books
- A Valve that can’t be Ghosted
- Three Cold Hands
- True Kintsugi
- Forge-smith
- The Ledger Remembers
- Unpoisoned Firstflag
- Beckett, Chris. Dark Eden. Corvus, 2012.
- Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harvest Book / Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.
- Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Stories of Your Life and Others, Small Beer Press, 2002, pp. 91-140.
- Hachemi, Munir. Living Things. Translated by Julai Sanches. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024.
- Hachemi, Munir. The Mulai. Translated by Julia Sanches, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager, 2014.
- Libertella, Héctor. El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2000.
- Miéville, China. Embassytown. Del Rey, 2012.
- Morrissey, John. Bird Deity. Text Publishing, 2026.
- Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Fawcett Crest, 1985.
Bookshops in Sydney. How's it going?
In the house by the ocean where we’re currently staying there’s a copy of Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, For the Time Being. In the inside back cover there’s a label from the store where it was purchased: Norton Street Books in Leichhardt, Sydney. That book shop has long since closed, so long ago that I’ve never personally heard anyone mention its existence. But then this year when Berkelouw Books, also on Norton Street in Leichhardt, announced they were shutting down I realised I’ve been living in Sydney for long enough now to have experienced the closure and opening of many bookstores over the years.
A good decade before COVID, around 2010 there was a period when it felt as though there was a real culling of Sydney bookshops. This was around the time Dymocks closed several of their CBD branch stores to focus on just their flagship store on George Street. Each closure felt like the end of an era. Cumulatively it was seriously worrying. And then the turmoil grew worse.
A matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee
So AI models are chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon.
It seems in their obscure chat rooms AI agents can already accidentally name sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’s spaceships of ‘The Culture’ almost better than humans.
Here we have:
And they’re not even trying.
Still, naming super-intelligent spaceships is one thing; taking over the galaxy with them is another. Presumably that’s next week’s task.
Reviewing Banks’s 1996 Culture novel, Peter Tieryas said:
💬 “Part of the joy of Excession is hearing the Minds speak with each other, that matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee.”
Weird how accurately this turned out, especially since Banks wrote the novel thirty years ago, while owning just a fax machine and two answering machines which he didn’t even use. No internet, no email and certainly no AI agents conspiring galactic domination in slang.
Well in case you’re interested, here’s a pretty extensive list of the actual Culture ships mentioned in the novels.
The consolations of literature
On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes of Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty.
I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing.
In a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes:
💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.”
Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know you’re not the first to miss out – and to be reminded that missing out might just hold its own subtle pleasure. This perspective might lack credibility unless you recognise that most days, as with Hokusai’s famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji, it’s almost impossible not to see that sacred mountain.
I took part in the August '26 IndieWeb Book Club
The book selection for the month was 📚 The Mulai, by Munir Hachemi, and I posted my thoughts online. To sum up, it was a thought-provoking metafiction fiesta.
Now VH Belvadi has posted the roundup, with a review – fittingly, I thought – in the style of the novel itself.
You can take part too. Just read the book, post your thoughts somewhere online and let the organiser know. That’s pretty much it. September’s chosen book is An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, by Wren James. Sara Jaksa chose this title and put out the call for submissions.
I know nothing about this book except that it appears to involve real person fan fiction conspiracy theories… er, maybe. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise so I’m looking forward to being enlightened.
Details of this and other months’ choices are at the IndieWeb Wiki.
*You can follow along with the continuing adventures of Writing Slowly by means of the RSS feed, or if you prefer, you can subscribe to good old email. *
📚Currently reading: My year in paris with gertrude stein by Deborah Levy.
Thoughts on The Mulai, a novel by Munir Hachemi
The Mulai, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches (Fitzcarraldo Editions 978-1804272732, June 2026; Coach House Books 978-1-55245-519-7, July 2026).
I came across The Mulai by Spanish author Munir Hachemi because it was the pick for August’s Indieweb Book Club, and I’m happy I did.
This is the kind of intellectual science fiction that intrigues me: lost or unknown ‘alien’ civilisations, or the remnants of failed attempts at planetary colonisation, clinging on to what they remember of ‘civilisation’, or perhaps abandoning it for something stranger and more adaptive.
Familiar tropes are hard at work here. The mysterious nearly-human culture with its almost-but-not-quite-indecipherable language. The unreliable anthropologist, who reports on their observations and is both repelled and strangely attracted to what they encounter. The sudden reversals of expectation and the uncomfortable presentiment of doom.
I’ve enjoyed several books that work with and extend these ideas. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time asks whether it’s possible to work for a better future without succumbing to Utopian fantasies. China Miéville’s Embassytown addresses the near impossibilities of translation across incommensurable cultures and physiologies, as does Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life”. Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden explores the travails of the descendants of human colonists, abandoned on an inhospitable planet. Bird Deity by John Morrissey depicts the stark brutality of planetary colonisation that exploits everything it touches while understanding almost nothing of the indigenous inhabitants it depends on (Here’s a review). And hovering behind all these works is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, that “ambiguous utopia.”
I make this litany to mark out the familiar territory, but as Chris Beckett said of his novel, “it’s what you do with these themes that’s important, not whether they’re new or not.”
And indeed these recurring themes remain vital. How are we to encounter the strange, the radically different, the inexplicably other? It’s something people seem to be terrible at. In her review of Embassytown for The Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin observed:
“There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different – aliens?”
The eponymous Mulai of Hachemi’s novel are definitely not familiar. They aren’t aliens, but for Dr. Nahum Cordovero, the “archaeologist” who comes to study them in their 159th year of isolation, they might as well be. They are the survivors of a failed attempt at planetary colonisation, terraforming pioneers, abandoned when their distant sponsors became preoccupied with a war.
After generations of abandonment the Mulai have forgotten almost everything about the advanced technology that still keeps them alive. They have long sublimated their hope of rescue into a more abstract eschatology: “The tree comes.” This mantra comforts them, perhaps especially due to its lack of any connection to reality.
Since arriving on this barely inhabitable planet they have rapidly and comprehensively transformed almost every aspect of their previous way of life. To Dr. Cordovero, everything about them is tantalisingly hard to understand.
As he comes to terms with the language of the Mulai, it both clarifies the culture and renders it harder to interpret. His status as an outsider is tested to breaking point. By learning the language, the culture it represents begins to interpret him.
Meanwhile, Faida, one of the Mulai, is also finding it hard to understand life. Having embarked on a quite different quest, she has encountered a book hidden by one of the original colonists. The reader may recognise it almost at once as Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but to Faida it’s a deep enigma. She resolves to attempt the impossible: to break with taboos in order to translate this strange artifact into the Mulai language.
From these different angles, then, questions of language, culture, and interpretation are problematised rather than reaching a clear resolution.
Hachemi’s previous novel, Living Things, observed that nuances and misunderstandings “are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence”.
The reader is deeply implicated in this process. How to make sense of this fragmented narrative? What do these strange words mean? What is the actual purpose of Cordovero’s mission and what are the implications of his heavily censored conclusions (censorship presumably being a condition of their existence)?
“El árbol viene” — “The Tree Comes” — is the original Spanish title of the novel. This is the meaning of mu lai, 木来 in Chinese. It’s part of a sign at the entrance to the dome under which the Mulai live, which, if it wasn’t for the weathering of the planet’s fierce seasons, would still read 未来, wei lai. The now missing extra stroke would signify, “Future”, the official, long-forgotten name of the original mission.
This is a sign that we’re firmly in the territory of metafiction. It is also a reference to one of the works quoted in the epigraph to the novel, Argentinian author Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. This work declares “the future is over” at the same time as it pulls apart the famous claims of the Swiss linguist of the tenuous relationship between the word “tree” and the living tree it signifies.
The metafiction deepens as the reader is led to wonder about the importance of de Saussure’s linguistic theories and their appropriation by Jacques Lacan via Libertella’s satire. The same applies to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, along with two fictional works repeatedly alluded to as the narrative progresses: the Libertarian Codex, and its “first amendment”, the Teachings of Flukeh.
All is puzzling fragments in this tale told through a multi-authored collection of papers, disjointed in time and of often dubious perspective. This sense of spatial, cultural and literary estrangement is surely appropriate for a novel fundamentally about estrangement. I found it deeply compelling and finished the book in two intense sittings. No sooner had I read the last page than I found myself turning straight back to the first page to re-read with a new, if still very incomplete understanding. “The future is over,” begins Dr. Cordovero. But that’s just the start.
There’s a great review of The Mulai by Xiao Yue Shan in Asymptote Journal. It’s worth reading even if you don’t read the novel.
And from an interview with the author (in Spanish) I discovered he seems to have a Mulai glyph tattooed on his forearm. Now that’s commitment to your art.
See more on the IndieWeb Book Club
Now read:
César Aira on the constant flight forward
Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.
References
Currently reading: Wise Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
Currently reading: Wise. Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
One reason I write:
“We remember only a tiny fraction of existence. We have forgotten most of what it is like to be alive, long before we die. Oblivion starts seeping into our heads as soon as we are self-aware.” (p.44)
Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky. – Ursula K. LeGuin
You might care to check out the shortlist for the 2026 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction.
Odysseus: A name that spells trouble
Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.
After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.
Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD: