The Pleasure of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 27: Arrate Hidalgo

 

One Book, One Videogame, One Band

by Arrate Hidalgo 

 

2025 has been a year. I find it impossible to summarize it in a way that may sufficiently acknowledge the horrors and the joys of it. But 2025 has been a year in which I have been alive and fortunate enough to enjoy books, videogames, music. Here are three samples.

 

One Book

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

“To celebrate the lexis of landscape is not nostalgic, but urgent,” says Macfarlane in the introduction to this rich, vibrating word-horde, in which he provides a loving journey through nature writing and the role that this —some would say very British— genre has had in shaping the imagination of landscape by humans and their relationship with it. Interspersed with these in-depth looks at works of literature, Macfarlane includes, divided into landscape families —e.g. waterlands, woodlands, edgelands—, glossaries with hundreds of words he has collected, either found, learned or gifted, in a variety of the languages and speeches of the British Isles, most of which share the quality of being incredibly evocative and lyrical, sometimes comical, in their precision. Just two examples, if you’re curious:

rionnach maoim: shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day (Gaelic)

squatted, squat-up: splashed with mud by a passing vehicle (Kent, north Staffordshire)

Macfarlane argues, and I agree, that while being able to name does not mean to understand, to use language well is “a species of attention,” one that is key for us not to lose our sense of place and, in the process, of ourselves.

 

One Videogame

The Longing by Anselm Pyta and Studio Seufz

Inspired by a German legend about a king that sleeps underground for thousands of years and the dwarf that must check on him once every century, The Longing is an exploration of solitude, empathy, and the passage of time. In it, we will follow the Shade, a lonely creature born to serve an ancient king, who goes to sleep with the order of being woken after 400 days have passed. These 400 days are actual, real-life days, which will begin passing the moment you start the game and will not pause even when you close it to get on with your real-world duties. You may choose to let the Shade wait it out and wake the king after a bit over a year, or you may decide to let the Shade wander and explore the underground land in which they must wait, and, in that way, bring some variety into their life. This will lead the Shade to discover the tunnels surrounding them and even find trinkets with which to decorate their otherwise bare little cave-room. The pace is such that, in my case, I ended up developing a sort of quiet companionship with the Shade. They would sit in their armchair reading —actual books! such as Moby Dick (you can read the whole thing, and many others, within the game)—, and I would do my work, translating, sending invoices, or whatnot, while the Shade would sometimes muse about boredom and the possibility of a world beyond. The art, the melancholy dungeon synth soundtrack, the writing — it all contributes to a wistful, intimate experience I have rarely found in any other medium.

 

One Band

Castle Rat

Often described as “a Dungeons & Dragons fever dream,” Brooklyn-based Castle Rat provide traditional doom and heavy metal sounds and visuals of a quality and earnestness that are absolutely disarming. Chain-mail bikinis, Conan-coded swords, plague-doctor masks — Castle Rat has it all, combined with skull-rattling doom riffs and powerful vocals —by frontwoman and “Rat Queen” Riley Pinkerton—, which must be experienced live. The band not only has created an entire epic sword and sorcery narrative that they perform between songs —which at times will have the audience pointing and possibly yelling “It’s behind you!” (picture a medieval-themed fantasy play with a mosh pit)—, but also they just sound really good. Try “Cry for Me” for a power ballad “for grave side regrets and moonlight laments,” according to the band, with an accompanying video filmed entirely in VHS.

 

  

 

Among other things,  Arrate Hidalgo is Associate Editor at Aqueduct Press. She is also an English to Spanish translator, a founder and organizer of a feminist sf con, and an amateur singer. Visit her website at arratehidalgo.com. Her English-language translation of the Basque science fiction classic, Memories of Tomorrow, by Mayi Pelot, was released by Aqueduct Press in 2022 as a volume in Aqueduct's Heirloom Book series.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 32: Arrate Hidalgo

 

Reading Pleasures in 2022

by Arrate Hidalgo

 

For this year's pleasures series, I’m sticking to books. The amount of reading I've done this year is of course unmatched by the amount of show-watching, but I’ve been able to return to reading for pleasure at a rate I had been missing for a while. Below I list some of those books and the reasons why I picked them (besides the fact that they’re available in English, which left some Spanish and all Basque titles out. Do ask if you’re interested in those).

 I wish us all a kind entry into 2023.

 

Dead Collections - Isaac Fellman

Why: the vampire everydayness and the obvious passion for archival thinking and difficult conversations.

 

Shadow & Claw (The first half of The Book of the New Sun) - Gene Wolfe

Why: the hints at our present and the unreliability of the narrator. Plus the language.

 

Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

Why: the author’s ability to transmit the way things smell. And the beautiful Spanish translation by Concha Cardeñoso.

 

My Tender Matador (Tengo miedo torero) - Pedro Lemebel (translation from Spanish by Katherine Silver)

Why: the lovely mix of frills and toughness, the vertigo of some scenes.

 

Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World - Linda Hogan

Why: the richness of non-human histories lovingly passed on.

 

Love - Toni Morrison

Why: the characters’ voices popping out of the book.

 

Precursor (Foreigner saga # 4) – C. J. Cherryh

Why: the atevi. Always the atevi.

 

Bad Girls (Las malas)  - Camila Sosa Villada (translation from Spanish by Kit Maude)

Why: the survival of magic in the face of cruelty and unimaginativeness.

 

 

My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

Why: the dark comedy and thrills mixed with sisterly love.

 

Unbecoming - Lesley Wheeler

Why: the ease with which it creeps up and inconspicuously topples normality.

 

The Death of Vivek Oji - Akwaeke Emezi

Why: the life contained at the core despite immense unfolding grief.

 

Heart Berries - Terese Marie Mailhot

Why: the sting of truth and unapologetic prose.

 

Bonus: Mothers don't (Amek ez dute) - Katixa Agirre (translation from Spanish by Katie Whittemore)

Why: I already explained, but it’s in English now.

 

Extra bonus: Book of Travels  - Might & Delight (I cheated, this is a video game!)

Why: the sense of wonder it achieves like no other video game I recall in recent memory.

 

 Among other things,  Arrate Hidalgo is Associate Editor at Aqueduct Press. She is also an English to Spanish translator, an founder and organizer of a feminist sf con, and an amateur singer. Visit her website at arratehidalgo.com. Her English-language translation of the Basque science fiction classic, Memories of Tomorrow, by Mayi Pelot, was released by Aqueduct Press in 2022 as a volume in Aqueduct's Heirloom Book series.

Memories of Tomorrow by Mayi Pelot

 

 

I'm pleased to announce the publication of Memories of Tomorrow by Mayi Pelot, translated from the Basque by Arrate Hidalgo,* as a volume in Aqueduct Press's Heirloom Books series. Aqueduct is releasing it in both trade paperback and e-book editions. It's available now at www.aqueductpress.com.

 Memories of Tomorrow collects a set of vibrant and enigmatic visions that emanated from one of the most creative minds of contemporary Basque literature. Often unnoticed by the established canon, Mayi Pelot has been uncovered and championed in recent years as one of the first genre authors in the language. Her publications, despite their brief span—from 1982 to 1992—undeniably laid the groundwork for future generations of Basque science fiction writers.

This collection, the first book published by Mayi Pelot, includes six stories that take place in the same galaxy but at different times. Touching on subgenres such as social speculative fiction, the techno-thriller, and space opera, Memories of Tomorrow is, in essence, a poignant political commentary on the oppressive systems that rule our world and their practices of othering, neocolonialism, gentrification, and massive exploitation of natural resources. Pelot often focuses her lens on those questioning and resisting the actions of the powerful and points to the relationship with nature and one another as a healthy, sustainable alternative to our current world structure. 

 Read a sample from the book.

 The five sci-fi shorts and one novella in this impressive collection from Pelot (1947–2016) explore the aftermath of a third world war. The flash fiction opener, “Miren,” showcases Pelot’s ability to make a visceral emotional impact in only two pages. “Row, row,” about a girl named Leyre attending a lesson on the futuristic Anti-Pollution Wall, builds on that first story in a devastating way, exploring the interconnectivity of individual trauma. The emotionally authentic “Feedback” follows a Muslim man living in 2039. The standout is novella “The Exchange,” in which an unfaithful man named Wotan pursues the mysterious being Erda, who lives beneath the planet Daleth. The tale is lush and immersive in its illustrative descriptions of other worlds and other beings, and contains the most beautiful prose of the entire collection. Hidalgo’s introduction, which provides fascinating context for Basque science fiction, lauds Pelot as an “innovator,” and these six works prove her worthy of this praise. Readers will be delighted to dive in to Pelot’s oeuvre.--Publishers Weekly

_______

*The translation was made possible by a grant from the Etxepare Basque Institute.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, pt. 28: Arrate Hidalgo

 

My Mother's Year in Books
by Arrate Hidalgo

This is not my year in books, but my mother’s. And it covers not only 2021, but also 2020. Why? Because these past two years have seen a radical change in my mother’s reading habits. And if there wasn’t already enough to blame on the pandemic, this is too.

Ever since I became absorbed by fantasy and science fiction in my early teens (the former came some years before the latter), and especially as I turned twenty and discovered feminist genre fiction, my mother has regularly asked me if I would ever read anything “real” again. Anything “without aliens and robots in it.” Down-to-earth fiction. I suspect that she thought, as Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out years before, that fantasy was useless, that it would teach me nothing worth keeping in my head if I was ever to get a job. It so happens that it has allowed me to find work in my own way, but that’s another story. Back then, as now, I read sff because I love it.

She didn’t. Or she thought she didn’t. Fast forward to 2020, my parents and I, fortunately healthy, confined together in the first wave of Covid that hit Spain. My mother is running out of stuff to read. My childhood room is full of it, since this is where most of my books live (as I’m moving places all the time due to the current housing market). She comes in casually, wondering what I’m up to. And she starts pointing at books and asking me about them. They’re science fiction books.

I guess, come to think of it, she had read some sff before, but since it was translated by me she probably thought it didn’t count. Ha! It does. “New mother” by Eugene Fischer and “The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon, both published in my translation in book format by Spanish press Cerbero, are two excellent ways to be lured into the genre.

The first sff book I can remember giving her was Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I thought it would be a safe bet. When I picked it up I did not put it down until I finished it. And time travel in this novel was an excuse for Butler to tell a story that otherwise did away with science fictional tropes. I was right. She also was glued to it and gave it back the day after.

I normally give my mother books to read by piles, though. She goes through them at a speed I definitely did not inherit. Anyway, next came the first sff pile I gave her: anthologies of Spanish genre authors, thinking she would appreciate the variety and short format. One was Distópicas y poshumanas, a two-volume anthology of science fiction written by Spanish women covering from the 19th century to the present day. Edited by experts Teresa López Pellisa and Lola Robles (herself an Aqueductian), and published twice in two years by different presses, it features authors known to the mainstream as classics beyond speculative writing, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and Ángeles Vicente, who wrote Zezé, the first novel written in Spanish featuring a lesbian protagonist. The rest of the pile were volumes of the Alucinadas series, which was created in 2014 by Cristina Macía and Cristina Jurado and collects contemporary science fiction by Spanish and Latin American women. Five volumes exist to date, and especially the first two marked a milestone in the visibility of women genre authors writing in Spanish. It certainly opened up an entire world to me back when the first volume was published. A lot has changed for the better in the eight years (already!) that have passed since, and it is to be celebrated that such anthologies are no longer as necessary as before.

Next came the pile of novels written by authors that were featured in those anthologies and were therefore known to her: Uno by Nieves Delgado, La moderna Atenea by Conchi Regueiro, El informe Monteverde by Lola Robles (trans. by Lawrence Schimel as Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist for Aqueduct), and Consecuencias naturales by Elia Barceló, all of which are science fiction. Uno explores Delgado’s always favored subject of artificial intelligence, intersected by gender identity; La moderna Atenea is a partially epistolary novel, representative of Regueiro’s seamless blending of costumbrist and speculative fiction; Monteverde echoes Le Guin’s anthropological vein in a linguistic science fiction story that challenges preconceptions on disability; and Consecuencias naturales is a sharp critique and total inversion of the male hero as conqueror of space.

My mother loved them all. At this point she was already coming to terms with the fact that aliens and robots were compatible with good literature. Since then she has read more Butler, Ken Liu’s selection and translation of Chinese sf titled Planetas invisibles, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, and Le Guin’s “The Wild Girls.” But the rest of my Le Guin books are in English, so I’m planning to get her a bunch more, as well as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Its Spanish translation, after spending many years out of print, has been recently published again– a direct result of the work done by feminist fandom collectives such as the website La nave invisible.

Speaking of out-of-print, the last book I’ve given her was Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book. “Quite timely,” she commented. And how not to agree. In this Christmas-time time-travel story set in a future pandemic-ridden world, Dunworthy, the Oxford historian worried about the pupil they have sent to the Middle Ages in the middle of a new virus outbreak, comes across a flyer:

“In boldface type it said: ‘FIGHT INFLUENZA, VOTE TO SECEDE FROM THE EC.’ Underneath was a paragraph: ‘Why will you be separated from your loved ones this Christmas? Why are you forced to stay in Oxford? Why are you in danger of getting ill and dying? Because the EC allows infected foreigners to enter England, and England doesn’t have a thing to say about it. An Indian immigrant carrying a deadly virus–’ Dunworthy didn’t read the rest. He turned it over. It read, ‘A Vote for Secession is a Vote for Health. Committee for an Independent Great Britain.”

I remember perfectly well pro-Brexit party UKIP’s lies about the NHS being under pressure by refugees taking all the healthcare away from the British. The one thing Willis didn’t get right was how soon the “secession” would actually happen.

At this point I’ve stopped worrying about what to give my mother to read, whether it will be too much, too imaginative. “They’re just so imaginative” is the one thing she always says after every read. Apparently that isn’t a problem anymore.

 

 

Among other things,  Arrate Hidalgo is Associate Editor at Aqueduct Press. She is also an English to Spanish translator, an founder and organizer of a feminist sf con, and an amateur singer. Visit her website at arratehidalgo.com. Her translation of the Basque science fiction classic, Memories of Tomorrow, by Mayi Pelot, is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in spring 2022 as a volume in Aqueduct's Heirloom Book series.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 33: Arrate Hidalgo

 

The Pleasures of 2020
by Arrate Hidalgo

I’m terrible at keeping track of my reads, which has also been the case in this… erm, different 2020, but I reckon what I’ve gathered below is a good selection of my reading, viewing, and listening in the last 365 days:

  

Reading

 

Fever Dream, Samantha Schweblin (tr. Megan McDowell)

Samantha Schweblin is one of the Argentinian authors who have been turning to horror to dissect Argentinian social context, to extraordinary effect (if you’re into that, other excellent names to check out are Mariana Enriquez and Spanish-born, Argentina-nurtured Ariadna Castellarnau). It’s difficult to tell what’s hallucination and what isn’t in this brief but deep read into the possibility of the monstrous in one’s child, or rather, the monstrous in the landscape itself intoxicating one’s child. I recommend knowing as little as possible if you go for this unsettling, rippling read.

 Marx and the Doll, Maryam Madjidi (not actually in English. See fragment tr. by Ruth Diver)

This exile novel written from the point of view of an Iranian girl (and, later, woman) forced to migrate to France with her communist parents dives into language, class, and home. Especially critical with the French state’s centralist approach to culture and tongue, the novel touched me to the core also because it has a grandma in it, and I just can’t help sobbing when long lost grandmas are involved.

 Fire Logic, Laurie J. Marks

My first confinement read! Thank you, Small Beer Press! It had been a while since I had been so enthralled by a secondary world fantasy. While the queer female leads were a great point in favor, I just really enjoyed the conversations and overall worldbuilding. Personally I love it when I don’t know exactly what everybody in an unknown world is speaking about all the time, especially when discussing philosophy. I intend to check out the next volume in the tetralogy as soon as I can get hold of it.

 

 

 Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora

Though I have only one volume of this journal, I’m hoping it won’t be the last. The one I have (v. 44.1, which has Sheree Renée Thomas as associate editor) includes absorbing poetry and prose by a great number of authors, among whom I want to highlight Kandace Siobhan Walker and her piece “Nowhere Native II.”

 Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða

During the spring confinement I returned to my Old Icelandic learning times, which took me to researching some Icelandic sagas I hadn’t actually read back when I was pursuing my master’s in Medieval literature. Two of them were the saga of the Greenlanders and the saga of Erik the Red. According to the Wikipedia, these are “the two main literary sources of information for the Norse exploration of North America”, and they astounded me because of the off-hand way in which the Icelanders’ encounters and conflicts with the indigenous populations whose land they trespass are narrated. It’s impossible to read these stories now without the looming prospect of colonization in mind, and since reading them I’ve wanted to search for contemporary criticism on this aspect, unsuccessfully for now.

 Hild, Nicola Griffith

I’m not a fast reader, especially when I’m really enjoying the way in which a story is written. It has taken me a year to finish Nicola Griffith’s historical fiction around Hilda of Whitby’s life story. Or rather, her life as a child and teenager/young woman, which is as far as this first volume goes. (There will be another two, and when I found out that Griffith has finished the second one, I actually screamed.) I’ve often described this novel as very sensorial, and it is. Some metaphors for Griffith’s thoroughly researched 7^th-century Britain will stay with me for a long, long time, especially because of the way in which Hild takes it all in, observing the “natural” world not as an outsider but as a node in the great pattern of things.

Speaking of medieval literature and contemporary experiments to apply a medieval lens to the world, and vice versa (and bearing in mind that the word “medieval” comprises over a thousand years of history and a vast and complex network of territories), I wanted to highlight a quote from re-reading the intro to The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Medieval Period:

 So the questions we might as as we approach these texts involve less what they ‘are’ than what they ‘do’, what they might mean not only to their imagined original audience(s) but to us, and how that meaning might change as our knowledge develops.… A reader of a contemporary novel is seldom aware of the complex web of cultural assumptions that sustains the narrative; these assumptions are transparent and automatic. For readers of early literature the assumptions are solid, opaque, at times impenetrable—but this awareness of the alterity of the reader to the text is, we think, a very healthy thing. It is always good to be reminded that meanings are not simply ‘there’ in the text, waiting for the reader to stumble over them; they are kindled by the friction between the reader, the story and the world they both inhabit. Medieval texts force this awareness upon us, by it serves us well as readers of any literary work. (Emphasis my own.)

 I’d say this is applicable to life as a whole.

 

Viewing

 I’ve been watching a lot of shows this year, as one might expect. I binged on the US version of The Office and on The Witcher (I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I watched that show this year, before being confined, which feels like an age ago.) I was really excited about Lovecraft Country, and some aspects of it I found excellent (the cast, the gory scenes, the use of whiteness as an element of terror), but I think the last few episodes lost me a little. Now I’m really into Star Trek Discovery, although something I like about the franchise (the episodes being generally self-conclusive) has been done away with this time; perhaps to adapt to the current cliff-hanger based structure of media platforms.

In any case, the show I have enjoyed the most this year has been the HBO series The Young Pope (and its second season, The New Pope), directed by Paolo Sorrentino, starring Jude Law and John Malkovich (with Silvio Orlando’s character Voiello as one of my favorite fictional characters of all time). The show begins with the election of a young, inexperienced cardinal (Jude Law) as new Pope, fueled by Machiavellian cardinal Voiello —who really calls the shots in the Holy See—, who hopes that he will be tepid and malleable enough to maintain Voiello’s favored status quo in the Roman Church. Little does Voiello know that Pius XIII has his own plan and his own stormy relationship with God, which informs a quasi medieval (again that word!) approach to his role as head of the Catholic world. Does the show pass the Bechdel test? Not even close. Is it ironic that the fiction I have loved the most this year is set in the very core of Western capitalist patriarchy and basically deals with the different agents and forces invested in continuing it? Maybe! Please watch it, though! From the script, to the soundtrack, to the photography, it’s just so good!

 

 Listening

In music, I will only mention two beautiful cello concertos in two amazing renditions (at least I think so; I’m not an expert): Jacqueline du Pré’s classic performance of Dvořák’s cello concerto in B minor (op. 104) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and young and super talented Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s BBC Prom concert performing Elgar’s cello concerto in E minor (op. 85) with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Try not to be chopping onions when you play them, if you know what I mean.

 

Among other things,  Arrate Hidalgo is Associate Editor at Aqueduct Press. She is also an English to Spanish translator, an founder and organizer of a feminist sf con, and an amateur singer. Visit her website at arratehidalgo.com.