Lightspeed Column: Language, Roads, Intersection

My Lightspeed column for March is now available online! In it I review Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, Carlos Hernandez’ The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, and Rose Lemberg’s Marginalia to Stone Bird. Here’s the logic of the assemblage:

This month’s books contain multitudes: worlds built from whole cloth, a cascade of perspectives, multiple languages, and the work of travelling between them. There are, above all, questions: Who are we, how do we approach the world, what does the world make of us? The answers—if answers there are—are songs, and poems, and science.

I loved all of these, but was most blown away by The Winged Histories, which was just released from Small Beer Press on Monday. I was absolutely stunned by its achievement. Here’s an interview with Sofia Samatar in the LA Times (the things she says about TEXTURE, aahhh), her own blog post about it, and an NPR review (by Jason Heller) of the book. I just want everyone to read it, absorb it, be absorbed by it in turn.

#SFWApro