This is part two of reviewing short stories which won The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which promotes science fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan, and includes everything from regular science fiction and steampunk to magic realism and weird fiction. 'The Puppetmaster' was the third winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found here.
If I had thought the story which had won the Salam award in its first year had been disappointing, that streak unfortunately continued in its third year. And the weird thing is that the hint of possibility that existed in the first story carried over here as well. It was almost good, almost entertaining, but not enough. There was the idea of greatness, and then it was unjustly squandered, so that all I was left with abysmal worldbuilding, characters that couldn’t carry the narrative, and a word length too long to keep me interested.
“As a woman, everyone around you will always convince you your every idea is a flight of fancy. But you’ve got to trust your intuition.”
On the surface, there was lots of stuff that I really, really liked. Strong-willed women caught in societies which look at them weirdly for expressing different thoughts has always been a particularly favourite trope of mine, and this story starts with our protagonist, Gul, confused by the panels of glass she glimpses in the air above her village. The emergence of lights in the air that no one can explain allows the story to lean into the genre that the award is granted for, but soon any interest we might have in the mystery of the lights gets lost in the family drama that overtakes the story when Gul’s father reappears, having vanished years ago.
He called her his Shehzadi, his princess, and when he married her, he attributed all her stories to a fanciful imagination. Until he realized, she believed some of them.
Gul’s father’s vanishing, her mother’s death, her grandmother’s secrets all play a part in tying the story closely to our main character, but for some reason it all felt so boring. There was never any moment in which I actually cared about Gul or her troubles. And one could argue that we don’t need to care about characters to be entertained or involved in their lives, but none of that happened either. Halfway through the story when I realized how much of it was left I actually had to force myself to keep reading, that’s how uninterested I was.
It didn’t help that the world building was so haphazard, so very weak in its very evolution. On the one hand, I loved the slowly emerging truth of the glass slabs Gul sees in the air. On the other hand, there were so many ways to do it better. Allowing the sci-fi portion of the story to only emerge in the fourth quarter of the narrative was a huge disservice to the very essence of the tale itself, because we spent way too long with the characters and their messy lives and not enough trying to figure out the details of the world that the author had set up. What that eventually meant was that the final revelation, and our shift into the science portion of the story, felt very much like a slapdash amateurish attempt at setting up a futuristic society around our character’s personal dramas.
PM105 had been there when the humans breathed their last breaths. Ironically, it was no cataclysmic war between nations that caused the end of all life. It was the hatred bred in individual humans as they subsisted, atomized and fragmented, living life through screens. A vast world of interconnectivity and unlimited potential, and the humans had used it to isolate themselves to the detriment of empathy and the complete loss of truth.
No details of the story’s dystopian setting get explained properly, brushed under the rug with some hasty descriptions of basic human villainy. Any of the stuff that I was impressed by within the narrative so quickly got lost within the absolute ridiculousness of the science fiction at the heart of the tale that it actually felt disappointing to realize that all of the good writing had essentially gone to waste. I wanted to enjoy the story, and yet I was acutely dissatisfied pretty much throughout the telling of it.
“I’m saying, the sky
is a glass dome!”
“Is that a metaphor for feeling trapped?”
But there was something even worse than the story itself, a
factor that might have actually made my reading experience worse and affected
my enjoyment, and that was the simply godawful formatting. Someone really needs
to sit down whoever is in charge of this Award’s website and give them some tips
on how to lay out a text for the ease of the readers. Not only was the font
colour as abominably tepid grey and painful to read as ever, the actual centre
alignment of the text blew my mind. Why WHY in the name of all that is holy was
that editorial decision ever taken? I think I was too busy fixating on the font
colour when I read the first short story to notice this egregious
alignment, which might make sense when children in grade three are writing a
shape poem, but not in many other places.
To top it all off, my absolute favourite thing, the editor’s incapability to decide which Urdu word to define and which one to leave alone, also cropped up. I’ve been hitting my head against this issue for years, and it still seems no one has managed to figure it out yet. Randomly, the word ‘bhoot’ is used for ghost, without any explanation for the non-Urdu reader. Fine, one could argue that context clues should be enough for decoding the text, but then the word ghanwala is described? But paranda and mathapati aren’t? What even is the reader supposed to think?
The twins were fighting over the last ghanwla, a kind of thin, sweet, crepe and pancake hybrid.
As editors, these are issues that we check time and time again. What is the level of consistency in terms of translated words, what can the reader easily discern and what should be made clearer, where does the writer need a little nudge and where can he or she be left alone, all these things a discerning editor needs to keep an eye on. These issues might fly under the radar for a reader, but usually there are multiple levels of editing going on with every published text, which makes reading this story so frustrating. And that’s not even beginning on the multiple copyediting issues that littered the text. I know that commas can sometimes be subjective, but in some cases, a comma simply doesn’t need to be there!
She stretched out her arm to chase the fleeing light and hit, glass.
Overall, there were just some really dumb editorial decisions. In a sudden shift from third person to first person there were no quote marks, no shift between lines. Honestly, even if the story had been good plot wise, it would have lost me between all those improper comma placements and tense changes. This story is basically the first draft that gets handed over to an editor before it goes through three rounds of copy-editing and five rounds of proofreading. It is amazing to me that stories with such a clear lack of polish are winning what I had so far been assuming were prestigious awards. Either not enough writers worthy of the craft are taking this award seriously, or I need to seriously re-think the level of respect I have previously granted this particular literary honour. 2017’s winner didn’t do much to win me over, and this story only served to strengthen my low opinion. Maybe 2020’s story will change this streak. Here’s to hoping.