almost uniformly of very high quality. A few critical essays at the end constitute an added bonus: all-in-all, if you’re looking for an entry point into Chinese SF - which is definitely one of the most interesting contemporary traditions of SF around - this is a good place to start.