Grimdark “The Limits of My Language” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
“Redstarts in the Last Summer” by Vajra Chandrasekera
“The List” by Gautam Bhatia
“Djinn In the Woodpecker’s Eye” by Gourav Mohanty
“Reed Lions: A Story from the Principalities” by R.R. Virdi
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
The April issue of Grimdark consists entirely of work by South Asian writers, which intrigued me straight away, since I am unfamiliar with fiction from that part of the world. Right up front let me say several of the stories are recommended. They’re well crafted and entertaining, and as a plus, provide intriguing tastes of other cultures. That’s the rub, though. This reviewer found himself constantly Googling unfamiliar words and references in order to understand the stories. I wonder how many readers would make the same effort if it wasn’t their job to soldier on, as it is mine. So let me offer this advice to any editor considering a similarly worthy project: Annotate the stories. Footnote liberally. Your audience will thank you.
With that off this reviewer’s chest, we turn to the first offering in the issue, “The Limits of My Language” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, a fantasy set in the kingdom of Sinhapura, which is ruled by His Holiness Sinha Adiraj, “a relatively intelligent sociopath.” The narrator, Mohandas Siege, is not only a magician, he’s also symbiotically bonded with a murderous daemon named Blade. Siege works for the Adiraj as the “Emperor’s Bitterness,” a combination right-hand man and assassin. When ordered by the emperor to judge a magical contest, Siege and Blade discover perfidy, a tiny horror hidden within a fake perpetual motion machine, and set out to expunge a terrible evil before it can take root and corrupt the empire… Moving and recommended.
Next up is a science fiction story, “Redstarts in the Last Summer”1 by Vajra Chandrasekera, which takes place in a dystopian near future in “Progress Valley,” a fenced-in city holding millions of climate-change refugees located not far from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, which is now the anchor point of a space elevator. The narrator is a white nun, a member of the secret “Noble Order in Exile”—and a terrorist in training. Only instead of having been fitted with a suicide vest, they have a “nullity” device implanted inside their body, which when triggered will create an implosion—a void—two kilometers wide… Well realized, rigorous, and recommended.
(1The word Redstarts appears in the title of the story and nowhere else in the text. Maybe something was lost in translation.)
The third story, “The List” by Gautam Bhatia, also science fiction, takes us to a far future in which humanity shares the galaxy with a Borg-like alien race known as the Deva. In this universe, lifespan has been extended indefinitely—but memory remains finite, forcing people to store their experiences and recollections on-line. Apparently, too, Earth’s ecology has collapsed; and on the planet Xolon, those who fail to conform to the criteria of “the List” are no longer considered human, and are cut off from the “memory banks” and banished offworld. Against this complicated background we meet Jatayu, captain of the spaceship Terran Sky, ostensibly carrying a cargo of medicinal skins to Xolon, while the real mission is to rescue a group of “Runaway Off-Listers” fleeing persecution—or is it? Nothing is quite as it seems in this interesting attempt at future-building that sadly doesn’t quite hang together. A good try, though.
We return to fantasy with “Djinn In the Woodpecker’s Eye” by Gourav Mohanty. Strangely, in the same way that “Redstarts in the Last Summer” lacks any mention of Redstarts, this tale doesn’t refer to woodpeckers even once, so I can only assume the title refers to some aphorism with no Western equivalent (remember—annotate!). Well, OK, moving on now … we’re taken to a world in which the old king Samar the Sour has been overthrown by a “Usurper” with the assistance of the traitorous protagonist, the unreliable narrator of the story. Despite his faithfulness to the new regime, however, the narrator’s wife is condemned as a “Djinndancer” and thrown into jail, and the narrator himself is soon imprisoned and tortured gruesomely. This is all quite confusing, both to the reader and to the narrator, who stubbornly refuses to use the final wish owed him by a Djinn as he struggles to discover who had betrayed him—and why… Almost a contender, but no knock out.
The April issue ends with a novelette, “Reed Lions: A Story from the Principalities” by R.R. Virdi, which is certainly grim, and definitely dark, but neither fantasy nor science fiction. It’s sort of a South Asian Seven Samurai, detailing the adventures of a ragtag squad of desperate soldiers, who decide to make their last stand defending the inhabitants of a doomed village on the road to Shantrimahr. Most die, of course. Bravely… An enjoyable and touching tale but, as I mentioned, it’s not a genre story. Maybe that won’t matter to grimdark aficionados.