Abhijeet Makes Things

Tag: fiction

  • The Saint of Imagined Communities

    The Saint of Bright Doors is a phenomenal book I read long enough ago to have forgotten most of the detail. What remains is a semi-digested slurry of images and emotions, and I can highly recommend them. If you haven’t read it, please know that the rest of this post will be more or less incomprehensible.

    When I ask casual readers, that is to say, readers who aren’t read to learn to write, about their opinion of this book, the reviews are largely positive. The main complaint I hear from them is that the adventures that Fetter, our protagonist, wanders into seem arbitrary and pointless.

    To me this complaint is, plainly speaking, accurate. The book is heavy on the vibes and prose, and all the adventures Fetter goes on seem episodic to the point of incoherence. Now let me tell you why that’s a good thing. (I’m sure there is an official reason for this choice by Vajra, but Barthes told me he’s dead now so I can’t ask him and am forced to guess.)

    Vajra is trying to build up this city/nation of Luriat through what I recently learned is called a tour d’horizon, a journey to the bounds of the known world. This would be a banal exercise in taxonomy, except I picked up that term in an unexpected source.

    For reasons unknown to gxd and mxn, I subjected myself to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities late last year. Though there is a sustained critique of Anderson by post-colonial scholars, I found his claim that nations were imagined into being through print capitalism fairly interesting. (It’s possible that’s not the claim and I’m misreading it. If so, sorry. I’m an engineer. Leave me alone.)

    In focusing on print capitalism as a form of nation-creation, Anderson briefly cites scholarship on El Periquillo Sarniento, a picaresque critique of Spanish colonialism in Mexcio to note that the hero’s journey through the hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries of Mexico “conjure up a social space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of this colony.”

    If you have read The Saint of Bright Doors, this list of places above seems almost too neat. At some point in the book, Fetter stops by almost all of these settings, highlighting how they contribute to the oppression of the common public. I think this is intentional through conscious choice or revelatory through happy coincience. I think Saint is a tour d’horizon for a made-up world that is also Sri Lanka, written to induce in the reader a familiarity with the city/nation of Luriat in which you can see reflected the nation/state of Sri Lanka and its struggles with power.

    Overall, I would say this is the kind of risk I don’t take in my own writing. This could easily been an excruciating slog leading from, through, and to nothing, but the prose and the density of commentary in each location end up carrying the book / 10

  • Giant Chips, Giant Shoulders

    I’ve been reading more short fiction to try and understand where the market is today. When people hear this, many tell me this is a Bad Thing for writers to do. From seasoned pros to random relatives to people in my writing group, there seems to be no dearth of people who believe creative work should appear ex nihilo from the genius artist’s brow. I don’t think I can agree with this.

    To me, writing feels like a conversation with past works. Everything I write is the meeting minutes of my own imagined salon starring Pratchett, Roy, Erikson, and so on. Newer writers (Jemisin, Ha, Chiang) also chip in, usually with more interesting and current suggestions. I don’t think I can write if I don’t read.

    Maybe it’s a Me Problem. I’m an engineer who grew up in the STEM-lord hegemony of post-90s India. I always feel behind on reading compared to my peers. I’m hesitant to even call them my peers. In one sense, I’m ahead of them in that my intuitions on physics and causal inference are stronger than many active writers. In a much more important sense, I’m far behind them; my impoverished intracranial salon is significantly more parochial than someone who grew up reading The Canon or someone who works in Real Science (TM)(C)(R) and can summon cutting edge speculation at the drop of a pipette.

    It’s also possible that those complaining about my reading approach are pointing to a different problem: they’re worried I’ll get stuck trend-chasing. People who believe this are unaware of how much work it would be for me to actually accomplish this. I don’t have the skills or fortitude needed to (a) identify a market trend (b) translate that into a story outline and, (c)rucially, actually write a story that I’m not interested in on its own merits.

    “Understanding the market” is just me trying to understand what I’m stepping into, so I know what I’m in conversation with. Imagine I sat down to write a story set in the impact of LLMs on creativity without knowing that Thomas Ha already wrote a great story about that (The Mub.) Whatever I could come up with might be an interesting story, but it would also be a shallower one.

    There’s a perverse similarity between the people telling me to avoid marketomancy, and the people who (incorrectly) defend LLMs as extensions of this behavior. Though the former would vehemently deny this connection, both approaches treat writing as a coin-operated machine: insert ideas here, just add terajoules. This is also, ironically, STEM-lord logic. The mental model of writing as a conversation is much more interesting to me, and has the added benefit of being more human.

    The final irony of this formulation is that treating writing as a conversation is already common wisdom in a particular set of fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The nerds who built those LLMs didn’t also invent calculus from scratch. And I shouldn’t have to invent multi-POV short stories to know that they’re an option. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

    Now that I have used the STEM-lord in me to defeat the STEM-lordism in my well-wishers, I will now return to my stories. Because, and this may be the most important part, I LIKE TO READ.