A reminder that pre-orders remain open for THE FIFTH INFLECTION, and it’s also on Netgalley.

What I’m Reading

Any genre of writing, I believe, is built upon a compact between the writer and the reader. Over the years, that genre has been constituted by a set of conventions, tropes, and structuring features that have given it a recognisable shape and outline. The compact between the writer and the reader entails that if the writer presents a book as belonging to a certain genre, and the reader picks it up on the strength of that claim, then the reader is entitled to expect - no more and no less - that shape and outline to be maintained.

So, for readers who’ve come to epic fantasy through Tolkien, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb or - more recently - Steven Erikson or Brandon Sanderson (to take just a few names) - there is a shared, unspoken understanding of what makes something epic fantasy. That is not to say that expectations cannot be subverted, or that there is no space for creativity, individuality, or experimentation. but even the most experimental and expectation-subverting fantasy novels - say, for example, The Traitor Baru Cormorant - still has that shape and outline. Indeed, it is the preservation of the outline that allows for experimentation within it.

But every once in a way, a book or a series comes along that subverts the outline itself. Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King are excellent examples: fantasy novels, yes, but radically defamiliarising our most basic expectations of what fantasy is supposed to be doing, and how it goes about doing it (as I wrote here and here). And so is the Korean novelist Lee Young-Do’s The Heart of the Nhaga, now available in an English translation by Anton Hur.

To understand the defamiliarisation running through The Heart of the Nhaga, start with a thought experiment: imagine The Lord of the Rings written in alternating chapters featuring the p.o.v.s of Frodo and a mid-ranking Orc in Mordor. It’s virtually impossible to imagine, because that book would no longer be The Lord of the Rings. Epic fantasy - whether operating through the clean-cut dark/light binaries of Tolkien, or the more nuanced variants of his successors - ends up constructing narrative hierarchies of this kind. This is completely missing from The Heart of the Nhaga.

The world of The Heart of the Nhaga has four different species: human, Tokkebi (a species that can manipulate fire both in the real world and as illusion), Rekon (a huge bird-species), and Nhaga. The first three live in fractious discord north of the “Line of Limit.” South of the Line of Limit are the Nhaga: a reptilian species who love trees and build forests, suppress the minds of animals and make them do their bidding, cut out their hearts in exchange for effective immortality, and in whose society patriarchy has been entirely inverted. The first three species hate and fear the Nhaga, and do not dare venture beyond the Line of Limit.

But all that changes when a group of three - a human, a Tokkebi, and a Rekon (one may even call them a fellowship) are charged with going south and exfiltrating a Nhaga double-agent for a mysterious purpose. Once they get there, however, they find that the original double-agent has been murdered, and that his replacement ran away from his people before his heart could be extracted - making him painfully mortal. To make matters worse, the substitute has been falsely accused of committing the murder itself, and is being chased by his own sister, who has been commanded to kill him in repayment of the blood debt owed to the murdered Nhaga’s family. Cue a desperate cat-and-mouse game in the forest and beyond, featuring a cohort of the undead, a flying “beetles,” a massive tiger who may or may not be mind-suppressed, and many men-who-would-be-king.

If all this sounds chaotic, it is. The Heart of the Nhaga - told through the alternating p.o.v.s of the fellowship of the three and of the Nhaga themselves - is delicious chaos from beginning to end. In its dizzy proliferation of species, characters, motivations, intrigue, and and inter and intra-species politics, it is reminiscent of Marlon James (albeit without quite the same degree of gratuitously brutal violence), but very much its own thing. But what truly sets apart The Heart of the Nhaga is how Lee Young-Do, having committed to a non-anthropomorphic narrative, commits absolutely all the way through: the interior landscape of the Nhaga is painted with the utmost detail and care, and Lee Young-Do achieves here the immensely difficult task of simultaneously creating a world both utterly alien but also legible. The same is done, to a lesser extent, with the Tokkebi and the Rekon.

The other thing that Lee Young-Do commits all the way through is the inverted gender structure of the Nhaga. Of course, since the beginning of the genre, writers have imagined non-patriarchal and anti-patriarchal worlds, and even worlds where women have extraordinary coercive powers (think The Power). But The Heart of the Nhaga is perhaps the first work I’ve read where the inversion is depicted with a remorseless logic at every level of society, and that logic is taken to its absolute extreme:

Ryun - you and me, we’re not only made of what that man gave us. If you really want to use silly words like “father,” you have to call every animal your mother ate and every drop of water she drank your father as well. It makes no sense, right? (82-83).

It’s a logic that is, at the same time, fascinating, disturbing, defamiliarising, and disorienting in its consequences. Indeed, to read The Heart of the Nhaga is to be constantly unsettled.

This is a book that does retain at least some of the core outlines of the fantasy novel: if - according to Lin Carter - the two pillars of fantasy are the quest and the war, then The Heart of the Nhaga has a quest, and brings the readers to the cusp of war (one does feel that there is a lot of set-up going on for a war in the sequel). But nothing about the quest - or the oncoming war, for that matter - has any kind of familiarity beyond the threshold. This is heightened by the fact that The Heart of the Nhaga has as many registers as it has species: we are treated to the most un-epic fantasy-like moments of both slapstick and wry-dark humour (imagine if Terry Pratchett was to insert a chapter into The Lord of the Rings), and moments of political philosophising, especially on questions of kingship and rule. Somehow, midway through, The Heart of the Nhaga turns into an anti-monarchic screed, and it’s not even particularly subtle about it:

You, like everyone else, know nothing of kings. Until you know what a king is, do not try to make kings out of your chiefs. You must not try to make things you do not understand. But you can still make great chiefs. And a great chief is greater than the greatest king. Because they have the power to make people prosper.

The Heart of the Nhaga ends on a tantalising note - a cliffhanger, even. One gets the feeling that a lot of the payoff is reserved for the sequel. But whatever the sequel gives us, this is a fantasy series that is unique in every sense of the word, both intentional and unapologetic about what it is doing, and - most importantly - possessed of the imaginative range and virtuosity that makes it all come together brilliantly despite the breaking of the compact.

Sticking the ending is notoriously hard. There are a lot of books that do brilliantly for the first 95% of the story, and then produce an ending that make you want to shake the author by the scruff of the neck for letting down their own creation and their own characters. And then, sometimes, you come across the opposite: a story that is meandering along, interesting and well-done, but not particularly memorable - and then it delivers such a deliciously vicious sting in the tail that retrospectively alters the entire novel, raising it to the echelons of brilliant achievement. The Language of Liars is just such a novel (or, technically, novella).

The Language of Liars is set in a multi-species galaxy, which runs on a substance called the meridien, which allows for inter-stellar travel. Only one species can mine the meridien, and they are called the star-eaters. Conveniently, the star-eaters appear to have no desire other than to mine meridien, and so - under benign oversight - they do so in continuing shifts. But a problem is looming over the horizon: the star-eaters have ceased to reproduce, and when asked about it, they only say “the body knows when.” If the star-eaters die out - as they will in a few centuries - galactic civilisation will collapse, unless an alternative is found.

The protagonist of the story is Ro, a linguist of the Orro species (particularly dependent on meridien); the Orro linguists have the unique ability to “jump” into another species (that is, occupy their mental frameworks), and - much to this own surprise - Ro succeeds in jumping into a star-eater’s mind, for the first time in remembered history. While he begins with the objective of inter-cultural study and better understanding of another species, his own success soon leads him into a high-stakes struggle to discover why the star-eaters have stopped reproducing.

Any more would be to reveal the “sting in the tail” that I’ve talked about, so all I’ll say here is that in The Language of Liars, S.L. Huang manages to pack in sophisticated critiques of anthropology, linguistic pyrotechnics, and some classic space opera moments, all within the limited space of a novella - and then the ending. Come for the detailed excursions into inter-species language in the tradition of Babel-17, Embassytown, and The Story of Your Life - and stay for the emotional devastation wrought by the final three chapters.

Many years ago, I interviewed Ibtisam Azem about her brilliant novel, The Book of Disappearance (it would go on to be shortlisted for the International Booker). The Sleep Thief technically precedes The Book of Disappearance - it was Azem’s Arabic debut - but has only now come out in an English translation by Sinan Antoon (one suspects it might have been the International Booker shortlisting that made that possible!).

The Sleep Thief is very different from The Book of Disappearance: if I had to characterise it, I’d call it Emile Habiby’s Saeed the Pessoptimist, updated for 2026. Habiby’s iconic book is indirectly referenced early on in the novel, and the influence is clear: like the eponymous Saeed of Saeed the Pessoptimist, Gharif, the narrator of The Sleep Thief, is a Palestinian citizen of the State of Israel; he is - understandably - a somewhat unreliable narrator, and the book itself - like Saeed the Pessoptimist - proceeds in the form of a mosaic novel, a series of loosely connected montages about Gharif’s life, from Haifa to Jaffa to Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, interspersed with the very quotidian, very banal everyday brutalities of life in the State of Israel (the “sleep thief” refers to Gharif’s ability to steal a moment of sleep through brutal interrogation, much to his interrogators’ chagrin).

I don’t like remembering street names, because each street has two: the one that is written and the one warring with memory. Their names and ours. Even when one of ours and one of theirs are the same, the names still have stolen taste. Names. I don’t like that plural. When I utter it, I feel that I am without features. I thought a lot about going to some Greek island and claiming amnesia. No one would know anything about me. I could forget who I was. But this thought brought me no comfort.

The voice is all Azem’s, but one can hardly refrain from seeing the wry tone of Habiby underneath it: The Sleep Thief is a palimpsest novel, both in style but also in authorial voice: very much its own, but also, a most fitting tribute to Emile Habiby.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

The 31 August special issue is on internet culture.

Also, R.U.R. and Arcane are, separately, two of my favourite pieces of SFF (well, not counting Season 2 of Arcane!), so it was great to see this essay bringing the two together: “Move Fast and Don’t Ask Permission: Techno-Optimism in R.U.R. and Arcane.”

The Indian Scene

Congratulations to Chaitanya Murali on the publication of “Of Black Town’s Monster” (parts one and two) in Podcastle! Give it a listen/read.

We’re now accepting a second round of submissions for the IF Anthology of New Indian Science Fiction. For details, click here.

Recommendations Corner

Since The Sleep Thief is just out, what better time than this to go back and familiarise - or re-familiarise - yourself with Ibtisam Azem’s first novel published in English, The Book of Disappearance: a book set on a morning when all Palestinians mysteriously disappear from the State of Israel, and what follows.

What I’m Reading/Watching

I’ve long loved Japanese crime fiction (speaking of which, RIP Keigo Higashino - nobody ever did it better), as well as my few forays into Japanese historical fiction (The Third Love and Shogun). So, when I heard about The Samurai and the Prisoner - a locked-room murder mystery set during Edo-era Japan, and currently only playing at film festivals - I had to track it down, with some difficulty. I’m glad I did, because it was absolutely worth it.

The Samurai and the Prisoner follows Araki Murashige’s rebellion against the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who is bent on conquering all of Japan. As Murashige waits for Nobunaga’s attack within the walls of his Akioka Castle, a series of strange murders ensue. To solve them, Murashige enlists the help of Kuroda Kanbei, a brilliant strategist - and Nobunaga’s envoy - who Murashige has imprisoned in the dungeon underneath the castle. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game of betrayal and detection, as the shadow of Nobunaga grows ever darker.

To be fair, The Samurai and the Prisoner is not really a locked-room murder mystery: only the first murder approximates a locked-room mystery, and it is resolved swiftly enough. The other murders are macabre in their own way, but very soon it becomes clear that - as with a Higashino novel - the why is far more important than the how. Here is where the depth of The Samurai and the Prisoner comes in: Murashige is an unusual war leader for his time, in that he does not believe in killing. He finds it both distasteful and unnecessary. Wherever he can, he prefers to spare life rather than take it; but this brings him into direct conflict with the Samurai Code, where you are both expected to take life - and to yield it up, when the code demands it.

Thus, from the beginning Murashige’s leadership is tested and his decisions questioned (or simply not understood, leading to a constant, underlying tension - a tension which is ultimately resolved through the series of murders). Soon enough, The Samurai and the Prisoner thus stops being about the crimes themselves, instead centring all the dilemmas - and agonies - of a man who is fundamentally out of time and out of place, and who thus finds himself struggling against not only his enemy, but against the tides of the era themselves. The murders are masterfully woven into this story, and it is that which gives them their unique poignancy - and the final denouement its particular force.

When I interviewed Nicholas Boggs - James Baldwin’s biographer - earlier this summer, he mentioned - in response to a question - that Colm Toibin and Teju Cole are two of the most important contemporary writers on Baldwin. Reading Toibin’s On James Baldwin, it is easy to see why: this is a book that is, essentially, a dialogue between Toibin and Baldwin, where the former speaks through his life experiences, and the latter through his words. Like Baldwin, Toibin is a writer, a writer who discovers his queerness as a teenager, and like Baldwin, Toibin comes very close to choosing a career in the seminary. There is also - one feels - an elective affinity between Baldwin’s blackness and Toibin’s Irishness.

All of this puts Toibin in a position where he can understand Baldwin with a depth and a sensitivity that is all his own: starting with the cadence of Baldwin’s sentences (and how their inflection is influenced by church sermons), to his literary roots in Henry James (another writer with whom Toibin has, elsewhere, engaged deeply), Baldwin’s own experiences both in the deep south and in New York and the formation of his humanity through those experiences - this is a book that makes Baldwin’s words ring all over again.

Another one that sets up as a murder mystery to start with, and then swiftly turns into something else altogether: in Alastair Reynold’s Halcyon Days, the deaths of two scions of two wealthy clans that control a Generation Ship that is only about half-a-century away from its destination, raises the hackles of down-on-his-luck private investigator “Yuri Gagarin” (the name is itself the setting for a story of its own). Obviously, his investigation runs into immediate roadblocks, involving intransigence, injury, and further death - before, piece by piece, the true nature of the Generation Ship begins to unravel.

In many ways, Halcyon Days reminded me of another of my favourites - and very underrated - stand-alone Reynolds novel, Century Rain: the two novels move seamlessly between noir and space opera, held together by world-altering secrets that are revealed like daggers to the heart. I think I also have a specific soft spot for Halcyon Days because the nature of the reveal is actually - in a certain abstract way - similar to the core premise of my first two novels, The Wall and The Horizon duology (and as Halcyon Days came after those books were written, I can thankfully steer clear of unconscious … influence). I would say, though, that it would be particularly interesting to read Century Rain and Halcyon Days together, as complementary novels.

Strangely enough, while I’ve read Books 1, 3, and 4 of Tchaikovsky’s Children Of… series, this is one that has eluded me, with a couple of aborted attempts. I finally did have to read it, because I was leading a book discussion on it as part of Champaca Bookshop’s six-book science fiction book-box that I’ve been curating (the accompanying book was Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and we talked about both books as space opera novels). This is, of course, the sequel to Children of Time: the conglomeration of Spiders, Humans, and the genius ship-mind Avrana Kern now set forth to explore, and chance upon a planet with both a race of highly evolved and fractious octopi, and a ruinous, particularly creepy virus/parasite. As with this series, Tchaikovsky moves between past and present, with the past showing us the sequence of events that led to the evolution of the octopus species as well as the initial takeover by the virus, and the present tracking the First Contact between the species.

I don’t think Children of Ruin has the propulsive quality of Children of Time, but it is compelling nonetheless: indeed, one of the most interesting points about the book came from one of the participants of the book club, when they noted that the octopus’s decentralised brain and nervous system was perhaps reflected in the seemingly haphazard and chaotically decentralised character of the intelligent octopus societies that the Spider/Human society from Children of Time encounters in the sequel. This hadn’t struck me when I’d read the book, and it did lead to me retrospectively scaling up my opinion of it.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Here is Cat Fitzpatrick’s review of What We Are Seeking - a book that everyone is talking about, and that I had violently conflicted opinions about.

The Indian Scene

We are inviting a second round of submissions for Volume 2 of the Westland IF Anthology of New Indian Science Fiction - watch the Westland Instagram page for more details when it goes live (sometime today).

Recommendations Corner

I didn’t want to curate the Champaca Book Box without a single text from South Asia (loosely, so-called!), so the climate fiction sub-category let me bring in Saad Z. Hossain’s Cyber Mage; if you’re part of the Book Box, you’ll be getting a copy, and if you’re not, I recommend getting one anyway: this near-future novel has Dhaka sinking beneath the waves as the climate catastrophe intensifies, while a set of geeky gamers race to save it: Hossain does wry humour and deadpan irony brilliantly, as readers of Djinn City probably know, and Cyber Mage is - I think - his most mature and completed work.

A quick reminder that the Ignyte Awards are still open for voting (the last couple of weeks), and “The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction” is up in the best non-fiction category. You can vote here.

e-ARCs of THE FIFTH INFLECTION are now on NetGalley and Edelweiss, if you’d like them. Meanwhile, I’m neck-deep into sequel work: just about starting my third round of edits on the next novel!

What I’m Reading/Watching

I am of the generation that was just arriving at sentience when the remastered versions of the original Star Wars trilogy came back to the theatres in the late 1990s, and a teenager when The Phantom Menace released. Like so many others, Star Wars captured my imagination at the turn of the millennium, aided by the fact that in the New Delhi bookshops of the early 2000s, you could get spin-off Star Wars novels at cheap, second-hand rates - and not a lot of science fiction other than that! But from the mid-2000s, I entered my long, slow period of Star Wars disillusionment, as the films grew increasingly ham-fisted, and fan-service began to replace new ideas and characters. Around the time of Rogue One, I stopped watching entirely.

So, I resisted having anything to do with Andor when it released in 2022. I did notice the online praise - including from people whose opinions I trust - and some of my old Star Wars friends urged me to watch it, but I just did not want to dive back into the Star Wars ‘verse. These friends persisted, however, and the dam of my intransigence finally broke last month. And I’m very glad it did, because I loved this series.

What drew me to the original Star Wars as a child - like so many others - was its anti-authoritarian spirit (something that got progressively diluted from the 2000s onwards). Lucas was famously inspired by the Vietnam War - but for all that, the original Star Wars was quite unsubtle in how it went about its story-telling, with its simplistic binaries of good/evil, dark/light, Empire/rebellion, Jedi/Sith (down to the lightsaber colours). Andor resurrects that anti-authoritarian spirit - but does to in a much more subtle, impactful, and realistic way. To start with, there are no jedi, no lightsabers, and the first time we hear “may the force be with you,” it’s in the last ten minutes of the last episode. Andor denies itself any refuge in deus ex mahina, and its very human, non-chosen characters have to rely upon human tools and resources to wage their struggle.

When it comes to the Empire, Andor never shows us either Palpatine or Darth Vader. What we are shown, instead, is a collection of ideologues, careerists, opportunists, and administrators. Until now, Star Wars villains had been either cartoonishly incompetent (normally leading to being force-choked by Darth Vader) or sinisterly evil. With Andor however, you see the work of the Empire being carried on by its officialdom who, for the most part, are neither; I would not call it the banality of evil as much as the bureaucratisation of it. As a result, we also get to see the inner lives - and interior landscapes - of the Empire’s officials, in a way that the antagonists aren’t simply replaceable carbon copies of each other. What this also means is that when they die, even their deaths have certain meaning: if not a loss to the world, they are at least narrative losses.

This is mirrored by the rebellion itself, because Andor is a story about how the rebellion against the Empire is assembled. In Luthen Rael, Andor gives us a Sergey Necheyev-style character, an ideologue absolutely committed to the destruction of the Empire at a visceral level, but also self-aware enough to know - and to regret - the full emotional life that he is giving up to do what he is doing, as well as the evil that he performs in service of the larger cause. Luthen’s own mirror is Senator Mon Mothma - who of course I remembered from the original Star Wars series - and whose arc evolves from the lone progressive senator trying to hold the fort in a hostile Senate, to full-blown rebel leader. There are double agents with tragic lives, fighters radicalised by the Empire’s excesses, and then of course there is the eponymous Cassian Andor himself, who may be the star of the show but who - in all honesty - performs the kind of relatively straightforward heroism that is quite overshadowed by all the shades of dark and light of the characters around him.

The Empire’s actions are frighteningly plausible: far from the brute-force rule of the Death Star and the Sith, Andor gives us a far more cunning and malleable organism: an Empire that manufactures consent, that is as concerned with hegemony as it is with coercion, that will goad and induce a revolt just so that it can respond with overwhelming force and use that as an excuse to take control of a valuable mineral resource, that is paranoid at times, and that prefers to hide recalcitrant populations away on prison-planets where they can be forgotten by the galaxy. If this sounds very much like the modern nation-State, it is; and it is perhaps small wonder that there was a movement by the American right-wing to boycott Andor: beyond a point you can only be so subtle before people catch on!

And while it’s perilous to project modern politics onto blockbuster American sci-fi shows, you cannot possibly watch Andor in 2026 and - whatever the intentions of its makers - not think of Gaza and of the moral abyss at the centre of our world. I don’t think a sci-fi show is obligated to comment on the world around us, but I think that if it does trigger its watchers into thinking about the world, then it should do so in a way that our sympathies align with the those at the sharp end of power, and not with those who wield it. It’s to Andor’s great merit that it gets that equation right every single time, and in every single arc.

All of this, of course, would fall flat without a great story underpinning it, and before anything else, Andor is a great story: the assembling of a galaxy-wide rebellion, in a race against the Empire’s attempts to detect, contain, and crush it, combines a political thriller, a spy story, high intrigue, and of course, action. This is underpinned by excellent writing: early on in the show, we listen to Nemik’s Manifesto, a call-to-arms whose central thrust is how unnatural tyranny and the will to control are, and whose words outlive its author’s death, spreading virally across the galaxy. Nemik’s Manifesto is the kind of thing that looks deceptively easy to write, but is devilishly hard to pull off, because one word out of place, or one atonal note, and the whole thing will come across as cringe, leaving viewers cold. But Nemik’s Manifesto succeeds brilliantly - as do the monologues delivered by various other protagonists at other points in the story.

I think these monologues, in particular, are a remarkable achievement, because we live in a world where discourse around authoritarianism and resistance is heavily over-determined. In such a world, for literature in particular, it becomes uniquely difficult to say something new, something which doesn’t immediately dissolve into overblown cultural kitsch. In other words, it’s particularly challenging to construct a set of words that has weight, because most of the lexicon of resistance has been worn smooth with overuse, misuse, and abuse. A show like Andor could very quickly start to feel the kind of thing that is an accompanying backdrop to a national convention of the US Democratic Party, and it is to its great credit that never, for a moment, does it even start to feel like that. In Andor’s world, resistance is not a packaged commodity, it feels like it carries genuine meaning, and genuine stakes. For that reason, Andor is one of those rare modern media products that come out of the heart of empire, and yet feel like a potent vehicle for empire’s critique.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Check out aegor ray’s perceptive review of Radhika Singh’s fascinating Earthly Playing Field.

The Indian Scene

Congratulations to Amal Singh on the publication of his new novella, “The Three Apocalypses of Kabir Vasudeva,” in the new issue of the Deadlands magazine (presently paywalled, but worth the price of admission!).

Recommendations Corner

I recently came across Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To, which is her satirical (surprise!) take on the classic SF trope of the small set of people marooned on an unexplored planet. I think this is actually a somewhat smoother entry point into Russ’s iconic work than the far better-known The Female Man, which is a confounding read even for genre veterans! We Who Are About To has a more straightforward, pared-back and linear narrative, and the mockery of the classic SF tropes come through more directly. I’m still only halfway through, but I think I’d defnitely recommend this for people who are looking for a way into one of SF’s most canonical — but also most enigmatic — writers.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been on an intense journey, re-reading - and writing about - James Baldwin. The initial trigger for this was an invitation from The Hindu to interview Nicholas Boggs, the author of the brilliant new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story (which I’ve written about previously, on this newsletter). I conducted the interview over Zoom in early June; it was a deeply moving experience, with Boggs bringing years of painstaking effort - and love - to the conversation. The interview is now finally out, in three formats: if you get the physical Hindu newspaper, it is in the Sunday, 19 June edition; a slightly longer version is in the e-paper (paywalled or unpaywalled with patchy formatting); but what I’d really recommend - if you have the time and the inclination - is to listen to the full video interview on YouTube.

As readers of this newsletter have probably gathered, finding Baldwin (again) at the age of 37 has been, in many ways, a life-altering experience for me. I’m so grateful to have had the chance to traverse some of that emotional landscape with perhaps the greatest Baldwin scholar in existence, and we talk about Baldwin’s life, his art, his loves (for him, these were never separate), how he moved through the world, his views on Palestine and on the false notion of “public safety,” and much else. For those who get the chance to read or watch any of the interviews, I’d love to know what you think.

This year, I’m honoured to be chairing the jury of the Otherwise Award, a longstanding SFF prize that seeks to acknowledge works that explore and expand our understanding of gender. Our reading list is drawn from public recommendations; so, if you want to recommend a work (published in 2026, or in 2025 but was not considered by last year’s jury), please do so using the form here. A reminder that it should be a work of SFF (can be any format), and should expand our ideas around gender.

Finally, a reminder that public voting for the Ignyte Awards is still open, and ‘The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction’ is on the ballot. You can vote for it (it takes a minute) - if you’re so inclined - here.

What I’m Reading

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of my favourite science fiction collections; but it’s only now that I got around to reading his other collection, Stories of Your Life (the eponymous story is, of course, more famous as the film Arrival). Much like Exhalation, this one begins with a Le Guin-style fantasy-science fiction crossover, drawn from the myths around the Tower of Babel. After that, we move into the science fiction proper, where you get the familiar Ted Chiang: cerebral, farsighted, deftly weaving in the awe and terror of the universe into the everyday. I do think the stories in Exhalation are more memorable, and linger longer in the memory, but it would be interesting to read the two books together as the complete Ted Chiang ouevre.

Womb City was our pick for the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle this month, and our meeting was yesterday. This is one of those occasions when I really felt the importance of reading in company, and talking about what we read. When I finished the book on my own, I was quite ambivalent about it, finding it borderline incoherent at times, and the world not quite hanging together. But after two hours of intensely picking it apart with nine other readers who’d read it as closely as I had, I came away with a vastly higher opinion of the book, and the skill involved in crafting it.

Womb City is set in a medium-term future Botswana. In exchange for public safety, a section of the population (predominantly women) is microchipped and subject to regular psych evaluations (including by their spouses), which aim to prevent crime before it happens (objectively, it works, with crime down significantly). Meanwhile, tech has advanced enough to allow for a certain kind of immortality: the consciousness can be separated from the physical body, everyone is given three “lifespans” of seventy years each, and can - in theory - “body hop” several times during these lifespans. But the access to all this technology is mediated through class, race, and nationality (a particularly macabre twist on today’s visa regime): the higher you are in the hierarchy, the less time your consciousness spends in limbo between lifespans, the more chance you have of keeping your family and your memories intact through body-hops and lifespans, and the more power you have to evade the city’s public-safety/surveillance panopticon.

Nelah, a young woman and a rising-star architect in her third lifespan (with no memories of her past), is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Elifasi, a senior officer in the police department. She has tried - and failed - to conceive thrice, and on this, the fourth occasion, Nelah and Elifasi decide to pay for a Wombucator, one of a set of “water-well wombs” that are part of a mysterious complex dedicated to the god Matsieng, and site of the equally mysterious “murder trials” that “allegedly use horrid practices to catch criminals who go undetected by technology” (in a rather macabre twist where neoliberalism meets AI meets myth, the “wombucator” is switched off, and the foetus killed, if prospective parents fall behind on their monthly payments). Meanwhile, Nelah starts a romantic relationship with Janith Koshal (“Jan”), the son of a powerful businessman, and who is in the throes of a divorce. Nelah’s relationship with Jan - which she carries on while duping the psych evaluations and her husband’s scrutiny - allows her to live life in the expansive way that her marriage does not.

(CW: graphic gore and violence to follow)

But all of this goes terribly wrong when, on a late night drink-and-drug fuelled drive out of town, Nelah and Jan run over and critically injure a seemingly innocuous passer-by, a young woman called Moremi. Knowing that their DNA is all over Moremi, and that discovery will mean an eternity in “consciousness jail” and no more body-hopping, after some dithering, Nelah - at Jan’s urging - kills Moremi; to get the DNA off, they flay her and then bury her in pieces. Jan’s wealth and influence gives him access to devices that can override Nelah’s microchip and prevent evidence from coming out; but what Nelah and Jan don’t reckon with is that within a day, a resurrected Moremi returns, driven by a quest for vengeance that includes violently murdering all of Nelah’s family, her lover, and - ultimately - her unborn child in the Wombucator (as a twist, Moremi is only visible to Nelah and to her next victim). The second half of the book is then a race against time, as Nelah and Jan try to discover what brought Moremi back to life, and to stop her before she runs through the list of victims and gets to the Wombucator; but in the process, they will discover terrifying truths about their city, about Matsieng and the Murder Trials, and about the entire reality that has been constructed around them.

(CWs over).

It has taken me this much space to summarise the book because - as you’ve probably gathered - there is a lot going on. The initial world-building sets us up for a classic science fiction novel centred around issues of technology, AI, and gender: fresh and innovative, to be sure, with a touch of noir, but (comfortingly) familiar. The turning point is the murder: the story rapidly moves into the domain of body horror, and then - nearer the end - to a portmanteau of the crime and the chase novel, of magical realism reminiscent of the old classics of Amos Tutuola or Ben Okri, and straight up mythological fantasy. There’s no genre that can contain Womb City: it needs its own, new genre.

In the reading circle, some of us compared it to the great Ghanian novelist, B. Kojo Liang’s Major Gentl and the Achimoto Wars, another unclassifiable classic. But with so much going on, and so many different themes and styles coming at you from a bewildering range of angles, does Womb City manage to hang together, to cohere as a matter of form?

On my initial reading, I felt that it did not. It felt almost like a pastiche of interesting ideas that failed to come together to create a story. In the reading circle, however, my perspective changed: someone raised the point that in Womb City, there is a striking mismatch between technological progress and the state of society. On the one hand, human beings have effectively become gods - able to change bodies like old clothes, preserve consciousness, live for an age. On the other hand, not only have social fault-lines remained just the way they were, but indeed, technological progress is now used to entrench them, make them even more impermeable. The technology is miraculous, but your class, your gender, and your nationality mediate how much of it you access, on what terms you access it, and whether it plays a liberating - or fettering - role in your life. Humans can play god, but having a child is still a sign of social status, the wealthy still have work-arounds to the “rule of law,” and erstwhile visa regimes have now become body-hopping regimes to prevent everyone from choosing a white, Swedish male body to “hop into.”

This is, of course, a familiar argument: that ultimately, the way technology impacts us will be determined by who controls it, and on what terms. The fascinating thing, I think, about Womb City is that the incoherence of the world of extremely advanced technology that can create utopia, but which coexists and facilitates our present-day social hierarchies, is reflected in the incoherence of its form. In other words, the novel’s choppy rhythm, style and resistance to familiar genre conventions is the only formal vehicle that can adequately communicate the incoherence of the world that it develops.

We began our discussion by talking about an obvious comparator work - Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale - and the longstanding black and indigenous critique of that novel. As William Gibson noted, “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” and Atwood appeared to have been wilfully unaware of the fact that her near-future, warning “dystopia” had been the reality of black and indigenous women’s lives in Canada and the United States for centuries. But while in one natural way Womb City - by virtue of its positionality - is an answer to The Handmaid’s Tale, our discussion on form made me think of another way in which it surpasses its famous genre predecessor. Atwood’s dystopia is a familiarly comforting, clean-cut division between the oppressor, the oppressed, and the rebel.

Womb City’s dystopia, by contrast, is patchy, uneven, and - again - resists easy classification. Nelah, for example, is both a heavily microchipped and surveilled woman, while also a successful architect. The surveillance structures themselves can frequently fail or be gamed - reminding us of that memorable line from Andor about how unnatural tyranny is, and how it needs constant effort to be maintained. Again, there are people who do quite well out of the surveillance structures set up in this world, and they are not always men. In essence, Womb City paints a dystopia that is a terrain of constant negotiation, stresses, and friction, of complicity and of collaboration, instead of a pristine structure where effective resistance can only take place through an organised rebel movement. To draw a comparison with the classics, if The Handmaid’s Tale is 1984, then Womb City is Brave New World - a more nuanced, layered, realistic - and therefore, genuinely terrifying - dystopia, which takes subtle hegemony as seriously as it does naked coercion.

Through the journey, Womb City also has a number of callbacks to classic science fiction that will delight genre regulars: predictive policing reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s pre-cogs, using mnemonics to overcome psych-evaluations in the tradition of Alfred Bester, inverted allusions to the eternal debate around our ethical obligations towards the simulations that we create, a debate that has occupied names such as Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds, an ending that - without giving the game away - puts us in the mind of Naomi Alderman’s The Power, and so much else. Womb City offers us a vision of dystopia that is both familiar and defamiliarised just enough to be thoroughly disconcerting: brutal, violent, uneven, chaotic, gendered, and with the tiniest of cracks that let in the potential for some kind of redemption, within the folds and interstices of this messed up world.

I’ve long been an admirer of Tanvir Ahmed’s acute critical work, which I edit for Strange Horizons (we share a similarly agonised relationship with the works of Guy Gavriel Kay), so I jumped at the chance to read some fiction by him. The Night Sweeps the Mountains Away is a little jewel of a novella that took me back to my childhood, reading folk tales from Central Asia: it takes the classic dual structure of the quest and the war, integrate them into one, and - most memorably - moves forward through the story-within-a-story technique that everyone in this part of the world has grown up with (I experienced it first in the Panchatantra). Reading this brought back a very specific childhood memory for me: hot summers in Delhi, the cooler in my parents’ bedroom, and a carton of ice-cold mango frooti. It was basically a slice of the time that formed me.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We successfully completed our fund-drive. Thank you to everyone who donated. If you’re an Indian reading this, we’ve had problems processing donations on Indian credit cards thanks to Stripe, and are working on alternative payment methods - so keep a watch on your emails for that!

The last piece that we published in the fund-drive was one that I edited, and I’m particularly proud of: “Not so Domesticated,” an essay by Fayth Tan, brings together two of my favourite themes in SFF: fungi and extractivism. Give it a read! The entire fund-drive issue has a set of brilliant pieces, and is really worth a read.

The Indian Scene

Congratulations to Prashanth Srivtasa for the publication of his new story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “The Teahouse.” Give it a read!

For anyone waiting on updates on Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, the initial reading process is done, and we will soon be meeting to finalise our shortlist. Reading 230 pieces (out of which around 30 were novelettes) takes a while, so thank you for your patience!

Recommendations Corner

Reading Tanvir Ahmed’s novella sent me down a rabbit-hole seeking that lost childhood, and it was Reddit that came to my rescue: my one memory of the book - other than its cover - was a character called “Yarti Gulok,” whose name translates to “half an ear.” It turns out that someone on Reddit was looking to reunite with Yarti Gulok as well, and another helpful soul pointed him to the Internet Archive, which has a copy. Amazon tells me that the book is still available somewhere in the world, but understandably, at a frightful price now; so the Internet Archive upload is a rare treasure. To anyone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure, I do recommend immersing yourself in the travails of Yarti Gulok - whatever age you are, it will be unlike anything else you’ve read.

Starting off with a few quick updates: as I’d mentioned in the previous newsletter, the global edition of The Sentence, titled THE FIFTH INFLECTION, now has a cover, and is our for pre-orders (it will be published at the beginning of 2027). The US and UK pre-order links are here and here. If you do intend to read the book, then pre-orders are extremely helpful, as they signal interest to the publisher, which - in turn - affects marketing. Meanwhile, the Indian edition, of course, continues to be available.

Public voting for the 2026 Ignyte Awards is still open, and “The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction” is a finalist in the creative non-fiction category. You can vote for it - if you’re so inclined - here.

Lastly, the Strange Horizons fund-raiser is into its last couple of weeks, and we’ve almost reached our base goal of being funded for 2027. Dive into who we are - and how to back us - here.

What I’m Reading

In recent years, the anarchist tendencies of the Spanish Revolution/Civil War have fascinated me. However, as a child, when I first heard about this period in history from my father, it was in the awed register of how every significant intellectual in the western world was engaged with the Spain, and how so many of them physically traveled there to back up their words with deeds. Hyperbole apart, in our atomised times, when no equivalent exists for the atrocities that we witness (perhaps the Gaza flotillas come up to around 1/100th the scale) the seemingly selfless global solidarities that the Spanish Republic generated has been a source of enduring curiosity for me.

Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps the Future treats this question with the seriousness, sympathy, and the nuance that it deserves. Primarily focused on women writers, artists, and intellectuals, Watling creates a lost world of letters around the Spanish Civil War. When I saw lost, I mean that literally: some of her characters are famous (Virgina Woolf being the most prominent). But there are other names - such as Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst and Sylvia Townsend Warner - whom I had never heard of before.

When I read Watling’s account of their novels, it was engrossing. For example, Herbst’s work felt reminiscent of Steinbeck’s novels, only more interesting. It made me think - not for the first time - about the politics of canonisation: that these women resisted incorporation into the canon because they resisted assimilation, because their history of being communists acted to disqualify them at the threshold. It is yet another salutary reminder of how curated our literary tastes are, and no matter how self-aware we think we are, it’s never enough: if we want to experience the full richness of our literary heritage, we need to always be actively seeking out writers who have been carefully airbrushed out of history.

In Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, Watling brings to light two crucial debates within this constellation of writers and artists. The first is the classic theme of art’s engagement with politics. We see how the effervescent Nancy Cunard circulated questionnaires soliciting writers’ views on the Civil War, and explicitly put them on the spot by asking “which side are you on?” Some writers - predominantly in the “older male” category - resented this, but Cunard was very clear about her objectives. This debate has, of course, been recycled many times since, but the urgency of the Spanish Civil War throws a particularly sharp light on it: art is always embedded in politics, and there’s no “view from nowhere” that the artist can bring to contemporary events. This is not to say - as Virginia Woolf felt strongly - that you have to write about the political events that are engulfing your world, but more the idea that as a writer, you can either be comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, or comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, and your choice between the two carries moral weight.

The second - and for me, more interesting - debate took place between the politically writers who traveled to Spain. While involving themselves in the defence of the Spanish Republic, there was one crucial thing that separated these writers from the fighters themselves: they could leave. The fighters could not. For some, the only answer was to literally put your body on the line: the photo-journalist Gerda Taro died at the front, and for many years, a lot of her work was attributed to her partner, Robert Capa (until long-overdue corrections). But a lot of the writers and artists were internally conflicted by the question of whether they were truly contributing to the Republic, or if they were just engaging in a narcissistic salving of their own guilty consciences by being present but, ultimately, only passing through.

While Watling is careful not to take sides in these debates - and, ultimately, these remain unresolved - what struck me at the end of the book was how these intellectuals were arguing about something meaningful. They were all seriously engaging with the question of how to put your life and your art in service of human freedom and liberation (whatever that looked like).

I do not think this is entirely replicable today, partly because the figure of the writer/artist is not quite what it was in the 1930s, it does not quite carry the same social and moral freight that it once did. Borders and visas also mean that we can’t quite up and go in the way that these writers did in the 1930s - especially with certain passports! But with all that said, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future tells us, movingly, that meaningful art is inextricable from a meaningful life, and art itself only gets its meaning from the dust of life.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

I really enjoyed editing and publishing Jenna Hanchey’s essay as part of our fund-drive, titled “Against Worldbuilding”, which critically examines our practices of world-building within the genre. Give it a read!

The Indian Scene

Congratulations to Tashan Mehta for being an Ursula Le Guin award finalist with Mad Sisters of Esi (see here).

Congratulations also to Tanvi Singh for the release of her dark literary fantasy, Ayasi. You can get the book here. The blurb says:

A young girl, chosen to be sacrificed to the demon queen Ayasi, has escaped. And the immortal’s wrath threatens to consume the mountain kingdom struggling to appease her.

A few years later, as sickness spreads across the land, Michewah, who trades in rare medicinal herbs, finds herself in the wrong place at the worst time. A bloody incident in the weekly market forces her to follow the instigator: an old man who transforms into a woman with an unnerving bearing and hollow, white eyes.

It’s the demon Ayasi, detached from her supine body and roaming the earth as the Wandering Death. The hours that follow contain the unthinkable as the young woman becomes all that stands between an entire civilization and a force that can end it.

Two of our Indian SFF writers, Amal Singh and Prashanth Srivatsa, have recently resurrected their Substacks, where they share previously unpublished fiction and book reviews. Follow Amal and Prashanth here and here.

Recommendations Corner

Sticking with the Ursula Le Guin shortlist, I haven’t read all the books on it, but I did really love Midnight Timetable when I read it at the beginning of the year, in preparation for a conversation with Bora Chung. I think it gets less press than Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, which is a bit of a pity, because the interface between tender melancholy and visceral body horror that Chung pulls of in this mosaic set of short stories is quite unique. Give it a read.

This is an interruption of the regular programming with some exciting news. This weekend, Saga Press released the cover of THE FIFTH INFLECTION, and the pre-order link went live.

Here’s the cover; I do love it, it captures the essence of the novel quite well. It also keeps something of the spirit of the old cover of THE SENTENCE alive, and I like that too.

THE FIFTH INFLECTION is, of course, the global edition of THE SENTENCE, so this news is specifically for US/UK/other non-Indian followers of this newsletter, who may be interested in reading it. If you are, then pre-orders are especially helpful, as they signal interest to the publisher, and can positively impact a book’s marketing (and future). The US (global) and UK pre-order links are here and here. You can also add the book on Goodreads, here.

If you’re an Indian reader, and want to have both copies (there are a few differences, although the heart of the story remains the same), then of course, please do pre-order it as well. But the best way of support - given the realities of genre fiction readership in India - remains getting yourself a copy of THE SENTENCE, recommending it to friends, etc etc, the works.

Happy reading!

Last week, I got the news that my Alter Mag essay, ‘The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction,’ has been nominated for an Ignyte Award in the Creative Non-Fiction Category. Recognition for critical work always feels nice, and in this case specially so, as it’s for an essay about Indian science fiction; I hope that the nomination will make more people curious about the Indian tradition of science fiction, which has always been both outward-facing and informed by global developments in genre, but also distinctly Indian.

While the initial shortlist is jury-selected, the final award is determined by a public vote. You can vote for the piece here, if you so wish.

In other news, the Strange Horizons annual fund-raiser went live yesterday. Strange Horizons is entirely reader-funded, and our major source of funding is our annual summer fund-raiser. To support us - and, in the process, claim a number of very cool rewards such as signed book-bundles - go to our BackerKit page.

What I’m Reading

If Beale Street Could Talk is the story of Tish, a nineteen-year-old, pregnant Black woman, whose childhood-friend-and-now-husband, Fonny, is in jail and awaiting trial for a rape that he did not commit (some of the stuff of the novel is drawn from Baldwin’s real-life experiences trying to have his friend and assistant, William Maynard, exonerated of false accusations of murder).

The novel takes us through the desperate attempts of Tish and Fonny’s families to clear his name, the interpersonal conflict that ensues when Fonny’s religiously-minded mother and sisters all but abandon him out of shame for his marriage (here, Baldwin draws on his own early entanglement with the church), how racism turns its victims upon each other (Fonny’s accuser is a Puerto Rican woman who disappears soon after), and all of this interspersed with scenes from Tish and Fonny’s lives navigating New York City while being younger, in love, poor, but - above all - Black.

Baldwin’s later novels have been criticised as being too didactic, and thinly veiled diatribes about race-relations masquerading as fiction, but such critique tells us more about the intellectual and emotional poverty of the critic rather than anything about the quality of the novel. Of course If Beale Street Could Talk is a critique of race-relations in 1960s America: it’s literally about a Black man enmeshed within the entrails of the White-administered criminal justice system. But it is above all a story in which tenderness and brutality are woven together with such skill and passion that the world is shot through with the intertwined textures of each. If Beale Street Could Talk is an embodied novel, where the emotional landscape of its characters is felt rather than told, and such a novel only comes from a life deeply lived. Consider:

It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues. And it was as though, out of these elements, this patience, my Daddy’s touch, the sounds of my mother in the kitchen, the way the light fell, the way the music continued beneath everything, the movement of Ernestine’s head as she lit a cigarette, the movement of her hand as she dropped the match into the ash-tray, the blurred human voices rising from the street, out of this rage and a steady, somehow triumphant sorrow, my baby was slowly being formed.

As Alejandro Zambra would say, it is work that is “forged in the night, in the barrio, in life and not in literature.”

I’m glad I read No Name in the Street immediately after I read If Beale Street Could Talk, because each illumines the other. It reminded me of a point that Becquer Segun makes in The Op-Ed Novel about how Spanish novelists, post-Franco, used the op-ed form and the novel form to explore the same ideas but exploring, through one form, dimensions that they could not explore through the other. No Name in the Street is a collection of two essays - Take Me To the River and To Be Baptized. Here, you read - in stark, non-fictional detail - about the events that shaped the story of If Beale Street Could Talk: Baldwin’s youth in New York (Harlem), navigating race and poverty, and - later in his life - the trial (both literal and metaphorical) of William Maynard.

But there is a lot more: No Name in the Street is both about Baldwin’s world, and the world, the world that American racism and white supremacy has built. From Baldwin’s childhood, his “escape” to Paris, and then his participation in the Civil Rights struggle, race - as a logic of violence imposed by White America - inflects and distorts everything.

In the most famous part of the book, Baldwin tells of a series of violent acts inflicted upon his people - the Birmingham bombing, the assassination of Malcolm X, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the assassination of Medgar Evers - interspersed with his own visits to the American South, and his reflections on life as a Black American, but also as a human being. And while his attention is focused on the South, Baldwin does not spare the North, noting - in particular - the complicity of the American liberal class, which must choose between “treason and irrelevance” (and invariably chooses the former):

Their performance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always protected itself against the deepest implications of black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility … for, intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested - the truth is a two-edged sword - and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.

In this account, Baldwin is unsparing, even of himself: he tells of how, in an interview, he proclaims that he will never again wear the suit he was wearing when he was last with Martin Luther King Jr, since that suit now feels covered with blood. Soon after, he receives a call from an old friend, who has seen the interview, and who now asks Baldwin to give him the suit that he no longer has use for; he, Baldwin realises, cannot afford “elegant despair.”

America is not all that comes under Baldwin’s scrutiny. Under the sharp moral clarity of his gaze, illusions fall away: here we have a clear-eyed understanding of Israel (as early as 1972), a withering critique of Camus (“… he wants the old order … to redeeem itself without bloodshed…”), and a line which not only combines the two, but - in so many ways - echoes Ghassan Kanafani’s famous line about the dialogue between the sword and the neck (all the more remarkable since the two men had probably never heard of each other):

This is why, ultimately, all attempts at dialogue between the subdued and the subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside, break down. One may say, indeed, that until this hour such a dialogue has scarcely been attempted: the subdued and the subduer do not speak the same language.

A few pages later, there are lines that echo and anticipate every anti-colonial uprising that would follow, from the Mau Mau and Algeria that came before, to the Palestine and Lebanon that would come after:

Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims - the barbarians - are revolting against all established civilized values - which is both true and not true - and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.

I wish there were specific passages in this book that I could point to, but I soon gave up my practice of marking sentences, because if I did, I’d have to mark most of this book. No Name in the Street is about the broken world we inhabit, about reckoning with the brokenness, and about crafting a life within the ruins, while never taking shelter behind escapism, solipsism, and nihilism.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Our annual fund-drive, as I mentioned above. As part of our fund-drive special issue, check out Marie Brennan’s speculative poem about pottery, which I really enjoyed, and Akanshaya Abismruta’s review of Bora Chung’s Red Sword, a novel I have complex feelings about.

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring over the last couple of weeks.

Recommendations Corner

Not a novel this time, but a short story. Readers of this newsletter will probably know of my long-standing love for the octopus; I never tire of recommending Ray Nayler’s octopus-themed SF novel, The Mountain in the Sea, to just about everyone. Well, the Ignyte Award shortlist (see above) introduced me to Hannah Yang’s short story in Diabolical Plots, titled “The Octopus Dreams of Personhood.” It is exactly what it says on the tin, so whether you are a long-standing Octopus aficionado, with their three hearts, semi-autonomous arms, and chromatophoric communication, whether you’re merely Octopus-curious, or indeed, whether you’re wondering why under the ocean you’re reading about the Octopus in this newsletter, go check it out!

I’ve spent the last two weeks in London, which means a lot of new books to read and write about. I always end up with a haul from the London Review of Books bookshop; from my own favourite bookshop, John Sandoe, which sometimes feels that it is specially curated for me; and from Foyle’s, whose vast stock on every topic under the sun means that you always find something you didn’t know you were looking for.

This time, I discovered an anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel called Freedom Press, which has a superb collection (especially if, like me, you’re interested in the histories of the Spanish Civil War). Freedom Press is located in a little alley of the Aldgate East Tube Station, which opens into a courtyard that is so nondescript, that you’d never imagine there was a bookshop there. In some ways, it reminded me of my favourite anarchist bookshop, Jura Books in Sydney, which is located bang in the middle of an industrial area, amidst a row of stores that have nothing to do with books. Once inside, however, you’re in an entirely different world - so if you’re in London, and haven’t yet been to Freedom Press, I’d recommend it.

My primary purpose in London, however, was not literary. I came to be involved in the last two weeks of the football season. It also unlocked in me a long-dormant desire to exercise a different writing muscle: that is, to write about football (a writing tradition whose most famous exponent, of course, is Eduardo Galeano). I’ve made a start with a second Substack which - drawing on Galeano - is called Football in Sun and Shadow. The first post addresses the cognitive and ethical dissonance involved in being a modern football fan, and then there’s a trilogy of posts about the last twenty-two years spent supporting Arsenal. Give it a look if you’re interested.

A few days ago, a piece written in the Times of India, about the fraying of adult friendships in the age of social media, went viral online. I glanced through it when it appeared on my timeline, didn’t find it very compelling, chalked it down to taste, and moved past. Very soon after, people who read it more carefully than me pointed out that it was very likely AI-authored. Around the same time, other people pointed out that the prize-winning story in this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize competition, published in Granta, was likely AI-authored. Both these events threw up a predictable storm online, and in WhatsApp groups.

What struck me most, however, was the defensive manner in which a lot of people who had been enthusiastically sharing the Times of India piece reacted to the news that it was likely AI-authored. I enjoyed it, they said, it spoke to me, who cares how it was authored as long as it did that?

Fair enough, but if I found an AI-authored piece speaking to me, I would want to at least be curious about - and interrogate - why that is so.

Reams have already been written about this, and I don’t want to add to a debate that, at times, veers into the sophomoric (including done-to-death debates around “what is art?”). There was something about the Times of India piece, however, that struck me: how easy it was. I mean that both in terms of its formal style and in terms of the emotion it sought to elicit from its readers. Its formal style reminded me of a stone on a river-bank that is worn smooth by millennia of flowing water, or the manicured grass that you find in an elite golf course. Writing that has been varnished and polished to a degree that all that’s left is the polish. The cadence of the sentences is so rhythmically symmetrical that you could fall asleep to it (I think this, in part, is why the piece did nothing for me).

And in substance, too, it felt to me that the essay was - in effect - telling people how to feel. I once read an excellent term for this: unearned emotion. A good piece of writing, in my view, ensures that its emotional pay-off is earned, that the reader comes to that emotion in the process of working through the text. When I went back and re-read the Times of India piece, it made me feel like a consumer at the department store of emotions, shopping for a ready fit (in this case, a blend of nostalgia, melancholy, and regret).

One phrase, in particular, stood out for me: “Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence.”

“Unoptimised presence.” These two words in close conjunction feel almost grotesque to me. The word “presence” carries weight, freight - it is something that resists subsumption into the corporate newspeak that we’re bombarded with every day. On the other hand, “unoptimised” is precisely the kind of corporate newspeak that dominates much of the written word that we experience in our daily lives. This, for me, is the biggest AI-tell, and what made the piece so jarring.

As I read it, I couldn’t but help think of the most beautiful piece that I have read on adult friendships: Patti Smith’s eulogy for Sam Sheppard. Here is how it starts:

He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

“Gogol was Ukrainian,” he once said, seemingly out of nowhere. Only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs.

There is nothing smooth or easy about this opening. The rhythm of the sentences is non-uniform, almost choppy. The images come at you from all angles, in the true Shklovskian sense they defamiliarise your sense of the world and of the proper order of things, and yet they fit. Consider the phrase “not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere.” These words demand something of you, and then give you back a sense of meaning and of the world that more than repays it.

And for me, that is - at least at present - the crucial difference between AI-writing and human writing. Invariably, at both the formal and the substantive level, AI will make your reading experience easy. AI will treat you as a consumer (and should we really be surprised, given that for a few years now, people have been talking about how they “consume” art - a phrase I utterly despise), and give you the product that you ordered. Human writing - or at least, the kind of human writing that is worth reading - will not do that. Good human writing makes you earn it.

There may come a time when AI becomes sophisticated enough to do what I’ve talked about above, at which point the conversation will shift again. But for now, and for me, here is where the difference lies (and also why I will continue writing novels and stories, no matter what!).

What I’m Reading

I haven’t been able to finish too many books over the last fortnight, but one I did read was Ann Leckie’s latest, Radiant Star. This one’s set in the same universe of the Imperial Radch as her groundbreaking Ancillary Justice, and takes place on a colonised, undersea world just as the Imperial Radch is breaking apart in civil war (the events at the end of Ancillary Justice), and is about intra-world conflicts between religious sects, as well as the distorting influence of the colonisers.

I had mixed feelings about this: everything that Leckie writes will be brimming with ideas, and executed with a high degree of skill and finesse. For all that, I never felt entirely immersed in the world. This might simply be the result of familiarity, something that readers new to Leckie might not be burdened with: for example, the gender pronoun switches, which felt so formally radical in Ancillary Justice when we read it a decade ago, now feel worn - and, in this book, not entirely explained or earned. The politics, too, felt almost over-familiar (although there were some brilliant bits of world-building involving food and architecture). It’s the kind of book I liked well enough when reading it, but not one that would stay with me very long after.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

After reading my brief thoughts on Radiant Star, read a much more comprehensive review of it in Strange Horizons.

Also, our annual fund-drive - which is what keeps us alive - starts in a week, so keep an eye out on that. I’ll be posting about it here, but it will also be on our X, BlueSky, and Instagram handles.

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring this week.

Recommendations Corner

After a somewhat lukewarm reception to a Leckie novel, it’s only fair to recommend one too. Translation State is not directly a part of the Radch series, and is sometimes overlooked in the Leckie canon as a stand-alone novel, but I think this is perhaps her most conceptually challenging - and rewarding - books. It takes on that most difficult task in SF - writing from a non-anthropomorphic point of view - and for the most part, accomplishes it really well.

What I’m Reading

A good biography, I think, aims to do a few things: to paint a warm, sensitive - yet unflinching - portrait of its subject, acquainting readers with the person, warts and all; through the subject, to also tell the story of a time and an era; and to cast the subject’s work in new light, so that we consider afresh what they lived for. The merit of Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story is that it does all three superlatively well.

Boggs’s conceit is that we can only truly understand a person through excavating their deepest and most meaningful relationships. The “love” of “love story,” thus, is not limited to romantic love - although romantic love was crucial to Baldwin’s life, not just for its own sake, but also as a fount for his creativity. Rather, it is a more capacious structure of feeling that includes warmth, closeness, emotional intimacy - and also the flip sides of those emotions: heartbreak, jealousy, possessiveness, and loss.

Love was something that Baldwin yearned for all his life - a yearning that was complicated by his being a black, gay man who was born in mid-century United States and could never entirely leave it, although he did leave - many times - to live elsewhere. Love, when it came to him, was always fraught with danger, with an undercurrent of violence, and with a sense of fleeting impermanence, shaped and constrained by norms, laws, institutions and prejudices that were designed to extinguish it - or to strangle it in its cradle. It was within these interstices that Baldwin crafted his life, lived his love, and created art so incandescent that decades later, it can still pull us up short, gasping for breath, when we encounter it for the first - or second, or third - time.

The book moves through Baldwin’s significant relationships (with family, with friends, with comrades, with lovers, with artistic collaborators - and sometimes, those categories all blur into each other), locating them within place and within stages of Baldwin’s life - New York, Paris, Istanbul, Saint-Paul-de-Vence - and it is through those relationships that we come to know both Baldwin, and his time.

Assessments of Baldwin often tend to privilege one aspect of his art over the other: often, Baldwin the political essayist (and civil rights icon) is illumined, at the cost of Baldwin the novelist (and the playwright). Sometimes - although rarely - it is the other way round. Much like the case of love, it is as if critics struggle with comprehending the capaciousness of Baldwin’s work, and how the facets of his art are inseparable from each other. However, as Bécquer Seguín has shown us in his magnificent book, The Op-Ed Novel, writers have often treated fiction and non-fiction as complementary: using the vehicle of fiction to push boundaries and explore ideas that would be deemed too transgressive or “off the wall” if they were written out as essays, and to use the essay form to clarify and polish ideas present as radical potentialities in their fiction.

In Baldwin: A Love Story, we are shown these two literary selves in conversation, as - in his effort to “work through things” (p. 252), Baldwin ends up engaging in a “mutual reshaping of approach.” In other words, as readers, we cannot separate Baldwin’s fiction from his non-fiction (and yes, from his dramatic work), and this is not - as has often been argued - to the detriment of his fiction, which is then perceived as too didactic. Rather, the deeper point that Boggs makes is that you cannot separate the non-fiction from the fiction because you cannot separate the aesthetic from the political. Form is woven into content for Baldwin, something that especially comes to the fore in his dramatic work, where he engages in “formal innovation in staging and dramaturgy … that would push the audience towards critical consciousness and political action.” (p. 366)

This is also significant because what comes through clearly in Baldwin: A Love Story is that for Baldwin, the stuff of literature indubitably came from the stuff of life. “What makes a writer is less his respect for Art than his respect for Life” (p. 423): these are words that stand out all the more when you consider that, after ascending to fame, Baldwin moved in the high literary society of New York (and Paris), where the foregoing aphorism was honoured far more in the breach. A few decades later, in his book of essays, Not to Read, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra would write of his compatriot Pedro Lemebel: “His work was forged in the night, in the barrio, in life and not in literature.” It is as if Baldwin foreshadowed this sentiment in a different time - but is it entirely a coincidence that Lemebel, like Baldwin, was a queer writer who forged his sensibility and his art in a deeply authoritarian context?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baldwin: A Love Story feels at its soaring best when it is about Baldwin on love: on its capaciousness, on its transformative power, on its illuminations, and on the terror that it engenders. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within”: such a line would set our consciousness alight under any circumstances, but Boggs deftly allows us to connect seemingly disparate threads: between how an openness to love strips us of our instinctive grasping towards safety on the one hand, and the imposed obsession with public safety on the other allows - and justifies - the violence that maintains an unjust racial and capitalist order.

Elsewhere, Boggs quotes Baldwin on the “false safety of innocence” that White America seeks to preserve in order to maintain its racially unjust status quo. It is generative to think of this in the context of a recent, brilliant essay by Richard Hunsinger and X. Rivera Maya, titled “Public Safety or Self-Defence,” where the writers wryly note that “public safety becomes a way for reactionaries and liberals across class lines to collaborate on the task of disciplining the proletariat.” In Baldwin: A Love Story, we see how Baldwin’s life and work was devoted to deconstructing this comfort shibboleth of safety, both in individual live and also when the word “public” was appended to it, in order to justify every manner of atrocity. Zambra again: “Fiction only triumphs when it fails, when it lets us see the traces of reality.”

This same interior landscape is at work on a subject that Boggs might have lightly passed over, but which - to his credit - he squarely confronts. In the early 1960s, Baldwin was invited to visit the State of Israel, which he did - with some enthusiasm, at least before going. Once there, however, it did not take Baldwin too long to spot what was amiss in the project (we should bear in mind that this was many years before historians began to reveal the truth of the 1948 nakba, and Baldwin - obviously - would not have had access to first-hand Palestinian accounts). Appreciation quickly turned to critique, something that placed Baldwin firmly outside the consensus of the American literary and cultural world of the late-20th century. And yet, when we think of Baldwin’s own commitment to “be a stranger everywhere” - and recall that for him, literary and political commitments were always intertwined - this should come as no great surprise. Here was a writer and a person who was unafraid of placing himself firmly outside the consensus, especially when he could perceive what that consensus strove so desperately to mask. This proclivity - as Boggs shows us - led to Baldwin’s abandonment by the same literary establishment that had once held him up. He didn’t care - and time has granted to him the last laugh.

At 700 pages, Baldwin: A Love Story is not a quick read. In other words, it demands of us a modicum the same dedication and the same love that Baldwin brought to his life and to his craft, and indeed, the dedication and love that Boggs has tapped into to write this book. And it cannot be any other way: after all, the deepest truth about a love worth having is that it will always make demands upon us, and in the process, compel both terror and transformation.

The book (or rather, book series) that shaped me the most as a teenager was Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It is hard to overstate quite how it rewired my brain, and how it gave shape to the inchoate anti-authority feeling that I had long tried to articulate as a coherent world-view, but which only sputtered itself out through various meaningless acts of revolt in school (and which only gave me grief). And one of the other things that His Dark Materials did was to inspire a lifelong curiosity about John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poem that it drew inspiration from.

I eventually got around to reading Paradise Lost in my first year of college: I loved its rhythm and cadence, cheered all the way for Satan’s rebellion, and was repulsed by the in-your-face misogyny, all in equal measure. As a first-year law student who had just read H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law, I was also fascinated by the jurisprudential implications of Satan having persuaded one-third of the angels to rebel with him. In the college corridors, I buttonholed unsuspecting seniors and asked them if they did not think that Satan had a point when he pointed out to the angel Abdiel that he had one-third of the heavenly host with him, and did that not indicate that the Hartian rule of recognition no longer existed to bind the said angels in any meaningful way?

So, Orlando Reade’s What In Me is Dark felt like a book written especially for me, because it is all about how, through the ages, rebels, poets, rebel-poets and poet-rebels, all found something in the pages of Paradise Lost. Among other figures, the book talks of Thomas Jefferson (who, I found, had underlined the same passage that I had - “what though the field be lost?”), George Eliot, C.L.R. James, the romantic poets, and so on.

Not all these figures are revolutionary, or even egalitarian: some, like a group of white carnivalists in ante-bellum New Orleans actually put the epic to racist purposes. What In Me is Dark, thus, is not an uncritical praise-song, and it does not claim that the resources in Paradise Lost are available only to the “devil’s party.” But at the same time, I think that the supremacist uses that Paradise Lost is put to are weaker and less persuasive - and ultimately, rely upon the most dated parts of the epic. What has endured in Milton - and what every generation rediscovers and recovers - is the irrepressible human desire to cock a snook at authority. It is a desire that most of us keep suppressed most of our waking moments; Paradise Lost lets us live it for just an instant in time.

A few years ago, a translated novel appeared on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist: Harve Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a time-vortex novel with more than a touch of the bizarre. As a science fiction novel, I found The Anomaly flawed but also weird in the best of ways. I picked up The Name on the Wall on the strength of my experience with The Anomaly.

It is an entirely different book (perhaps speaking to Le Tellier’s versatility). The Name on the Wall is a cross between auto-fiction and historical fiction: finding a name carved on a slab in a home he wants to buy, the writer finds out that it is the name of a French WWII Resistance fighter who perished in the last months of the War, in the Maquis. This leads him on a quest to reconstruct the young soldier’s life, and that of his family and his lover.

The Name on the Wall is at its best in its reflections on complicity and courage (one line in particular - “it is not needed that men be evil; only that they be spineless” - made me shudder). The moral clarity shines through: “But I can find no shred of indulgence for the people who allowed their hatred or - worse - their cowardice or careerism to define their destiny.” And yet, moral clarity is not quite enough to make it a memorable read: World War II is, by now, a heavily over-written subject, and I waited for Le Tellier to universalise these sentiments by drawing them beyond their immediate context. At a couple of points, to his credit, he does try (in the context of colonialism, specifically), but it isn’t quite there. All of which makes The Name on the Wall a serviceable read - but not more.

I picked this book up because I am a sucker for science fiction that breaks down our notions of biological determinism, and really plays with our biologically-grounded notions of self and identity. This book - a subversive take on the classic first contact story, set on a seemingly hostile planet where two human societies from two different worlds struggle to survive - does do that, and there were parts of it that I loved. The biology was deliciously eerie and mind-bending, the way the landscape was described was immersive, and one of its central points of narrative conflict (which I will not reveal here to avoid spoilers) was brilliantly crafted, with my only complaint being that the writer should have excavated it a little more.

And yet, there were parts that did not sit entirely well with me. There were moments of deus ex machina that were a little too pat. The notion of far-future societies grappling with what seemed to be a decidedly early-twentieth century, decidedly Anglo-American conception of marriage was a little jarring; of course, I am not saying that far-future societies cannot be socially regressive, but when the specific form of regression seems to replay a very specific cultural and temporal institution, it takes you out of both the SF-nal context, and out of the universalism that makes the best science fiction truly stand apart. And finally, this book has a character called “Sudharma Jain,” member of a race of translators (the “Jains”), who are characterised by their extreme aversion to violence, reflected in particular in their diet. In this book, Sudharma Jain is portrayed as a near-godlike figure, ascetic and immune from the flaws that roil the other characters.

I do think that if western writers are going to be this on the nose when borrowing from a non-western context, then they should also do some homework. There was absolutely no reason why there needed to be a race called “the Jains” in this book, but if you have made that choice, then it behooves you to also engage with all the many problematic aspects that accompany this specific vision of dietary non-violence, especially in modern-day India. Things will get messy very soon, because then you will have to deal with all kinds of uncomfortable questions around the link between dietary rules, purity, and caste exclusion. And while I’d be perfectly happy for a book to grapple with that discomfort - regardless of who wrote it - there is a creeping orientalism/philo-orientalism to the depiction of “the Jains” and their representative character that I found very jarring. It is a pity, because - as I have noted above - the writer did not need to use this name; any other name would have done. Having chosen to use it, though, the accompanying flattening raised my hackles.

I’d still recommend the book for readers who are interested in the kind of science fiction I talked about in the opening paragraph, because What We Are Seeking does do that extremely well, and pushes the boundaries of our taxonomic categories with great skill. But I’d recommend it with a modicum of discomfort - the discomfort that I wish the book had elected to grapple with.

I hardly need to reiterate that Keigo Higashino is an auto-buy for me: the moment there is a new translation, I buy and read it. As with all his previous books, this was a single-sitting read. It’s always so hard to substantively review a Higashino, because every plot point is a spoiler reveal; so I’ll only say that this story - with two murders set decades apart - does what Higashino is best at: the moral ambiguity that lies at the heart of society’s notion of what constitutes a “crime” and what does not.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Another work of science fiction that I have very ambivalent feelings about is Arcane. I loved everything about the first season, but the second-season queer romance between the rebel and the cop left me cold. I did not know that there were now franchise novels - in particular, C.L. Clark’s Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf; and I found this review by Catherine Bakervery interesting, especially for Arcane fans as well as Arcane undecideds.

The Indian Scene

Prashanth Srivatsa is building a repository of contemporary Indian SFF, which you can find here. Browse - and buy! - at your pleasure.

Recommendations Corner

From a Le Tellier book that didn’t quite convince me, how about one that did - for the most part? I read The Anomaly as part of my long review of the 2023 Clarke Award shortlist, and here’s a summary of the plot (click through for the full review, but there are spoilers):

At first blush, Hervé le Tellier’s The Anomaly is not a story about the climate crisis. It belongs to the tradition of thought-experiment SF, where you imagine one alteration to our world, and ask “what if?” As a flight signals its approach into an airport, it is discovered that it—and everyone on board—is an exact copy of a flight, flying the same route, that had landed three months ago. The internal time clock of those on board remains unchanged. Thus, for a select group of individuals in the world, there now exist two “sets” of the same person—only, one with a three-month time lag. The Anomaly explores how the State might respond, how society might respond—and, most strikingly—how the individuals might themselves respond. “People rarely have the opportunity to save a relationship before it’s even in danger,” writes one of the characters—in one of the most moving passages of the book—having seen, in the three-month lag, that his partner has left him. “I want to have a second chance before I ruin the first one” (p. 317).

See also: Dan Hartland’s review.

Along with the folks at Champaca Bookshop, I am curating a science fiction Book Box/Book Club. This follows Champaca’s model of a themed book box, where readers/subscribers are sent one “surprise” book a month from a chosen genre, over a period of time.

For the science fiction Book Box, it will be six books over six months, curated into three sub-themes: climate fiction, space opera, and revisited classics. For each of these themes, we’ll also have a book discussion.

For more information, and a subscription link, see here.

What I’m Reading

This is a book that I really wanted to love, and - going by its description - should have loved: a story set in mid-1970s Italy (a period that I’m fascinated by), involving queer love, art and cinema, and the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini. A young, queer English man flees from an unrevealed traumatic event to Italy, where he is suborned by his new lover to work, first, on a Fellini film, and then with Pasolini. The story proceeds through a series of episodic vignettes that drive it forward, many of which are set in - and around - the process of film-making. With all the ingredients to hand, though, The Silver Book simply did not hang together, for me: it felt curiously disjointed, stuttering from episode to episode, punctuated by impressionistic observations about the meaning and nature of art that didn’t quite land.

Perhaps the The Silver Book’s finest moments are near the end, in its brief character sketches of a doomed Pasolini. Lines such as “… and he goes on to say that everybody else knows these things, too, but they all refuse to speak, so as to preserve a world that is already unliveable…” and “because most people, not Pasolini, are ruled by fear…” give you a crystallised image of Pasolini with an utmost economy of words. This makes the events leading up to the book’s climax fraught with both intensity and emotion; unfortunately, it all comes just a little too late in the story.

I Think of You is a set of short stories by Ahdaf Soueif, set in Egypt and Britain (and sometimes moving between the two countries). They deal, primarily, with love in the everyday and the quotidian, love that is shaped by issues of migration and cultural alienation (and assimilation), but which also carries the imprint of the universal. I enjoyed these stories as I read them, but - a couple of weeks later - I barely remember anything of them. Perhaps that is the point!

For this month’s meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle (next week!), we decided to revisit Iain M. Banks, and iconic The Culture series, with The Hydrogen Sonata. I’ve read most of the Culture novels by now, with The Hydrogen Sonata one of my unread outliers (in part, I think, because it’s one of the lesser-discussed Culture novels). It was an omission that I was happy to put right.

The Hydrogen Sonata takes place on the eve of a great galactic event: the species of the Gzilt is about to undergo the Sublimation - that is, to abandon the material galaxy and move to a non-corporeal, higher plane of existence (that is the best description one can give of Sublimation, which is - perhaps intentionally - left fuzzy in the details). It is a fraught time for the Gzilt, and tensions are heightened when long-buried secrets - which might threaten the Sublimation itself - are brought to the fore. A group of Culture Minds (for those who have not read Banks, Minds are extremely powerful and sophisticated AIs spaceships, which run the Culture’s post-scarcity, utopian civilisation) take it upon themselves to investigate, along with some willing - and unwilling - human and Gzilt accomplices. In their search for the truth, they enter into a perilous race against the countdown to Sublimation - an event that some actors will do anything to see completed

I think that what characterises Banks’ work is that at the core of most of his novels, there is a very simple - and very classic - set of issues around the human condition, which assume galactic - one could even say, operatic - significance. In The Hydrogen Sonata, these were the ones I spotted:

1. The use of myth to create a national - or, in this case - a species identity, and the potential for grave disruption if it is revealed that that identity does rest upon just a myth (think Ismail Kadare, but space opera);

2. The ethical consequences of creating a “simulation” to model your own behaviour, where the simulation itself is so life-like that it is, in effect, life itself, with its own agency and existence (I recently read another variant of this in Alastair Reynolds’ Century Rain);

3. The effects of extreme longevity upon memory, and how the human mind is simply incapable of processing a situation where it can remember everything (think Borges, but space opera).

In various ways, literature has engaged with these ideas for a very long time - that’s why I could immediately think of literary analogues for two of the three core themes in The Hydrogen Sonata. The power of Banks’ novels, I think, lies in how these resonant themes lie at the heart of his work, and how the stakes around them are so magnified because, often, the future of an entire species, or a planet, of star-systems, rest on their resolution.

Having now read most of Culture, I have done that thing which all Culture fans do: prepare a rank-list of novels. Here’s mine (excluding Matter, which I haven’t read yet): Look to Windward > Excession > Surface Detail > The Hydrogen Sonata > The Player of Games > Use of Weapons »»»»»»»»»»» Consider Phlebas.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We are Hugo Finalists again (shortlist here!) - I think for the fourteenth year. A record of one win in fourteen is not all that excellent, though, so let’s see if we buck the trend this year (insert usual caveats about the subjectivity and limitations of literary awards).

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring at the moment. Oh, I’ve been reading the submissions to Volume 2 of the If Anthology of New Indian SFF. Total submissions: 226. Present reading count: 85. So we go on! My respect for editors shoots up every time I do this.

Recommendations Corner

How about a non-Culture novel from Banks? Feersum Endjinn has one of the most memorable beginnings to a science fiction novel that I’ve ever read - a man waking up, being murdered, being resurrected through a backed-up version, being murdered again - all the way down to his last life, when he manages to (barely) escape thanks to intervention by a copy of himself (created by himself for just such an eventuality), and even as he continues being hunted.

Most of the action takes place in a vast fortress, which - when you combine it with travels through a virtual cyber-reality, and a background plot detail involving the imminent destruction of the planet, as it is drifting into an interstellar molecular cloud - creates a most bizarre melding of genres - thriller, Gothic, cyberpunk, science fiction, dashes of fantasy. I don’t really know if it all hangs together, but whether or not it does, there’s nothing quite like it!

First, some news on the writing front: Earlier this week, I finished writing the first draft of the sequel to THE SENTENCE/THE FIFTH INFLECTION. It is obviously very rough, with more plot holes than a sweeping cloth, a bit like Paris’ Pompidou Centre building with all its innards and plumbing visible on the outside, but it exists!

I remain bewildered by my own writing process. I commenced work on this novel with a plot outline in mid-June last year, and you’d think that ten months for a 92,000-word first draft sounds about right. Except that after the outline, I did no writing until October; wrote 35,000 words in three weeks in October; then experienced another crippling block until mid-March; and then wrote 57,000 words in one month between mid-March and mid-April. This replicates, in a more stark way, my process with my previous novels: long periods of teeth-gnashing stasis, followed by a few weeks of writing where it all comes out, where - after months of looking for a word in vain - I can’t do anything but write. I would much prefer to have a steady, consistent routine - it would certainly trigger a lot less self-hate - but this is the way it is.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that there really is no process except your own. There are writers who swear by the “write something every day, even if it is 250 words,” but if you can’t, I suppose the lesson is to trust your own process and be gentle with yourself (easier said than done!). The words will come, they just may not come “as naturally as the Leaves to a tree” (Keats).

There’s a long way ahead now, with beta reads, edits, revisions, rewritings, and then submission, but for now, a first draft exists. I’ll leave you with a bit of a ToC teaser.

Last week, an article was doing the rounds on social media about how English-language Indian writers “of significance” must reside abroad. It produced a familiar list of example to substantiate its point - Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri etc. I didn’t care much for the piece - what does “significance” mean anyway - but at one trivial level, its argument was not incorrect. If, by “significance,” you mean being on literary awards lists, being features in the NYT, or “moving” through the high-literary circuit, then obviously living abroad (and here, “abroad” invariably means New York or London, not Nairobi or Santiago) gives you an advantage, because that is where publishing power (financial and social) resides. And power tends to flow from its origin, so it also follows that writers who establish themselves in those circuits will be taken more seriously “back home.” There is nothing particularly controversial about this observation - it’s hardly a point worth making.

What did amuse me, however, was that a number of Anglophone Indian writers living in India decided to take umbrage at this. Their reaction was to produce a counter-canon of English-language writers living in India who are also of “significance.” You won’t be surprised to note that, coincidentally, these multiple lists tended to converge upon the same names (with many of the writers recommending each other), and which also happen to be already much-awarded and much-marketed within the Indian literary eco-system (I came across a tweet thread, followed immediately by a Scroll piece, where the two lists - ostensibly written by separate people, independent of each other - overlapped to a wild degree).

This is an exercise in tedium, if only for how often it repeats itself. The response of a sub-set of Indian writers to the issue of geographic marginalisation seems to be to double down on local gatekeeping, and make the boundaries of their own in-group and out-group even more rigid. The original piece could have been a springboard for a more inclusive conversation about publishing power and how to address it; it could have been an occasion for bringing in a wider subset of English-language writers and critics who live and work in the country; what it became was an opportunity for a series of scold-y tweet threads and angst-ridden pieces, coalescing around the message: “if you don’t read these flag-bearers of English-language Indian fiction, then there’s something wrong with you.”

I suppose this can be a topic of discussion at the next edition of the formerly-Zee, now Vedanta Jaipur Literature Festival, where all of these writers congregate in any event. So it goes.

What I’m Reading

Over the last week, I read the newly-released fourth instalment in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children series. Along with many others, I maintain that the book which launched the series, Children of Time, remains one of the best modern science fiction novels. Children of Strife brings together many of the species that we encounter previously in the series - the memorable spider-intelligence of Children of Time, the intelligent octopi of Children of Ruin, the augmented humans - all of which have banded together in a largely peaceable space-faring society - along with a more fractious species of stomatopods, also from the original planet in Children of Time. For readers familiar with the series, Children of Strife reprises an old theme: the human will to destruction and conflict, confronted by a species (or an alliance of species) whose behaviour hews to a fundamentally different logic.

It’s a worthy addition to the Children series, and in a way, it serves as a retrospective (the story toggles between three different Ages) - although at 670 pages, I did find myself wishing that it had been a little shorter.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

If you have any kind of passing acquaintance with genre fiction, you’ll know that romantasy has been all the rage for at least the last two years. In a recent podcast of Critical Friends, Jenny Hamilton, Anushree Nande, and Dan Hartland get together to talk about this phenomenon, what it is, its appeal, and where it’s going.

The Indian Scene

Nothing stirring this week.

Recommendations Corner

Since we’ve been talking about Tchaikovsky and non-anthropomorphic SFF, here’s returning to a book/writer I’ve recommended at least once before on this newsletter, if not twice (but it’s never too much!). Yoss is a Cuban punk rocker/biochemist/science fiction writer, whose books are madly inventive. In A Planet for Rent, earth has been turned into a tourist destination for highly-advanced alien species, who come here and do, Roadside Picnic style, exactly what a median-callous group of human tourists do when they go on vacation. The interconnected/mosaic stories in A Planet for Rent are often told from the aliens’ perspective, which is what makes this such a fun read. Also, if you’ve ever wondered about the hypothetical mechanics of hypothetical alien sex, then wonder no more.

Read a review of the book at Asymptote Journal, here.

What I’m Reading

It finally happened: I (re)-read the book that inspired the title of this newsletter: Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest: the classic novella about a colonised society of peaceable near-humans (the evolutionary tree diverged millions of years ago) called the Athsheans, who are finally able to overthrow their genocidal human overlords by themselves discovering the methods of mass violence. It was the chosen book for the April meeting of the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, which happened yesterday. It was also the third in a series of first-contact/inter-species conflict novels that we’d read this year: in February, we discussed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, and last month, our pick was China Mieville’s Embassytown.

It’s always fascinating to come back to a classic of the genre, especially when you’re returning to it after a decade - a decade of immersion in the genre. On this read, I found new things to appreciate about The Word for World is Forest. One is how elegantly Le Guin treads the line between modelling her primary protagonist and antagonist upon familiar archetypes, and turning them into caricatures. The violent colonial officer, Davidson, is given a rich interior life, which allows him to appear as a classic, 19th-century imperial apparatchik, but not just as a stand-in for an idea. The anthropologist Lyubov’s individual kindness is impossible to separate from his place in a violent structure, which complicates both his character arc, and its ending. Lyubov, in short, recalls centuries of seemingly benign colonial scientists, who saw their role as reaffirming the separation of power and knowledge - while, in truth, entrenching knowledge-production as a pillar of colonial power. In the short space of the novella, all this could have become a pastiche, but it does not.

The second thing is how squarely the novella confronts the question of liberatory violence. In our meeting, we talked about how Selvar Thele is if Shakespeare’s Caliban had actually gained power and overthrown his oppressor. In both Shakepeare’s The Tempest and Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest, Caliban is presented as a colonised individual who has not forsaken his agency - but nonetheless, lacks the power to shape the world according to his agency. In The Word for World is Forest, that power comes from the discovery of violence, in an almost Fanonian sense. But there are no easy resolutions, as at the end, when the “Terrans” - now defeated - are about to depart, Selvar admits that violence, having entered Athshean society, will now become an inextricable part of it. Having gained their freedom through violence, will the Athsheans now turn that violence inward, as the Algerian Revolution did after its success? Le Guin leaves the question open.

And finally, I was struck once again by how unique Le Guin is in blending the lyrical style of high fantasy with the conceits of science fiction. It is not as frequent here as it is in, say, Rocannon’s World, but it is nonetheless unmistakable. In our discussion, we wondered if we could think of other writers who combine these forms so effortlessly, and the only one we came up with was - occasionally - Robert Jackson Bennett (for example, in Foundryside).

At the same time, the re-read revealed moments that were jarring, and that illustrated how, no matter how good a writer is, they are of their time. As with my re-read of The Dispossessed, here too, I found an uncomfortable gender essentialism pervading the novella, which - even as it attempted to articulate a progressive gender politics - ended up entrenching gender identity and gender roles. It wasn’t a pervasive theme, but wherever it showed up, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

But small irritants aside, The Word for World is Forest is a reminder of how complex, layered, and richly nuanced a first-contact story can be, even if its core premise - violent human colonisers meet peaceable alien species and try to enslave and destroy them - is most thoroughly trope-ified. You just need a Le Guin to do it!

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

We continued to publish the pieces in our special issue on fungi in SFF throughout the week, and you can now read the complete issue here.

The Indian Scene

For Indian readers, Amal Singh’s new novel, Slow Burn, is out later this month, and presently available for pre-orders here.

Today’s The Hindu carries a review of Between Worlds: the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, which you can read here (and get thee book here).

Recommendations Corner

There is an adage that a writer only truly finds their voice in their fourth novel. If that be so, then Worlds of Exile and Illusion - a collection of Ursula Le Guin’s first three novels (A Wizard of Earthsea was the fourth!) - is a fascinating window into a writer in the process of finding their voice. These three novels - Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions - are patchy and uneven (as you might expect!), but at the same time, you see glimpses of the literary style and aesthetic - and that sweet spot at the intersection of SF and fantasy - that found its apogee in Earthsea, The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Interestingly, within this collection, it reaches its pitch towards the end of City of Illusions: Before that, reading this book had been feeling something like a chore (interspersed with moments of brilliance): the last forty pages of City of Illusions, though, are an edge-of-your-seat read, and they have everything: lyrical prose, intense character work, unbearable tension, and all of it in the backdrop of one of those cosmic-level themes or questions that characterise the best of SF. You can almost see the end of City of Illusions transitioning into the beginning of Earthsea!

These past two weeks, I’ve been working on copy-edits for The Fifth Inflection (almost done!), and side-by-side, finally shaken off a four-month block and resumed work on the sequel. If “gardening” refers to the more chaotic end of a writing process, I must be a particularly chaotic gardener, as my process seems to involve months of inability to write and mounting self-hatred, followed by a two-week window where I can do nothing but write. Rinse and repeat. I’m hoping that this window will allow me to finish the first draft and move on to the far more pleasant task of editing, but we shall see.

What I’m Reading

Of late, I’ve been thinking of a line that I read many years ago in Stuart Jeffries’s Grand Hotel Abyss, about Walter Benjamin. “But if the storm is what we call progress,” writes Jeffries, “the angel might be seen as a likeness or symbol of Walter Benjamin in that summer of 1932 in Poveromo, as he tried, through the remembrance of writing, to redeem the past, to make whole what had been smashed. The storm was blowing, the wreckage growing, but Benjamin was attempting to stand his ground by doing the only thing he could: writing.”

I’ve been thinking about this line as I - and I think, many of us - struggle with the futility of writing as we witness bombs falling on universities, hospitals, historical landmarks, and as we see double-tap strikes on journalists and para-medics. While the non-stop, unmediated access to the violence of war is new, the violence itself is not; on occasion, knowing that in other times, there were those who struggled with exactly the same question, makes everything feel a little less lonely. As Benjamin himself noted, in an age very similar to ours, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

So, Peter E. Gordon’s new biography of Benjamin, The Pearl Diver, came at the right time. This is a carefully detailed, lovingly written account, both of the man and of the world he was born into and moved in. Gordon takes the unconventional step of beginning with Benjamin’s last day - his failed attempt to escape Europe, and his arrest (that led to him dying by suicide) - and then begins the chronology of Benjamin’s years, almost as if to suggest - in the style of Yesterday’s Tomorrow - that the ending was not inevitable, that endings are never inevitable, and that history always has its branching points. After all, it was Benjamin himself who, in his Theses on History, would raise the possibility of the past being transformed.

From there, we step into a more conventional biography, where Gordon takes us through Benjamin’s Jewish upbringing, his (desultory) engagement with early Zionism and his final turning away from it, his engagement with German literature and poetry, the travails and struggles of his academic career with its constant rejections for his orthodoxy-smashing work, the breadth and creativity that defined his prime (and for which we now know and read him), the importance of Klee’s Angel to his life and work, and of course, the tragedy of his end. And while this is very much a cliche, it is also true: for a figure so wreathed in legend, Gordon performs Benjamin the service of rendering him thoroughly human: we hear of his petty academic feuds and his insecurities, his questionable behaviour towards his romantic partners, his fraught relationship with figures like Brecht, Adorno, and Horkheimer, and the context for each of these things.

Elsewhere - in words that echo Dubravka Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, that Benjamin was “a historian of losers, not just of defeated humans, but of expendable things that, back in the day, had been the last word.” As with all good biographies, The Pearl Diver casts a sudden, fresh light on this aphorism, and turns it into something more than just an aphorism - something more akin to a map, a map of both Benjamin’s interior landscape, and the “debris” of the history in which he lived.

When Benjamin wrote, in his famous essay on Proust, that it “has at its centre a loneliness which pulls the world down into its vortex with the force of a maelstrom,” it is Gordon’s deft touch that lets us see the loneliness at the heart of Benjamin’s own life, driven both by a personality that refused to conform or to be shaped into something that others wanted it to become, and a world that cast such a personality out, starting with the home, and progressively expanding into the entire circle of life. Thus, what emerges is a writer whose words still blaze, but who, in the final analysis, like all of us, ached in and with this world. That is what makes this biography perhaps the most moving account of Benjamin’s life, work, and death that I have read.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Fungi have long fascinated me, and after a year of planning, today we published a special issue of Strange Horizons dedicated to fungi. We have stories, poetry, articles, columns, reviews, art - the works: almost a mycelial network, one might say! Check out the special issue here, and my introduction here.

The Indian Scene

I recently read - and reviewed - a new graphic novel called Zoraver and the Lost Gods. It’s set in the first two decades of the 20th century, in colonial-imperial India, and has an intriguing - and at times, chaotic - blend of historical fiction, myth, and magical realism, set in the context of the freedom struggle. I have seen similar attempts in other contexts before, but none in graphic novel format, and none that has the Indian freedom struggle as its theme.

Recommendations Corner

Since this newsletter has had a heavy dose of graphic novels and of fascism, I thought I’d recommend something we read in our reading group, many months ago: Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s 1957-1959 Argentinean graphic novel, The Eternaut, which portrays the aftermath of an alien invasion in Buenos Aries, and which - a decade later - was rewritten to include a specific dose of anti-authoritarianism. The graphic novel has attained legendary status in Argentina, had a vividly controversial publishing industry, and tragically, its own creator would go on to be disappeared by the Argentinean junta. Perhaps a particularly fitting speculative read for our times.

This is a newsletter about books and writing, but none of this takes place in a vacuum. I want to begin with recommending a few pieces that, over the last two weeks, have helped me make sense of some of what we are witnessing. Soon after the first bombs fell on Iran (including a missile that massacred 165 schoolchildren), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s “The dry and the wet burn together” laid out the nature, and the stakes, of this war with unsparing clarity (you can also listen to an excellent podcast on the 20th-century history of Iran with him and Golnar Nikpour at The Dig). Shahram Khosravi’s “Defeat as a Method” locates the present war in a longer history of stymied Iranian revolutions, starting with the 1905 constitutional revolution, and in the context of the Palestinian experience. And over on Africa is Country, in “Where have all the flowers gone?”, William Shoki reflects on the redemptive possibilities in a world that actively seeks to convince us otherwise.

I am wary of those who, in a time of war and atrocity, present art and literature to us as a decontextualised, depoliticised means of solace-seeking: you can’t Forough Farrokhzad your way out of a war, just like you can’t Mahmoud Darwish your way out of a genocide. What I admire about these pieces is that they do none of that, but grapple with the politics in an unsparing way, while preserving the kernel of humanity that does not reduce it to missile stockpiles, casualty counts, and the price of oil.

What I’m Reading

Singapore is perhaps the last place in the world that you’d associate with a revolutionary movement, but three years ago, when I read Jeremy Tiang’s novel State of Emergency, it radically altered my perception of that country, and its mid-20th revolutionary and radical history.

After that, I’ve always been on the lookout for Tiang’s work (along with Viet Thanh Nguyen, he’s also one of the prominent SE Asian writers that have been very strong on Palestine); the latest I found was this translation of a book called Delicious Hunger, which takes us right back to that same revolutionary movement - and this one has been written by one of those revolutionaries. Delicious Hunger is a collection of interwoven short stories that recount the lives of the revolutionaries who spent years fighting from the forests.

These short stories are written almost as journalistic vignettes: centred around a single event (a battle, a disappearance, a death), and then unfolding outwards in a portrayal of the revolutionaries’ time in the forest, crafting a life - and lives together - both in hiding, and under fire. It is almost as if the immense strain sharpens and clarifies the true nature of the range of human emotions - from love to parting to heartbreak to solitude: the veils that we weave are stripped away, leaving nothing but the essence. These are, in a sense, simple stories - but it is a simplicity forged in the most adverse of circumstances, circumstances where superfluity could itself have mortal consequences.

It is rare, these days, to find stories of revolution written by a revolutionary (the last such book I came across, I think, was Hiwot Teffeira’s Tower in the Sky); these days, literature that makes such claims is far more about revolutionary aesthetics. It is that what makes Delicious Hunger not just a window into a time and an era that has been allowed to be forgotten, but also the most unique and irreplaceable of authorial voices.

I will confess that this book was not quite what I expected it to be: I was expecting an account of the anarchist roots of Argentinean football, perhaps something a little bit like Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sunlight and Shadow. What the book is about - and this makes it no less interesting - is how the writer’s twin passions - anarchism, and the Argentinian football club Racing - came together in one week in 2001 when a powerful social movement overthrew the Argentinean government, just when Racing Club broke a decades-long drought and won the league title.

In the book, anarchism and football converge and diverge, in particular in how the growing neoliberalisation of the sport comes into tension with the more working class origins of supporters’ groups and fanbases, in Latin America generally, and Argentina in particular. This was particularly interesting because in the “global” leagues that most of us watch - the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, perhaps the Italian and German leagues - this tension has been more or less entirely submerged, subsumed by the imperatives of neoliberal globalisation. So, regardless of their origins, it seems faintly ridiculous to think of the big European clubs as “working class” or spaces for political radicalism (notwithstanding, for example, Barcelona’s history as a fount of anti-Franco resistance, or Celtic Football Club continuing to express its solidarity with Palestine).

In Latin America, however, there has not been complete subsumption, which means that the tension continues to exist - a tension that the book grapples with on multiple occasions, including the writer’s agonised decision to travel to Qatar to support the national team in the World Cup. Those parts of the book felt its most painful, and also its most honest - with the realisation that for those of us with progressive or radical politics, there exists an irreconcilable contradiction between following the sport that we love, and what that sport has now become; and all we can do is to try and hold those contradictions in balance.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

I loved this poem titled “An Inheritance of Air,” from the 9 March issue.

The Indian Scene

Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Intergalactic Feast, the sequel to Interstellar Megachef, is now out and available to order.

Recommendations Corner

The Nebula Award finalists were announced recently, and in the novella category, I’d just like to highlight Hache Pueyo’s But Not Too Bold, which is the more unsettling sentient spider story since Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you like Gothic fiction with a dose of body horror by the side, this one’s for you.

Submissions to the Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF closed over the weekend. Like last time, we have received around 250 submissions - so you know what I’m going to be doing for a good part of this coming month! Once again, it’s brilliant to see so many people submitting work for an SFF anthology.

The other thing I finished over the weekend was copy-edits to The Fifth Inflection - which means that the novel has now moved to the typesetting stage (I just received sample typesets yesterday). Meanwhile, the Indian version, The Sentence remains on sale here.

What I’m Reading

This book reminded me of one of the reasons why I stopped reading Guy Gavriel Kay a few years ago, after his novels played such a formative part in shaping my teenage world. I picked it up because the thought of a fantasy novel based on the life and deeds of François Villon was an irresistible prospect - especially when you think of Kays' brilliant previous novel, A Song for Arbonne.

But what you get with Written on the Dark is undercooked Joan of Arc fan-fiction, with a clumsy merging of historical periods and rewritten endings, and a love affair that feels like pulling teeth (at least this one lacks . The novel has its moments (especially the intertextual references to Sarantium, which - I think - most long-time Kay readers would agree is his best body of work) - but for the most part, this one is eminently forgettable.

Small mercies - at least its subject matter allowed Kay to steer clear of the inveterate orientalism that creeps in whenever he tries to write about the medieval Muslim world (see Tanvir Ahmed’s brilliant essay here)!

I continued my foray into Greek tragedy - specifically Antigone - with Antigone’s Parallax. As with the Butler book that I discussed in the last edition of the newsletter, this was another convincing argument for considering Antigone in the context of the entire Theban Trilogy, and specifically the dynamics that are initiated in Oedipus. There was also a fascinating section on the role played by funeral rites in the social understanding of death. Beyond that, however, I struggled a bit with this book, because a lot of it is in the very technical language of psycho-analytics, and written in a way that is substantially less accessible than Butler’s work.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Ada Palmer’s column on why speculative fiction writers are historians has generated some debate online; as the editor of the piece, I am of course neutral on the substantive argument, but it’s worth thinking about. I also enjoyed this piece on rewilding in Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built - a book I have a lot of disagreements with!

Podcast listeners may enjoy the latest Critical Friends episode on style in SFF.

The Indian Scene

Check out Suchitra Sukumar’s short story, ‘Your Body is a Shape of Grief’ in Gone Lawn magazine.

Recommendations Corner

I’m fairly sure I’ve recommended this book at some point in the past, but with Words for Worlds now in its 116th issue, repetition is bound to occur! Anyway, Embassytown is the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle’s pick for March, and although Mieville is of course a very popular writer, Embassytown is one of his lesser-known or discussed works. That, to me, is a pity: Embassytown may not have the polish of The City and the City or the put-togetherness of Perdido Street Station or Scar, but in terms of ideas, I think it’s his best work.

Embassytown is a completely original take on one of science fiction’s oldest preoccupations - the relationship between language and the construction of reality, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and so on - the tradition of Samuel L. Delaney and others. At the heart of the novel is a species that is functionally unable to lie - and, therefore, are violently colonised by human beings. This sets up a story at the intersection of first contact and linguistics that is studded with fascinating provocations (although one wishes some of them were a little more developed!).

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the submissions that have come in so far for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF. A reminder: submissions are open until March 1, so you still have two weeks to get your stories in. For submission guidelines, see here.

What I’m Reading

“The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black hole” was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. Just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”

– Gustave Flaubert, quoted in the epigraph to Robert Harris’ The Dictator

In Hisham Matar’s The Return, we are told of a character who was sad, but whose sadness had nothing noble in it. We all suffer, and we all strive mightily to convince ourselves that our suffering has the quality of nobility to it, a grandeur that gives it meaning, and elevates our suffering from the mundane to the tragic. And yet, also within our minds, there is a tiny, Puckish imp of doubt that whispers to us that we are fooling ourselves, that all told our suffering is just … ordinary. The voice gnaws away at us, threatening to burst through the seams of the carefully constructed narrative of our lives, and to tear meaning apart.

Departure(s) – Julian Barnes’ last novel (or so he tells us) – is that Puckish voice set down in spare, unsparing prose. Departure(s) takes two of the most enduring subjects of tragedy – love and death – and makes them unbearably ordinary. A young man and a young woman are introduced to each other by the author (Barnes), while all three of them are at Oxford. The two of them (seemingly) fall in love, but instead of marrying, they split up. Forty years later, the man approaches Barnes, and asks him to play matchmaker a second time. He does, to great success: the man and the woman, now in their sixties, become “rekindlers,” and this time they do marry. But this story does not culminate either in an indeterminate happiness, or in the tragedy of separation by death. Instead, the relationship breaks apart a second time, with a whimper, because “his tragedy is that he can love, but that his love cannot be accepted. Her tragedy is that she cannot love, but what she does offer is accepted as love.” But isn’t heartbreak itself a form of tragedy? No, because “then I remembered again that we live in post-tragic times. And I was falling into the temptation of the literary trope.” It is nothing more than a petering-out.

This story is interspersed by Barnes’ own cancer diagnosis, and a slowly dawning realisation that he is approaching the end of his days. And as his time comes, he resists each attempt of his mind (or his heart) to frame his life and death as a tragedy, because the Puckish voice tells him that it would be dishonest to do so. The first of Barnes’ group to pass – Christopher Hitchens – attempted to find solace in noting that “life was ‘thin stuff’, compared to literature.” Barnes’ response is wry disagreement, mixed with the rueful acknowledgment that “maybe this makes dying slightly easier.” Departure(s) makes a choice: to suffer without illusions rather than to suffer with illusions, where the suffering comes from the effort in maintaining the illusion, and the awareness that it is an illusion.

What, then, is one to do? How, indeed, is one to come back from this devastating assessment that Barnes offers up at the beginning of the book, and which the rest of the book is, in some ways, dedicated to demonstrating:

In any case the Tragic Age is long past: we are not grand enough to justify such words. We still use them, to be sure … maybe we haven’t yet found the right words to fit the lesser nature of the post-tragic life.

To some who – in the words of Ghassan Kanafani – cup the world with their hands to make it smaller so that they can be happy – this absence of grandeur suits well enough; but it does not suit Barnes, it does not suit his protagonists (one of whom – the woman – memorably says that “happiness doesn’t make me happy”), and it probably doesn’t suit his readers, at least those who persist until the end. What, then, rescues this work – and this life – from utter nihilism? Towards the end, Barnes gives us a clue, when he muses upon what he would like to do when he dies:

And, just as I shall be rereading great novels for probably the last time, I’d like to make farewell trips to see great art: to Madrid for Las Meninas, Brussels for Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, Rome for Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Ghent for the Van Eyck altarpiece, Palermo for Antonello’s Annunciated Madonna, and so on.

When Barnes speaks of “great art” and “great novels”, I suspect that he understands artistic greatness as something that goes beyond the particular, and rises to the level of the universal. And so, in a strange, meandering, way we come back to tragedy: tragedy whose fundamental characteristic – if we are reading Simone Weil or Nicole Loraux – is universalism, something that “grasps and defines human beings not as citizens of a political community but as mortal men and women” (Loraux). And so, perhaps, we come to this partial and unsatisfactory answer, but an answer nonetheless: we may live in a post-tragic age, and we may have not yet found the words for it, but we can still access that sense of universalism, mediated by the art that we have in our world, and to live in and through it. And it is this that makes Barnes’ parting words, where he paints the image of the writer and reader – the last few words that he will give to us in written form – their tender, moving quality:

Instead, I prefer an image of writer and reader on a café pavement in some unidentified town in some unidentified country. Warm weather and a cool drink in front of us. Side by side, we look out at the many and varied expressions of life that pass in front of us. We watch and muse… so, I’ll just rest my hand briefly on your forearm – no, don’t stop looking – and then slip away. No, don’t stop looking.

We won’t.

In 1980s Chile, a young boy grows up in a Santiago suburb, the son of a carefully apolitical pair of parents. One day, his neighbour Raul’s niece – Claudia – recruits him to perform a mysterious task: to watch her uncle, note who visits him, track his movements, and report back to her on his activities. The boy carries out the task faithfully, until one day he sees a young woman visit Raul, and whom he then follows halfway across the city. He reports back to Claudia, but suddenly things seem to have changed: she is no longer interested, and – eventually – tells him that he no longer needs to watch her uncle. That is the last time he sees her.

Years pass. The boy is now a writer, living in downtown Santiago, working on a new novel while slowly – and tentatively – getting back together with his ex-partner, Eme. His novel-in-progress is a thinly fictionalised account of his own childhood – the account that, the reader belatedly learns, was what they were reading in the first section of the book. Or is it? Fiction and reality blur, as one moment Claudia seems to be a character in the narrator’s novel, and the next she steps out of the pages and into his world, returning from a self-imposed exile in the United States upon her father’s death, to kindle a brief, nostalgic, and doomed relationship with the writer. In the course of this reunion, we learn that Raul was not Claudia’s uncle but her father, an anti-Pinochet activist who was forced to assume the identity of his brother in order to escape detection, as he carried out clandestine work for the party – until, at last, the opposition was legalised, he could resume his own identity, and the boy’s services were no longer needed.

But did any of this really happen? Are Raul and Claudia and their family real people, or are they figments of the writer’s imagination, as he seeks to populate his childhood with something that might give it meaning? Does the difference even matter? In 139 taut pages, Alejandro Zambra poses these questions and answers none of them, leaving the readers to seek and find their own closure.

“Sometimes fiction wants to supplant reality,” writes Antonio Munoz Molina in Like a Fading Shadow, “[and] sometimes it settles for adding certain secondary details.” As with Molina’s novel, Ways of Going Home is about our human need to impose coherence, pattern, meaning upon the tattered patchwork that is the sum total of the disaggregated moments of our lives. The writer’s past and present with Claudia can be read at two levels: how life under dictatorship strips and hollows out individual lives, with after-effects that last even once the dictatorship is over; and as an attempt to retrospectively find meaning in a life by weaving it into – to quote Molina gain – a story with “a clear beginning and end, leaving no residues, like cigarettes that leave no cancer.” As the second part of Molina’s quote indicates, however, clean stories, stories without residue, are about as impossible as cigarettes that leave no cancer. Stories, whether real or imagined, will always be messy.

And it is in the act of writing – the effort of imposing meaning – that something vital is lost. This is not quite the same as the familiar argument that language is imprecise, always groping towards a reality that it can never quite capture, and therefore a pale shadow of that reality. This is something slightly different: the idea that designing a pattern will always cast out something that doesn’t fit, or – in Ortega y Gasset’s words – “to define is to exclude and to negate.” To express that sentiment, we have these memorable lines:

… when we write, we wash everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance toward something. We ought to simply describe those sounds, those stains on memory. That arbitrary selection, nothing more. That’s why we lie so much, in the end. That’s why a book is always the opposite of another immense and strange book. An illegible and genuine book that we translate treacherously, that we betray with our habit of passable prose. (p. 125)

So it is that the writer’s relationship with Claudia is a mutual writing of a story that retrofits their childhoods into their present. As the writer notes:

We discover coincidences that bring us back to real life, to our youth, to childhood. Because we can’t, we don’t know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore; the moment has come when movies and novels don’t matter, only the time when we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then. (p. 83)

But the curious part about this story is that its creators do not see themselves as protagonists – but rather, as secondary characters who simply need to be in a story. This perhaps speaks to a narrowing of horizons under the suffocating atmosphere of a long-lasting, normalised dictatorship: under Pinochet, there are no heroes, only secondary characters who grope their way forwards, engaging – like Raul – in marginal acts of resistance (although even this is revealed to be significantly more noble and courageous than the writer’s own parents, who keep their heads down and do nothing at all). And so the effect of the dictatorship is not only the deaths and the disappearances and the repression, but an imprisonment of the mind, where even the imagination is caged. As the writer notes wryly – in echoes of Walter Benjamin’s lament for the detritus of history:

We are united by a desire to regain the scenes of secondary characters. Unnecessary scenes that were reasonably discarded, and which nonetheless we collect obsessively. (p. 99)

Thus, even what you can retrieve from the wreckage left by the dictatorship are stories of containment. And this is the sense that we are left with, at the end of the novel: a haunting sense of foreclosed possibilities and frustrated horizons, where all that’s left is the narrow ways of going home.

One can certainly concede that desire is radically conditioned without claiming that it is radically determined, and that there are structures that make possible desire without claiming that those structures are impervious to a reiterative and transformative articulation. The latter is hardly a return to “the ego” or classical liberal notions of freedom, but it does insist that the norm has a temporality that opens it to a subversion from within and to a future that cannot be fully anticipated.

Antigone’s Claim departs from popular readings of Sophocles’ Antigone that have posited the play as exploring a conflict between human-made law and natural law, or – more subtly – between the norms of (private) kinship (expressed by Antigone) and the impersonal imperatives of an evolving State-form (expressed by Creon).

Taking Hegel and Lacan’s readings of the play as a counterpoint, Butler argues that Antigone displaces and unsettles accepted notions of kinship, and in doing so, foreshadows (or prefigures?) other, non-normative forms. Butler does so by taking the prohibition of incest as foundational, and noting how, in the descent from Oedipus, the family structures involving Oedipus, Antigone, Ismene, and Haemon are displaced from the heterosexual family norm; thus, Antigone’s determination to bury her “brother” is not simply an articulation of a kin-based love between brother and sister, as Oedipus himself is both “father” and “brother”, which makes Haemon simultaneously “brother” and “nephew.”

Using this, and though a close reading of the play, Butler makes the point that “if kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws.” This “new field of the human”, thus, is articulated through the idea of “radical kinship.”

Butler correctly notes that Antigone – of course – does not provide a blueprint for what this might look like; the role of the play is limited to unsettling the normative forms. In a certain sense, it does the work of deconstruction, which – in turn – creates the possibilities for making a new path by walking.

My own reading experience of this book was a mixed one. I have no training in the grammar and language of psycho-analytics, and no familiarity with the work of Lacan. So, there were sections of the book where my eyes glazed over, and where I felt that I simply lacked the analytical tools to make sense of the argument. Despite that, however, I felt that I was able to grasp the book’s core argument (noted above), and in many ways it felt a more persuasive – and exciting – reading of Antigone than the ones that I had previously come across.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

If you are - or ever have been or intend to be - into manga, check out this review of a new book that explores the history of the first century of manga, the Japanese art forms it evolved from, its periodisation, and much else.

The Indian Scene

Yesterday, I spoke at an event to celebrate the publication of Earthbound, an anthology of climate fiction edited by Alina Gufran. Earthbound consists of a set of stories, most set in a near-future India, in the context of climate change, the climate crisis, and all that it will bring (and has already brought). The familiar settings and unfamiliar events lend a sense of the uncanny/weird to these stories, a defamiliarising effect that is unique to the genre. They are also striking for their treatment of the impact of the climate crisis on specifically existing social fault-lines (such as caste, class and gender), and for some (bleak) extrapolation along those lines.

You can get your copies here, and at bookshops (Midland, if you’re in Delhi).

It’s also worth noting that Earthbound adds to the growing climate fiction literature out of South Asia: see, for example, Varun Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay, Saad Z. Hossain’s Cyber Mage, Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar, and some of the stories in the Gollancz Anthology of South Asian Science Fiction and The IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, Vol. 1. This is now something of a tradition, and I sense that we’re going to see a lot more of such stories in the near future.

Recommendations Corner

This coming Sunday, the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle is reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay. Tchaikovsky is, of course, one of the most famous science fiction writers active today (The Children of Time series), but as with all writers who are prolific, there are parts of his backlist that have fallen off the map a little. One of these books is, for me, his best work: The Doors of Eden. The novel spans multiple timelines where the evolutionary tree branches off and sentient life evolves (its nature and form determined by the epoch it is in), and the story moves in and among these epochs. This beautiful novel also has one of the most beautiful lines I’ve read about the ineffable: “There are shades of qualities your language does not accommodate.”

I spent the second half of the month in Kerala, first at the Kerala Literature Festival, and then at the Kochi Biennale. I am not, in general, a fan of the literature festival “circuit” - for reasons that should be obvious enough - but KLF has always felt different. It feels an entirely organic part of the city, it is very non-manicured, entry is free, and the people seem to genuinely want to be there for the books. It’s an experience I’d recommend to everyone, if you can get yourselves to Calicut in the third week of January. This year, I had a lovely session with Cornelia Funke - whose books were a regular sight in the children’s section of bookshops in my teenage years (this was before “YA” became a thing). We ended up talking a lot about speculative fiction and the non-human world.

It was also my first visit to the Biennale, and I loved it. There’s something about the way in which the Biennale distributes its exhibits across various locations in Fort Kochi - from warehouses to cafes to heritage buildings to metro stations - that makes you feel that this is how art should be accessed: decentralised, varied, and woven into the fabric of the urban landscape you’re in. As with KLF, it felt like a very intentional rebuke to the practice - for too common - of separating literature and art from its environs, and something that really spoke to me. Specifically, the use of warehouses - and the nature of the exhibits in them - reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s focus on the detritus - the broken things - of history, and how good art is often an excavation of that detritus.

The Biennale is on until 31 March, so if you can get yourself to Kochi by then, you absolutely should.

What I’m Reading

Continuing to wind my way through my World Book Fair finds, I read Anarchy’s Brief Summer, a mosaic-style work that tells the story of the Spanish Civil War through the life and death of one its most famous and enigmatic figures, the anarchist commander Buenaventura Durruti, as seen through the eyes of his confidantes, friends, lover, and intellectual and political rivals. Each chapter - which corresponds to a phase of the Civil War - begins with a nostalgic, almost elegiac framing section by the writer, which sets the context, and then proceeds through fragments of essays, letters, speeches, and other historical records authored by the people around Durruti.

It makes for a fascinating approach - not quite a novel, but not quite non-fiction either, and it works brilliantly: you get a sense of the same history that you’ve read before - the initial triumph of the anarchists, the bitter debates around cooperating with the republican government in a popular front against the fascists, the reversals at the front, the resurgence in Barcelona, the final fall, and then the long afterlives - but told almost in the present tense, as its unfolding, and from a variety of perspectives.

The overwhelming feeling I had on reading Anarchy’s Brief Summer was about the astonishing radicalism of the Spanish Revolution, especially compared with the narrowness of political horizons today. Because the book is a mosaic of primary sources, we are given a window into the intellectual debate at the moment of its formation, and of its apogee. And the efforts of the Spanish anarchists to fundamentally reimagine the foundations of the world, beyond the confines of the economic/political structures that seem to be entirely immovable and unshakeable today, was both inspiring - but also deeply saddening, because compared to what they had then, the intellectual life of today seems a wasteland, at best.

Perhaps the task, then - to go back to Benjamin - is indeed one of excavation.

I read Asef Bayat’s Revolution Without Revolutionaries alongside Anarchy’s Brief Summer, and reading the two books together almost gave me whiplash in moments. Revolution without Revolutionaries is a diagnosis of the Arab Spring revolutions of the 2010s (focusing specifically on Egypt), and while Anarchy’s Brief Summer was all about the expansive and liberatory vision of the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, Revolution without Revolutionaries depicts how decades of neoliberalism had effectively made it impossible to even imagine visions of that kind any more.

Bayat coins the clarifying term “refolution” to describe the Arab Spring:

What came to fruition then looked like revolution in terms of mobilization but like reform in terms of change. These revolutions were reformist in the sense that the protagonists who spearheaded masterful mobilization were unable to imagine forms of organizing and governance that departed from those against which they were rebelling; they were unable, unwilling, or uninterested in directing the process of change within state institutions; they conceptually separated the economy from those aspects of the political order that they sought to topple; and they hardly offered any exploration of how state power worked or how to transform it.

The reason for this - he argues - lies in the intellectual and material exhaustion of the great revolutionary impulses of the 1970s - anti-colonial nationalism, Marxism, and Islam - that had been the driving forces behind revolutions in Palestine, Yemen, many parts of Latin America, and (most successfully) in Iran. By the 2010s, however, the grammar and vocabulary of these movements had been replaced by the language of neoliberalism, and emptied of substantive content. This - at least in some part - was responsible for the ultimate “failure” of these “refolutionary” movements.

As someone who came to adulthood watching the Arab Spring in real time, and as someone who has always been fascinated by it in its afterlives, I found the argument persuasive (if depressing!). But the part of the book I found most fascinating was Bayat’s account of the 1979 Iranian revolution (which he was an active participant in, as a left-wing college student). I learned, for the first time, that in the initial months of the revolution, there were strong and deep liberatory impulses, across a range of domains - the rights and freedoms of women, the rights of workers, of students, and participation in directly democratic structures. In fact, in many factories, workers actually took control of the production, and began to self-organise; something similar happened in universities.

Eventually, all of this was brutally stamped out (universities were closed down by the regime for two years, for example) and then snuffed out with the advent of the decade-long Iraq-Iran war. But Bayat’s book gives a fascinating - and elegiac - window into what the revolution might have become (and therefore, perhaps, what someday it could still become, even though - to come back to a line from Anarchy’s Brief Summer - “you can’t have the same revolution twice.”)

Yet another World Book Fair find: I bought this out of my interest in Gramsci, and because I like novels that shift between eras. I was disappointed. Insofar as the book is set in 1930s Italy, and tells us of Gramsci’s last years, it’s a gripping read; but when, every chapter, it shifts to the present day, tracing a rather insipid German professor’s quest to recover a “lost” Gramsci manuscript while navigating the wreckage of an unsuccessful marriage, it was tedious in the extreme.

I must say, that although I have a very small sample size, I don’t know what it is with Germans and terrible writing about sex and romantic relationships. I loved Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days, but Kairos - my god! - 287 pages about a tedious relationship between a 19-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man (why!). And here too. If you’re a Gramsci obsessive, get this book, but otherwise give it a miss, honestly.

If you’d give me a gap year with no responsibilities, money to go with it, and tell me that I could use it to study anything I want, I’d enrol in a classics programme. Throughout my life, I’ve had tantalising access to flavours from this bouquet: in college I read English translations of the Greek plays; in various cities in the world I’ve gotten to watch performances (including one in ancient Greek) of some of the more famous representatives of the canon, such as Antigone; I spent a year while at Oxford auditing various courses on Greek and Roman literature; I’ve come at them obliquely through other writers (such as Ismail Kadare), and so on. I’ve just never been able to study the classics systematically.

Much like my previous forays, I came to Nicole Loraux’s The Mourning Voice without planning: I came across the book through Alberto Toscano, whom people probably know better as a scholar of fascism. But as always, I loved what I did find. In The Mourning Voice, Loraux essentially argues that - contrary to the prevailing views at the time that she wrote - tragedy in classical Athens performed what she calls an “anti-political” function: that is, it was a vehicle to express sentiments, emotions, and ideas that were contrary to the dominant ideology of the city-state, and which could not be expressed in political life. Loraux demonstrates this in a fascinating way: by focusing closely on a unique feature of Greek theatre, the chorus, on the lyrical nature of the plays (as opposed to the content of what is being said), and on the non-verbal as opposed to the verbal. She argues that without paying close attention to these essential features of Greek tragedy, you cannot fully understand what it is doing, who it is speaking to, and what it is speaking for.

In the process, Loraux reads afresh - and reads against the grain - some of the classics that I thought I knew somewhat well - Antigone, Elektra, Trojan Women etc - and completely reorients our understanding of these plays, and the context in which they were performed. The close reading is an absolute delight to follow (even though the sheer granular detail sometimes makes it hard), and in the process you understand not only the plays themselves, but also the world in which they were performed.

The book reminded me of two of my favourite works: Adam Parry’s essay, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” which argues that The Aeneid has both a “public” voice - the familiar celebration of Rome’s greatness - but also, in an undercurrent, a private voice, which is more uncertain, more elegiac, and questions some of the normative frames that the public voice celebrates. And the second is Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, which shows how Bedouin women use poetry to express the subversive and anti-patriarchal sentiments that they cannot express in more regular, “prose” conversation in the public sphere. As with those two books, The Mourning Voice brings to us the unique joy of immersing ourselves in the delightful open-textured character of literature, and the beauty of discovering all that literature can do and be, in creating, shaping, and nurturing an expansive life.

This has been a fortnight of heavy books, but this had to be the heaviest: a short history of 20th century Nigeria, from the colonial era to the present-day, covering eras that I knew something about previously (such as the Biafran War, which I’d read about in Achebe’s work), but also those which I had only a vague sense of (the murder of Ken Saro-Wiva and the brutalities of the Shell Oil Company in the Niger River Delta). There are things you know about the corporation-state nexus in the abstract, but reading about the details, stripped of everything, recounted in a detached, almost objective tone - the burned villages, the torture and the mass murder, the wholesale destruction of lives - that hits very differently. I wish I could say that there was a sliver of redemption or hope that came through in this book, but there isn’t - and that, I suppose, is life without illusions.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

In the fourth week of January, Strange Horizons publishes a special issue dedicated to criticism in SF (the only SF magazine to do so). Personally, it’s one of my favourite issues of the year, and here is the 2026 version, with some gems.

The Indian Scene

Submissions call: Submissions remain open for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian Speculative Fiction, throughout February. The last date is March 1, so you have this month to submit. Submit here.

Submissions are also open this month for a special issue of Tassavur Magazine, edited by Abhijeet Sathe. Submit here.

Recommendations Corner

On the subject of the classics, one of the favourite enterprises of fantasy writers has been to “retell” the classics. And ten years before Circe, there was Lavinia, which remains my favourite of such attempts. When it comes to subverting dominant normative frames, and doing so in the most subtle - yet more uncompromising - of ways, there is nobody like Ursula Le Guin, and Lavinia feels like The Aeneid’s private voice being brought to life. It’s not amongst Le Guin’s better-known works, so if you haven’t yet come across it - what better time than now!

This past week, the World Book Fair has been on in New Delhi. Visiting the World Book Fair has been an annual ritual for almost three decades (at least, the years I’ve been in Delhi). As a child, my parents would take me there (if memory serves me right, in the 1990s it happened once every two years; now, it’s annual). Back then, the Scholastic and Bloomsbury stalls were the main attractions for an eight-year-old. In 2000, I recall getting a hardback of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (childhood indiscretions, I judge myself for it now) before it was available in Indian bookshops. The World Book Fair was one of the most magical places in my little child’s world. Lunch at an outdoor food stall in between hall-hopping didn’t hurt the mystique either.

Decades have passed. Books are now much more easily available, whether through ordering via your local bookshop or - where that’s not possible - online. Meanwile, some of the buildings that housed the Book Fair at Pragati Maidan have been torn down. The Book Fair itself has shrunk. Its character has changed. It has become a lot more “governmentalised,” if that’s a word. With that, for many people, the magic has gone. To an extent, that’s true; and yet, something remains. My go-to places have changed from Scholastic and Bloomsbury to Aakar Books and Speaking Tiger (among others). Still there are things you chance upon at the World Book Fair that you simply won’t elsewhere. I always come back home with my fingers aching from holding multiple bags from multiple stalls. And, come what may, there will always be a sprinkling of magic dust in a huge hall with books in all directions, and people among the books.

This year, as always, I came back with a stash - which I will go through in the coming weeks, and talk about it here.

On another note, happy 24th Birthday to Blossoms Bookshop. Its massive second-hand collection made it the most important place in my life between the ages of 17-22, when I was reading for my undergraduate degree in Bangalore. So if you’re reading this, and you’re Bangalorean, drop by and support one of its most venerable institutions.

What I’m Reading

Anyone who has followed this newsletter for a while knows that I am fascinated by the life and work of Victor Serge. Ever since I read the stunning Unforgiving Years many decades ago, I have tried to read everything I can by - and about - him (a project facilitated by NYRB republishing a lot of his novels). As an artist, as an anarchist, and as a person, my view of him is - I think - a view shared by many others: deep respect, tinged with admiration, primarily for a man with moral integrity, who refused to compromise on it, and who paid a staggering price for his refusal.

I came across Unruly Revolutionary through a Boston Review interview with the author, Mitchell Abidor. As the title - Turncoat Radical - suggested, the interview promised to upend this widely held view about Serge. After reading it, I came across the book itself at the World Book Fair. I bought it with some trepidation: I was expecting revelations that would create the kind of jarring dissonance I felt when I read Patti Smith casually talking about playing a “harmony” concert in Tel Aviv in the 1990s. Never meet your heroes - and never find out too much about them either.

This impression is fortified when you read the book’s introduction, where Abidor is almost apologetic about what follows. And yet, the book itself is not quite near the character deconstruction that the interview suggests. To start with, let me note that it is an excellent biography: rigorous, detailed, excellently written, and - as biographies of such figures should do - crystallises the era in the person, and the person in the era.

Now, as for Serge himself: the book does not so much deconstruct him as much as it humanises him. Abidor does an excellent work of setting the context through which a lot of Serge’s writing and actions - which might otherwise seem inconsistent - make sense. What emerges is - in anarchism’s classic formulation - “neither a god nor a master,” but a human being with all his human flaws - flaws that are accentuated and amplified because of the nature of the times in which Serge lived. Thus, we do not excuse - for example - his support of the bloody suppression by the Soviet Union of the Kronstadt Rebellion, but we can understand it - an understanding that is informed by his subsequent and public change of a view, a change that he paid a high price for.

The most serious charge that Abidor claims to lay against Serge is that towards the end of his life, he became not just anti-Stalinist but anti-communist, to the point where - akin to George Orwell - he was involved in making lists and reflexively supporting the US. Unlike Orwell, however, Serge died in 1947 (an early death, hastened by privation and exile). At the time he died, institutional and governmental communism was Stalinism: other variants had been stamped out. From the vantage point of 2025, we can distinguish the two, but in 1945, that would have been a much more difficult task. At the time, even McCarthyism had not yet entered the picture. One thing about Serge that this book brings out very clearly is his ability to change his mind as the reality around him changed. With that quality, there is no reason to believe that, confronted with reality of the Cold War, and of the militant decolonisation movements that swept the world in the 1950s and 1960s, Serge would not have changed his mind again - I rather believe he would have.

We will never know, but perhaps Abidor here is a victim of his own success: the portrait he paints of Serge is so nuanced and - despite everything - sympathetic, that both at his best and at his worst, he is a figure that we can continue to admire as quintessentially human, and bearing the best of human courage as well as (on occasion) the worst of human short-sightedness - but never human evil.

For that alone, and for everything else, this is a book worth reading.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Take a look at the Feminist Futurisms round-table - from last year’s WorldCon - featuring some known and familiar names.

The Indian Scene

Submissions for Volume 2 of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF are still open. Submit your story here.

Recommendations Corner

Last Sunday, for the Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, we had a lot of fun talking about Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Apart from the utterly chaotic nature of that book, as I (re-)read it, I thought to myself that it really was a fantasy novel trapped in the science fiction form. And that made me remember Zelazny’s actual (serialised) high fantasy novel, The Chronicles of Amber, which hasn’t quite enjoyed the kind of resurgence some other books from that era have had. This is a pity, because reading that book was sheer joy, the kind of joy that high fantasy should give you. I still recall the grandeur of the opening scene, where characters are introduced like the dramatis personae of a Shakespearean drama, the scenes of dream-travel, which are Zelazny at his best, and which Jordan would use to great effect in Wheel of Time a few years later, and the twin themes of war-and-quest that Zelazny completely nails. I will need to re-read the book to see how well it holds up (I was a teenager when I first read it), but if you’re someone who hasn’t yet read it, I wish you the joy of first discovery.

Earlier this week, I did an interview with The Hindustan Times’ Manjula Narayan, for her Authors and Books Podcast, focusing primarily on the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, the process of putting it together, the nature of the stories that we look for, and the state of contemporary Indian SFF in general. You can watch it here (or listen to it on your preferred podcast platform). And remember, submissions for Volume 2 of the anthology remain open until March 1 (submit here).

This Saturday, I’ll be in conversation with Bora Chung about magical realism and speculative fiction in East and South Asia. It’s not a crossover I’d have predicted, but one that I am quite excited about. The conversation is online - 5PM IST - and you can sign up by scanning the QR code in the poster here.

Writing update: I did finally finish the edits to THE FIFTH INFLECTION, and sent them to Sareena Kamath, my editor at Saga Press. The novel’s now gone into production, and it’s all hands on deck again, back to working the sequel.

Finally, a small landmark: over the new year, this newsletter crossed 3,000 subscribers. I’m very grateful to all of you who take the time out to read, and hopefully, from time to time, this newsletter has helped you discover books that you’ve loved!

What I’m Reading

I ended 2025 with Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side of the Story. After my mid-year journey through Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, this was my second tragic bildungsroman novel set in mid-20th century Italy, focusing intensely on women’s lives, their rich interiority, their friendships, and confrontations with patriarchy in the context of a violently changing world. Both Lies and Sorcery and Her Side of the Story presage themes that you can later find in Elena Ferrante, and it’s of little surprise that Ferrante herself acknowledges her debt to these two writers.

In fact, some of the early parts of Her Side of the Story - set in a tenement complex in Rome - reminded me of the brilliant HBO TV adaptation of Ferrante, in how it communicated the suffocating atmosphere in these tenements, and of the patriarchal violence that lurks just underneath the facade of forced marital and familial civility:

In the apartment above ours, the one next to it, the modern white buildings rising up beside ours – in all the buildings in Rome, all the buildings in the world, I saw women awake in the dark, behind the unscalable walls of men’s shoulders.

Early on in the novel, the protagonist’s mother - caught between an unhappy marriage she cannot escape from, and a love affair that she cannot escape into, dies by suicide; this event shapes the protagonist’s own life, her relationship with her father, and the emptiness of her own marriage. Meanwhile, Italy has entered World War II, the protagonist’s husband is a part of the resistance and is imprisoned, driving her to join the resistance as well - in the hope that through militant action, she will come to understand her husband better.

Her Side of the Story is a novel of permanent deferral: the novel’s women protagonists confront and struggle against patriarchy and violence in the hope that the barrier immediately before them (whether a loveless marriage or fascism) is the last barrier that they have to overcome before they can find something resembling happiness. But that happiness appears to be permanently deferred, always beyond the next barrier, and the next, and the next.

At times, this results in what appears to be a frustrating lack of agency on part of the characters (for example, the protagonist’s natural curiosity, love for reading, and ability to put herself in danger are at odds with the passivity with which she approaches decisions that have to do with her marriage, including her decision to join the resistance) - but perhaps that is the entire point:

In other words, you had to accept that you couldn’t be a hero or play a leading role. And I would have to accept my marriage, the loneliness it brought with it, its decline, the end of the romantic plan through which we had invented ourselves.

At the same time, however, I did not read Her Side of the Story as a novel about defeatism - far from it. Throughout the story, there are cracks in the edifice that let the light in - even though the form of that light is as much wont to illuminate as it is to blind.

It is fascinating to read Lies and Sorcery, Her Side of the Story, and The Neapolitan Quartet together. Between them, these books chronologically cover most of 20th-century Italy, and thinking of them together lets you see both the incremental, crawlingly slow progress in women’s agency through the course of the century, but also - and at the same time - the constraints, traps, and nightmares that persist generation upon generation. In each of these books you find the violent clash between the richness and complexity of these women’s interior landscape, and the structures of a world that have been designed to snuff it out - with varying outcomes.

It is probably the spectacular success of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet that has brought Morante and Cespedes’ work back into the public eye, and into the consciousness of readers (like me) who’d otherwise have been unlikely to come across them. For that - as for so much else - we have a lot to thank Elena Ferrante for.

Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read is, on first glance, a disparate collection of critical work: reviews, essays, and reflections on writing. Taken by themselves, the individual pieces are deeply enjoyable: the style is reminiscent of some of the fragmentary, episodic writings of Eduardo Galeano, there is a dry, biting, and sometimes caustic - but never ungenerous - wit, and you get to learn about an entire set of Latin American writers that the “Boom” does not normally consider. Zambra has no time for literary canons, and that is something that makes this book unique.

More than that, however, as you read, certain themes emerge. Zambra is deeply skeptical of literary establishments, and of literature as a profession. Manuel Puig, he writes, has created “a literature outside of literature, of an oeuvre that is simultaneously legible and inscrutable, one that calls the nature of the literary into question.” In one of the most memorable essays in the collection - on Pedro Lembel - he writes: “his work was forged in the night, in the barrio, in life and not in literature.” There are traces here of Joseph Andras. Still later, he writes: “Ribeyro writes to live, not to demonstrate that he has lived.” And perhaps, towards the end, the kicker:

Books say no to literature. Some. Others, the majority, say yes. They obey the market or the holy spirit of governments. Or the placid idea of a generation. Or the even more placid idea of a tradition. I prefer books that say no. Sometimes, even, I prefer the books that don’t know what they are saying.

Reading this, you get the sense that for Zambra, the phrase “full-time writer” would be a contradiction in terms: you cannot write without the stuff of life, and that comes from living.

The mirror of this is another theme that shines through the essays: for all his humour and wit, Zambra takes writing - and the practice of writing - very seriously. Early on, he writes of a compatriot: “I want us to have writers like him again: forthright, committed, beautiful, forever young, cultured, generous, loud-mouthed.” The word choice - especially the words that I have italicised - seems significant. Again, on Pedro Lembel, he notes that Lembel “reminds us that literature is not offensive, that it’s not mere decoration, that it does something to society. To give him the [Nobel] prize would be to honour that. It would be, I think, a collective prize.”

This is not a call, of course, for didacticism; Zambra is, again, careful with his words, and “does something to society” is not prescriptive about what that “something” should be. But that is not to say, either, that this is an amoral practice. Zambra’s “philosophy” of writing - or perhaps it would be better to say that the meaning he seeks in and through writing - is - echoing Vaclav Havel - to:

… find oneself with the weight of words, to reconquer their necessity, search incessantly, even when they – the words – have become ever more transitory, more perishable, more erasable than ever.

So you can read this book at multiple levels: as an insight into the craft of reviewing and of criticism; as a guide to a collection of Latin American writers that you might not instantly find displayed in a bookshop; but above all else, I think, a reflection on how even within “th[is] pile of debris … [that] grows skyward,” writing remains necessary.

What’s Happening at Strange Horizons

Check out the latest edition of the Critical Friends podcast, on cozy horror.

The Indian Scene

Run Along the Shelves has a very nice review of the IF Anthology of New Indian SFF, picking out some of the stories they particularly liked (here; and to get the anthology, here).

Recommendations Corner

Ahead of my weekend panel, I read Red Sword, which is perhaps the most science fiction-y of Bora Chung’s work (the others are horror/magical realism-adjacent collections, I’d say). Red Sword is a very spare, very minimalistic novel about a group of conscript-soldiers caught between the nameless Empire that enlists them and the existing colonisers of the planet that they are meant to snatch back for the Empire. It’s a straightforward enough story until a few twists at the very end; and the blurb says that it is meant to be an allegory of the 16th-18th century wars between the Russian Empire and Qing Dynasty China, in which the latter used conscripted Korean soldiers.

In an interesting review in Locus, Niall Harrison finds the spareness of the novel its most attractive characteristic, with the allegorical theme a bit of a distraction. I had a bit of an opposite reaction; like Harrison, I do not know enough of the history to tell if this really is an allegory or not, but for me the story truly came alive at the end, when a smidgen of narrative depth was added to the schematic conflict that had been depicted thus far. Read it and make up your minds for yourselves!

A quick note to say the submissions for Volume 2 of the Between Worlds Anthology of New Indian SFF are open, and the deadline is March 1, 2026. For guidelines, and the submission link, see here.

Writing update: I’m finishing the year with wrapping up my edits for the US edition of The Sentence (now titled The Fifth Inflection). Publication is still a year or so away, but I should have more details on that in the coming months. It has been a bit of a surreal year: in January, after around five years of querying, I found a literary agent; in April, we “went on sub”; at the end of May, there was an offer from Saga Press; in October, the novel won the Ignyte Award; and one year on, I’m finishing edits and working on the sequel to the The Sentence/The Fifth Inflection, with some more stuff in the pipeline for 2026. I write about some part of that writing/publishing journey - which culminated in 2025 - in a previous issue of the newsletter, here.

Now for the annual round-up of the books that I read this year. Some of these I’ve reviewed separately on my blog, and I’ve linked to those reviews below; shorter reviews of all these books can be found in previous issues of this newsletter.

I began 2025 with two books at the intersection of poetry, history, politics, and revolution. Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism told the story of how Persian poetry constituted a glue that bound together a number of decolonisation projects in the mid-20th Century, in central and South Asia. From Iran to India to the USSR to the central Asian republics, Persian poetry provided a cultural vocabulary and a grammar that diverse peoples could use to talk to each other - a grammar that was eclipsed as the USSR eventually turned it into a top-down, State-led project. Eric Calderwood’s On Earth or in Poems: the Many Lives of al-Andalus movingly chronicled how, centuries after the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, al-Andalus has lived on in history, memory, legend, and as an anchor for radical political projects, including in Palestine. Al-Andalus has fascinated me ever since I came across it as a teenager in a fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, and I loved reading this book. In summer, I would re-read the book wandering through Andalusia, in the squares of Granada, in a tea-house in Cordoba, and by the corniche in Cadiz.

In July, I read Michael Craig Hillman’s part-biography, part-literary analysis in A Lonely Woman: Forough Forroukhzad and her Poetry. I had previously read Forroukhzad’s poems in a scattered way, but this book did a wonderful job not only of setting them in context, but also in illuminating Forroukhzad’s own poetic and personal development through these poems, in the context of mid-20th century Iran under the rule of the Shah. The book is a window into what rebellion through poetry might mean in a society where other modes of rebellion are closed off, and it forever altered my reading of the beautiful - and unsettling - Conquest of the Garden.

On a similar theme, the month after, I read Whitney Chadwick’s The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism, my annual find at Budapest’s matchless National Gallery Bookshop. This book chronicles the intense relationships between women surrealist artists in the mid-20th century, who confronted both the travails of World War II as well as the patriarchal art world. I discovered new things about the lives and loves of artists like Frida Kahlo, and I discovered new artists entirely, such as Claude Cahun (“True poetry, the kind that keeps its secret … is like the paving stone … that can be used by the revolutionaries rather than the police.”) The fictional complement to this book was Lucy Steeds’ The Artist, which is one of the best novels I read this year: the story of a young woman in early-20th-century Provence, who dreams of being an impressionist artist, and struggles against the strictures imposed by her reclusive uncle, whom she lives with, and who actually is a famous artist. Rarely have I come across a novel with as narratively perfect an ending as this one.

On the topic of art and the novel, and hopping from France to Italy: the dazzlingly unpredictable Laurent Binet’s latest novel, Perspectives, is set in renaissance Italy with Michelangelo as a character, and is a historical-detective novel that moves through the world of renaissance art. Binet is as virtuoso as ever as a novelist, with shades of The Name of the Rose in this novel (long-time Binet readers will be unsurprised, given that Umberto Eco himself is a character in The Seventh Function of Language). I was told by someone with impeccable taste that they found the ending a let-down; I’m not so sure!

Still on the same theme, and back to non-fiction, in February, at the World Book Fair in Delhi, I chanced upon Jacopo Galimberti’s Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Visual Arts - a dense, complex, and ultimately rewarding book about how the the post-war, militant left-wing political movements in Italy gave rise to an entire genre of art, from the visual to the aural to the architectural, and how these artists struggled to craft a vision of what it means to be - and to make - radical art within the constraints of a capitalist world. Set in the same era, Luigi Pintor’s Memories from the Twentieth Century: A Kind of Trilogy is a set of political montages and reflections of radical movements and their limits. These books fortified my view that Italy from the end of the War to the conclusion of the Years of Lead is one of the most fascinating places to read about, if you’re interested in radical politics and art.

Ah, the Italians! More than a decade ago, I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, and it changed my life. It turns out that Ferrante was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Italian women writers writing the most intense, the most visceral, and most unforgiving bildungsroman novels about womanhood, revolt, and patriarchal and political tyranny. In summer, I read Elsa Morante’s 800-page, three-generations-spanning Lies and Sorcery, which left me raw. Barely had the wounds closed when I decided to finish the year with Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side of the Story, set in the years before and during World War II, with the protagonist a blend of a Ferrante and a Morante character, whose travails in the resistance and in a love-starved marriage leave you with alternating feelings of rage and helplessness, until a late sting in the tail leaves you not knowing what to think at all; I’m still navigating my feelings about this book.

My one day in Barcelona in summer, half of which was spent in an anarchist walking tour, finally drove me to start reading the Spanish Civil War and Spanish anarchist history books that I have long been procrastinating on. Danny Evans’ Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating account of the anarchist perspective in the revolution, of the anarchist movement’s valiant - and ultimately doomed - attempts to avoid co-option in the effort of republican State reconstruction that was ongoing even as Franco’s fascists were at the gates of Barcelona. This is a detailed and granular history. Meanwhile, Mark Bray’s The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France takes the longer view, starting with the “propaganda of the deed” that began in the late-19th century, and going on to discuss the anarchist movements in the early 20th century, culminating with Barcelona’s “tragic week” in 1909. The book starts with an immortal line about terrorism and human rights being the two fractious siblings born out of the 20th century, and only gets better from there. In between these two I read Serge Pay’s little gem, Treasures of the Spanish Civil War, a set of interconnected reflections and anecdotes about the revolution, the war, and the aftermath, set in spare and haunting prose.

Still on the theme of anarchism, but moving away from Spain, Kavitha Rao’s Spies, Lies, and Allies: the Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy is a fantastic account of a certain moment in Indian revolutionary history, and which really should be a lot better known, and read by a lot more Indians, than it currently is. I also discovered at the book fair Ngo Van’s In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, which tells the little-known story of the radical Vietnamese revolutionaries who were persecuted both by the colonial powers and by Ho Chi Minh’s party, because of their anarchist views - a necessary corrective to the otherwise brilliant (and seductive) works such as Joseph Andras’ Faraway the Southern Sky, which I had read last year. It once again convinced me that the revolutionary movements of early and mid-20th century east and south-east Asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia) are some of the most fascinating to have ever been - and their almost total erasure a tragedy. On the subject of Vietnam, I read Salar Mohendesi’s brilliant Red Internationalism, which chronicles the rise of the anti-war Vietnam movement, the global solidarities that it created, and how - ultimately and ironically - the victory of the Vietnam led to its fracture and ultimate co-optation of the language of anti-imperialism by the language of human rights, actively promoted by the United States as a legitimation strategy. After reading this book, you’ll never quite be able to look at the concept of human rights the same way.

Another revolutionary movement that has long fascinated me has been the Ethiopian students’ movement that overthrew emperor Haile Selassie - but was then co-opted and ultimately destroyed by the military regime of the Derg. This summer, I read two excellent book about that history. Baalu Girma’s Oromay - only recently translated - is a haunting novel about the political repression that followed after the victory of the Derg. Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 interrogates the radicalism of the students’ movement - and its long legacy, for good and for ill, that still informs contemporary Ethiopia. This is one of the best books of critical non-fiction that I read this year.

Patti Smith is a writer I’ve always wanted to read more of, ever since I read her beautiful eulogy for Sam Shepard; this year I finally did so, reading her memoirs Just Kids (about her life as a young artist and musician in the New York of the 1960s and her love story with Robert Mapplethorpe) and Bread of Angels (about her childhood, her life with her husband Fred Smith, and her rebuilding of her music career after Smith’s death). I found Bread of Angels - especially the bits about domestic life - a little patchy, but Just Kids - whew! Patti Smith has an ear for the rhythm and the music of words - and for the movement of the sentence - that is simply extraordinary.

As always, I read a lot of science fiction this year, with mixed results. Alastair Reynolds’ Century Rain - doubling up as an alt-world SF novel and a love letter to Paris - was my stand-out read, the best Reynolds I’ve read (and that’s saying something, as he’s my favourite SF writer active today). I was not overly impressed by the Clarke Award shortlist, with Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time perhaps being my favourite in the shortlist. I bookended my year with two two Adrian Tchaikovsky novels - Alien Clay and Bee Keeper - that had all kinds of weird and unsettling biological speculation, in the classic Tchaikovsky mold. And one of my favourite genre reads was a book that’s not been published yet, but is forthcoming in 2026: I was asked to write a blurb for Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, a book that brings together two of my favourite themes that I never thought I’d see crossed over: a generation spaceship, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution! Watch out for this one when it’s released in the Fall.

Among the unclassifiable books that I read this year: Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice, a novel about an Arab student’s time in the Soviet Union in that most consequential of all years, 1973; Venus Ghata-Khoury’s The Last Days of Mandelstam and Dominique Noguez’s The Three Rimbauds: one imagines Osip Mandelstam’s final days, and the other imagines a world in which Rimbaud did not die, but became a member of the French literary establishment; Julie Lekstrom Hime’s Mikhail and Margarita which, sticking to the Soviet theme, (fictionally) reconstructs Bulgakov writing his novel in the climate of censorship and disappearances (Mandelstam plays a part here too); Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers, a novel about how an Algiers bookshop played a part in the war for Independence, before falling into disuse, disrepair and - ultimately - destruction; Dubravka Ugresic’s A Muzzle for Witches, an absolutely wonderful memoir - written towards the end of her life - of the relationship between nationalism, literature, and women’s writing; on a similar theme, and also a last memoir, Eduardo Galeano’s The Hunter of Stories; Alejandro Zambra’s delicious, ironic, and bitingly witty collection of essays on literary criticism and the Latin American novel, Not to Read (come for the Neruda barbs, stay for discovering writers you didn’t know you needed to read); Julio Llamazares’ The Yellow Rain, a Pedro Paramo-esque novel where an atmosphere of loneliness and death creeps up on you so quietly that you don’t even notice it until the moment that it thoroughly disorients you; Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (probably the most famous novel in this list!) which I really don’t have much to say about that hasn’t been said already, other than that I loved it; and finally, one of my favourite novels of the year, John Williams’ Stoner, which has the finest and most moving treatment of death that I’ve ever read in fiction.

These are not all the novels I read this year, but they form a significant portion of them. Reviews of the ones I read most recently will be forthcoming in the first January 2026 issue of the newsletter. I hope that some of these books pique your interest, and that you find them to be the compelling and magical companions that I did this year.

To the writers who read this newsletter, I wish you a 2026 where words are kind to you; and to the readers, I hope 2026 brings you many more books that - as Kafka said - can be “an axe for the frozen sea” within us.

Thank you for reading, and see you in 2026.