Read Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 Online
Authors: Various
Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 (19 page)
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* * * * *
Edited by Jim Steel
•
Saladin Ahmed plus author interview
Ramez Naam
Christopher Brookmyre
STEAMPUNK III: STEAMPUNK REVOLUTION
Edited By Ann Vandermeer
Benedict Jacka
J.T. Brannan
Eric Brown
Margaret Atwood
Lee Battersby
Brenda Cooper
Karin Tidbeck plus author interview
•
Saladin Ahmed
Gollancz hb, 288pp, £14.99
Review and interview by Ian Sales
Arabian Nights-style fantasies are not unusual in English-language literature, genre or otherwise, and the Arab world of yore has been used – perhaps less frequently than its historical impact would suggest – in a number of genre works, from Robert Irwin’s
The Arabian Nightmare
to Ian Dennis’ Prince of Stars trilogy.
Throne of the Crescent Moon
, however, is less
Alf Laylat wa Layla
than it is a genre sword-and-sorcery novel set in a world inspired by the Caliphates.
Dr Adoulla Makhslood is a ghul-hunter and fast approaching retirement age. His assistant, Raseed bas Raseed, is a Dervish, a sort of combat monk, devout and highly-trained in armed and unarmed combat. When the woman Adoulla loves, the brothel-keeper Mistress Miri, sends a boy to him whose parents have been killed by ghuls, Adoulla and Raseed head out of the city to the scene of the murder to investigate. There, they are attacked by ghuls an order of magnitude more powerful than any Adoulla has ever encountered before. Happily, the duo are saved by a magical lion, which proves to be Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, a shapechanger and the protector of her Bedouin tribe. Except her tribe is no more – they have all been killed by ghuls. Zamia reluctantly agrees to accompany Adoulla and Raseed back to the city, where Adoulla must investigate the mystery of the powerful ghuls’ origin. This leads him into contact with the Falcon Prince, a Robin Hood-like figure who seems set on seizing the eponymous throne for himself, and whose aims and methods Adoulla finds profoundly objectionable.
The Gollancz publicity material describes
Throne of the Crescent Moon
as “in many ways, a very traditional fantasy”, and makes much of its setting – as informed by Ahmed’s background. But it is in the ways the book is not a traditional fantasy that it is most interesting. The protagonist is an old man, about to retire, and not a peasant hero with secret magical privilege. There are poor people in the book’s world, and the characters spend much of their time among them. There is no romanticising of rural or urban poverty. And the book ends with the status quo very much upset.
It’s not all perfect, however. Though Ahmed assembles an interesting core cast, Raseed turns more or less single-note once Zamia has made her appearance. She too feels somewhat paper-thin. The elderly magician couple of Dawoud and Litaz, however, are much better drawn, and the best written characters in the book. The writing also takes a while to settle down and a few uses of American vernacular in early chapters jar badly. Everything in the plot is there for a reason, but one or two incidents do feel a tad over-extended.
Despite all that,
Throne of the Crescent Moon
marks a promising debut. As twenty-first century fantasy novels go, it is a remarkably light book, weighing in at a mere 288 pages. It is a fast read, despite the plot feeling more like a series of arabesques than the straight line more typical of genre fantasies. The world of the story feels both Arabic and yet, perhaps, not quite Arabic enough. There is a definitely a
Thief of Baghdad
atmosphere throughout, and some of Ahmed’s choices were clearly informed by his background – but
Throne of the Crescent Moon
is an Arabic fantasy in much the same way typical Anglophone genre fantasy novels are loosely-derived from the Middle Ages in Europe.
But it’s not the world of
Throne of the Crescent Moon
that is its most interesting aspect, or indeed its Unique Selling Point. But using that world has allowed Ahmed to question some of the tropes that are deeply embedded, and usually deployed without thought, in genre fantasy. As a result, I suspect the Crescent Moon Kingdoms series may prove to be a more impressive work than any individual volume within it.
The Gollancz publicity material makes a point of mentioning your heritage and that
Throne of the Crescent Moon
draws heavily upon it. What elements of your background fed into your writing; and was this a deliberate choice or something that just happened?
Absolutely deliberate. I understand the appeal of the notion of literature as a self-contained field – the idea that talking about a writer’s biography or demographic profile is somehow getting “outside the work”. But every book ever written is, to a degree, a product of the cultural forces that surround the author. I was raised in a mostly Arab, mostly Muslim immigrant community. The sound of the call to prayer, the smells of certain breads – these are a part of who I am.
This doesn’t mean I subscribe to a doctrinaire notion of authenticity, though. Howard Andrew Jones and the late George Alec Effinger – two white guys from the American Midwest – have written fantastic, convincing Arab/Muslim SF/F series. These things are rarely a straight line.
Did you feel a temptation to make those cultural forces more overt in
Throne of the Crescent Moon
, to weigh the scales in favour of “Arab” rather than “western epic fantasy”? Do you feel some kind of balancing act is required? Or was the process more unconscious than conscious?
There’s certainly a balancing act going on. On the one hand, the novel tries to value things epic fantasy often fails to value: home, age, piety, the poor. On the other hand, it’s very solidly in the tradition of western adventure fantasy (though perhaps more sword and sorcery than epic fantasy). I guess I’d say the process itself is organic but conscious.
What differences – if any – do you feel exist between genre fantasy and literary fantasies, and what position do you see Arab fantasies such as
Throne of the Crescent Moon
occupying?
That’s an essay rather than a quick answer, of course. The short version is that they operate vis-à-vis different sets of conventions. And
Throne of the Crescent Moon
’s set of conventions is absolutely inherited from the genre end of things. The magic often reeks of taxonomy. There is – horror of horrors! – a map of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms included. The novel was, in other words, written gleefully to the beat of M. John Harrison’s “great clomping foot of nerdism”. I suppose it goes without saying that I find the idea that such attention to world-building necessarily results in a bad – or fascistic! – novel to be, well, horseshit.
There are very few Arab science fiction writers, and fewer still translated into English. Yet, Arabian Nights-style fantasies are not unknown in the English-speaking world. Given this, why did you choose to write fantasy rather than SF?
I think much of the interest in the Arabian Nights comes from more “literary” (I know, I know) writers, who latch onto either the story-within-story structure or Scheherazade as a symbol of the unrelenting demands of story. I like John Barth and all, but these writers tend to reduce the Arabian Nights to a prism through which western literature can navel gaze. I’m much more interested in the half-historical, half-mythical landscape of the Arabian Nights
as a landscape
, if that makes sense.
And it was always going to be fantasy, as opposed to science fiction for me. I’m a (profoundly heterodox) theist. At my core, I’m a magical thinker. But also my training as a reader is very much in fantasy. My fantasy/science fiction reading ratio is probably ten to one.
Adoulla is an old man, close to retirement. Why choose such an aged character as the hero of
Throne of the Crescent Moon
?
Because I’ve always been a cranky old man at heart. Because the teenager’s journey to self-discovery – which is at the centre of so many adventure fantasy novels – holds very little interest to me as a man nearing forty. But the question of how we find peace after our bodies and souls have had some heavy, hard mileage put on them? That interests me greatly.
Settled married couples are also an odd choice as protagonists for a fantasy novel – did they come out of earlier decisions you made about the book you were writing, or did they grow out of the writing?