#Vajra Chandrasekera

[hussyknee]

Vajra Chandrasekera is a Locus and Nebula award-winner and has been short-listed for a Hugo Award this year. You can find his Tumblr here: @adamantine and his twitter here: @_vajra

[torpublishinggroup]

Celebrate Pride with Tor Publishing Group!

Rakesfall by @adamantine

They met as children in the middle of the Sri Lankan civil war. Later, in a demon-haunted wood, an act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey through the ages. As they reincarnate ever deeper into the future, a truth emerges: Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell.

Running Close to the Wind by @ariaste

In this queer pirate fantasy, Avra Helvaçi has accidentally stolen the single most expensive secret in the world. To avoid capture, he flees to the open sea, where only his on-again, off-again ex aka pirate Captain Teveri az-Ḥaffār can help him survive, profit, and become a legend.

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body and wears your skin. Welcome to Camp Resolution, a queer conversion center where everyone leaves a different person. In 1995, seven queer teens were abandoned here by their parents, but survived. Sixteen years later, they’re scarred and broken, but back to face an evil that threatens the world. 

Kinning by Nisi Shawl

In this alternate history where barkcloth airships soar and former colonies claim freedom from imperialist tyrants, the identity of the island of Everfair still wavers. Victorious in the wake of the Great War, a new threat looms. Can Everfair continue to serve as a symbol of hope for anticolonial movements around the world, or will it fall to forces within and without? 

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by @rebeccathornewrites

Can one of the Queen’s private guard and the most powerful mage in existence leave their lives behind to settle down in their new bookshop that serves tea? This cozy fantasy is steeped in sapphic romance and nestled on the edge of dragon country. 

The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab

Once there were four worlds, nestled like pages in a book, each pulsing with fantastical power and connected by a single city: London. After a desperate attempt to prevent corruption and ruin in the four Londons, there are only three. Now the worlds are going to collide anew—brought to a dangerous precipice by the discoveries of three remarkable magicians.

Now available in paperback!

The Archive Undying by @emcandon

This is a story about misplaced faith, complicated love, so much self-loathing, and yeah—giant robots. Plugged into his AI god when its apocalyptic corruption renders him unfortunately immortal, sad gay disaster Sunai takes a die-again-or-die-trying approach to things. Unending life’s tough when intimacy is somehow scarier even than either of the warring police states set on turning you into a weapon or the rogue undead mecha-fragment of your old god that wants to eat you. 

Now available in paperback!

The Bell in the Fog by Lev AC Rosen

A dazzling historical mystery that dives into the shadowy, closeted world of the Navy, emerging in the gay bars of the city. It’s a whirlpool of missing people, violent strangers, and scandalous photos in 1952 San Francisco. 

Now available in paperback!

Celebrate Pride with more titles from Tor Publishing Group here!

[supervillainny]

*sidles up to you* hey, whatcha readin?

[aroaessidhe]

Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Fetter- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Xie Lian- Heaven Official's Blessing / Tian Guan Ci Fu by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Magnus Chase- Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series by Rick Riordan

Benjamin/Benji Woodside- Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

[wizardsvslesbians]

We go along despairing about the state of the publishing industry and bemoaning the lack of artistry and strangeness in modern SF and then in defiance of all logic someone drops a first novel like this.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #16 – The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

I grabbed this on a recommendation I now forget the specifics of, but which I am incredibly glad I listened to. Not a perfect book, but a beautiful one. It really does immerse you in a capital-w Weird setting in a way I haven’t gotten to enjoy in a while, and might the best in years at really weaving it in with a sense of the mundane and the bathetic. Pacing and character development and plot are a little all over the place, but still a great read.

The story follows Fetter, the only child of the Perfect and Kind, anointed messiah of the Path Above. His mother tears his shadow off of him at birth, and forever after he must choose to remain tethered to the earth and not float away into infinity. He is raised from birth as a tool to take vengeance on his father by committing each of his five unforgivable sins – culminating, of course, in holy patricide. His childhood is spent in indoctrination and murders – and oh, he’s also the only one he knows who can see the monstrous devils who share the world with humanity.

So anyway, all that gives him a lot to talk about in therapy.

The actual book follows Fetters’ life as an aimless young adult in the city of Luriat, with its layers of impenetrable government and byzantine system of castes and races inherited from successive colonizers, its regular pogroms and plagues, and its tendency for any doors left closed and unwatched for too long to instantaneously become permanently shut portals to Somewhere. Over the course of the book, he is dragged into a revolutionary conspiracy, learns his father is coming to the city, learns deep metaphysical secrets, is a pretty terrible boyfriend, becomes a suicide bomber, and learns to fly.

To start with the negative, the pacing of the plot is...okay, maybe not bad, but it’s really not trying for the things I’d expect it to. A whole act of the narrative is spent meandering through an absurd purgatory of refugee/prison/quarantine camps Fetter has been consigned to. Lovely writing, thematically important, does eat up a lot of page count which then leads to rest of the book being things happening very quickly one after the other with very little in the way of buildup or reflection. Time is enjoyably spent just detailing the experience of Fetter’s day to day life, but much of the supporting cast feel more like plot (or thematic) devices than characters. The book ends with the protagonist loudly reciting the big lesson he’s learned from the events of the book. So yeah, less than perfect book. Still, I found all the sins very easy to forgive.

As mentioned, this was the first fantasy book I’ve read in a while that felt properly fantastical, like it was created from first principles rather than being the latest in a hoary old lineage stretching back generations. Which might be complete bullshit, I don’t know – not like I’ve read a great deal of other South Asian fantasy to compare it to – but it worked for me. A big part of which is how very modern it is. This is a secondary world with prophets and plague-bearing anti-gods, forgotten timelines whose ghosts leak into the world, and a whole plethora of almost- and not-quite- messiahs. And also one with cellphones and UN-administered refugee camps, labyrinthine bureaucratic politics and scandals over inappropriate allocation of imported medical devices. It all feels like a reflection of the present and its own concerns rather than the thousandth-generation pastiche much of the genre does, I suppose – which is something I really did appreciate.

The world of the book – or, at least, the little slice of it the story is concerned with. There’s clearly grander and stranger things happening off in the distance – is one intensely concerned with caste and class, race and religion and breeding. Luriat is weighed down with the architecture and high culture of successive waves of colonialism, and its elites organize and govern the population according to a syncretic mix of all of their ideological castoffs. Politics – and in particular the use of plague and quarantine on one hand and sectarian pogroms on the other to control the populace – is pretty key to the whole book. It’s also just about entirely beyond Fetter. Not that he’s dumb, just that he’s apolitical, in the sense of treating government like an inexorable and inevitable fact of life to be worked with/around or avoided, not something you can understand or change. Which makes for fun reading as there’s clearly a whole Les Mis thing happening like 0.5 degrees to the left of the book’s plot.

Anyway, I’m still sad Pipra didn’t get more screentime, and the whole ending feels almost comically rushed, but absolutely a worthwhile read.

[bread-lowph]

idk i think about this a lot

[evenaturtleduck]

"This is a very important lesson," Grandmother Sits says. "Perhaps the most important part of your initiation, which of course will never quite be completed, you understand; you will always be beginning again, just never twice in the same place. The lesson is that the red wheel cannot be broken, whether by accident or intention, though you can certainly be broken upon it. The lesson is that you can't win. You can only keep moving. You are doomed to failure, which is to say, to life, which is full of pain. There will never be a final synthesis that unifies all worlds and resolves all dialectics. You can only resolve your own paradoxes and become more of who you are."

[adamantine]

It's my birthday, so if you want to hear me talk for like TWO WHOLE HOURS (and why would you not want this, he says, making eye contact pointedly) I'm up at the iconic Between the Covers podcast with David Naimon! We talk about The Saint of Bright Doors, Rakesfall, Sri Lanka, Buddhism, post/colonialism, fascism, replacement theory, and pretty much everything else that anybody could possibly ever talk about

[hussyknee]

I woke up to the news about Refaat Alreer. I still feel cold. Imagine seeing someone talking on your TL every day, narrating what the genociders are doing, counting the dead and telling their stories, amplifying his colleagues in Palestinian activism and academia, advocating and pleading endlessly for a ceasefire, delivering blistering witticisms about Zionist propaganda and then...he and his whole family are dead.

Two of my favourite tweets by him, calling out the craven Western media for never naming Israel.

It feels like a funeral today. My whole TL full of his students and Palestinians mourning Refaat alongside writers and journalists and academics from all over the Global South. The only people who matter to us is us.

Meanwhile, Zionists are attacking us under our mourning tweets, circulating the tweet where he laughed at the monstrous lie of Hamas cooking a baby in an oven during Oct 7th, one of the lies that fuelled the slaughter that eventually killed him too.

This was his last tweet.

USAmerican disability activist Imani Barbarin's tweet today was partially motivated by Refaat's death.

I need to go offline for a while.

I leave you with Refaat's last poem that was his pinned tweet for over a month. When a storyteller dies, generations are robbed of universes. When a poet dies, the world loses a piece of its soul.

You can find Refaat's book "Gaza Writes Back" in my gdrive folder of Palestinian literature. I don't know where the royalties will go now, but please also try and find it in a bookstore or library.

[torpublishinggroup]

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The Saint of Bright Doors by @adamantine

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The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

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[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

The Saint of Bright Doors

Fetter has been raised from birth to commit the five unforgivable sins set out in his messianic father's religion, to culminate with patricide. After being trained for this throughout childhood his mother sends him out into the world as a teenager to fulfill the mission she has set him. This is all largely backstory, dispensed of in just two short chapters. The bulk of the story follows Fetter after he has abandoned following his mother's instruction as an aimless 23 year old (by his best estimate at least) in the city of Luriat.

Fetter now has a therapist (who he has been seeing "ever since he learned what a therapist was") and a boyfriend, attends a support group for unchosen ones and helps new immigrants adjust to living in the city.

Taken out of context a lot of elements of the books sounds like they're from a novel that's doing self conscious genre commentary or is even verging on parody but the book is really nothing like that. It's a unique fantasy world that is genuinely fantastical. I find that modern settings with a high level of magic often struggle to convey a sense of wonder and this was a welcome exception to that.

It's possible it's just drawing inspiration from books I'm not familiar with but the setting felt fresh and original.

The prose is enjoyable. It occasionally tries a little too hard to be clever but that's a rare problem and for the most part it's a joy to read. In particular Chandrasekera is very skilled at shifting registers; there are moments that in the hands of a less skilled would play as comedic juxtaposition (either intentionally or worse unintentionally) but his writing makes it seem natural

As the book continues Fetter gets involved with political radicals, goes undercover as a researcher, reconnects with his dying mother and gets drawn back into his past. The book becomes more plot heavy as it continues and it's not entirely to it's benefit. It's most often at it's strongest when focusing on individual in the course of ordinary life (or well ordinary by the standards of this world).

We learn more about the history of the world and Fetter's parents throughout the story and these parts have some of the best writing in the book. One chapter is taken up by Fetter's Mother, Mother-of-Glory, relating the story of how Fetter got his name and it's one of my favourite sections of the book.

Throughout the book caste and class and the experience and perception of immigrants are constant factors which are never far from the surface.

The book does weaken towards the end. Fetter leaves and returns to Luriat and after his return it somehow feels simultaneously both unfocused and too tightly focused. Towards the very end the narrative distances itself from Fetter and we're disconnected from his inner thoughts. I understand why Chandrasekera made this choice but it's something difficult to execute after following Fetter so intimately up until then and I don't know that it is entirely successful. The latter chapters would have benefited from more room to breathe.

There's no real way she could have appeared for more than the brief period that she did but Ordinary was great and I would have loved to see more of her.

The Saint of Bright Doors is Chandrasekera's debut novel and it is impressive for a first book. As much as I thoroughly enjoyed it, I'm even more excited to see what he'll write in the future.

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

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[jolyful]

There's been a soft rain all day - perfect ambiance for getting into a new book! 🌧️ So far I'm loving the writing and very intriguing worldbuilding

[flyleafbooks]

SO excited to be starting the summer with amazing reads from @tordotcompub @torbooks !!!