This is on till the end of the month: The World SF 3 Bundle, curated by Lavie Tidhar, featuring SF/fantasy writers from around the world (Including several amazing writers I've read and loved, and one nos. The Simoqin Prophecies). Go get your copies quick!
Updates:
A very kind review from Sonal Shah in India Today magazine
And a very generous review in BLink. (paywalled)
Do read this Chosen Spirits/writing interview in the Khaleej Times (thanks Anamika Chatterjee ) which apart from being much fun to do also led to a reconnection with my favourite English teacher in school, who now lives in Dubai.
Much joy was also brought by this essay in the LSE Review of Books, Dr. Atreyee Majumdar writing about Chosen Spirits and Megha Majumdar’s A Burning as books that are warnings and studies of the times we live in.
Also, this 2008 kids anthology is out with a new cover from Scholastic
The last few days have been Zoom-heavy:
I really think it’s amazing that you can study creative writing in college in India now - I’d have made a beeline for this if I’d been a Tiny Youth in 2020 (though I’m very glad I’m not). I wonder how many of these faces will be gazing soulfully-stylishly at us from blackandwhite authorphotos in six or seven years.
Also this:
And there’s another one coming up with Bound in a couple of days, though I’m not sure if it’s live because I am so very, very organised.
I am very tempted to start regular livestreams where I chat with writers and/or film people but resisting this impulse valiantly. Though I might do the whole creative writing course thing again, in some medium or other. Resisting that impulse valiantly too.
Brainpieces
I find that the two parts of my brain - the part that makes me buy books I know I want to read and subscribe to streaming services and news sites that I know are good, and the part that makes me watch random shit on Twitter and other social media (as in there’s a treasure-trove of good-to-great material there every day and no reason to leave, but I seem to spend 80pc of my time just going through random opinions that are worth exactly the 0 rupees I pay to see them) - seem to be acting wholly independently of each other.
This really has to stop, or at least be reduced as much as possible. I stopped hate-watching and rage-watching things a few years ago, because I managed to remind myself that there was never enough time to see and read things that had a far better chance of being great, so there definitely was no time for this whole shared experience of groaning about a thing known to be awful that several friends of mine do all the time, which has now been exponentially fomo-plussed by social media. Like I watched so many of you get suckered into watching first that people-fail-at-not-having-sex reality show, though the arranged-marriage show is that much bigger, clearly, because it’s also something you can have Socially Relevant Opinions about. Enjoy! I’m not going to watch it until I have managed to get back to serious novelwork and have something to procrastinate/escape from. Or at the very least I’m going to try very hard to not succumb and start watching it, though I can see so many friends are just addicted.
It’s less of a problem with books because there’s less pressure to be seen in public experiencing the same thing in real time, like watching shows as soon as they appear is really the new world cup of whatever sport. That said, my TBR continues to be out of control because really amazing writers keep releasing new work, and while being aware of them is fantastic, having a New Shiny Novel appear every time I’m attempting to catch up on years of backlog can be a little frustrating as well.
A great time to provide additional distraction with a few links.
An Avengers moment: Gary Larson has come out of retirement and is enjoying making more Far Side things on digital media. 95? He retired in 95? Isn’t that the same year Bill Watterson also retired? What happened in 95?
A tour through the history of Black science ficion.
Obviously there was a Bengali involved in the French revolution.
A new M. John Harrison story in Granta
The hearththrob Qatari prince at USC
Listen/see
Mahershala Ali, Idris Elba and Oscar Isaac, Nicole Kidman, Zoë Kravitz, Lucy Liu, Cillian Murphy, and Keanu Reeves want to read you bedtime stories.
Postcards from 1900 that imagine the year 2000
Michaela Coel’s new show, I May Destroy You
Other people watching: The police are using drones in the US to make sure people aren’t nude.
Soon, more people will be pretending to have read and loved A Suitable Boy than ever before, when Mira Nair’s TV show about it launches. I think it might be really good! Mira Nair is Mira Nair. But it’ll be very hard for people who read the book in the 90s to find any human to match their idea of Lata (and, eventually, the Chatterjees) so I’m expecting a lot of disappointment as well. I don’t think too many of the novels from the great Indo-Anglian litfic boom of the 90s could make good shows or films - not enough story once you remove the heavy wordplay - but Suitable Boy certainly has enough material for three or four packed seasons.
I saw Palm Springs, which is nice, but maybe I’d heard too many good things about it. My favourite timeloop movies are still Groundhog Day and Tom Cruise Groundhog Day Edge of Tomorrow, but this is probably a top 5? Palm Springs does bring new things to it, and finds interesting solutions, and is very sharp, so I’m not sure what my problem is. Maybe I’m stuck in a timeloop.
Scroll has started a Reporting Fund, please contribute if you can:
Here is a bin heckling ducks that I enjoyed
Back in a bit
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Okay, also this Twitter thread that might be nothing, but might be the real-world origin-or-at-least-major-influence of the LOTR books