by TTA Press
They whoop and call through the night, running, running. He and Roberto are risk-takers, re-vo-lu-tion-ary. The caper they’re planning will show they can bring the machines to a halt, show Amrit that Mikhail is bold.
“It’ll bring the whole thing down, to a standstill,” says Mikhail. He glances at his companion as they run.
He’s not Roberto. A skinny guy with a fake tooth, a friend of Roberto’s, maybe.
“You’re drifting hard,” the guy says. He looks nervous. “I’m talking about the flag. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The power station.” They’re running, running, almost there. “Like Roberto said. Unless he’s backed out on us, where is he?”
“Hold on.” Fake Tooth stops short. They’ve reached the western edge of the wall, and he leans against it, chest heaving for breath. “You? Are you saying that it was you and Roberto who blew up the power station?”
“It’s just gonna be a caper, a bit of sabotage.” Mikhail laughs. “No one is saying anything about blowing it up.”
“Mikhail, people died. One guy got sent to the box.” He whispers, but his lips are so close to Mikhail’s face it’s like a shout. Mikhail turns away, too quickly, and the ground and sky spin, change places. He lurches into the wall, grabs hold for balance.
“It was you. I can’t believe it. You, I heard about it, they sent you to the box.”
Mikhail slides down the wall, rests his cheek against its cold surface and closes his eyes. The box.
“You’re drifting too hard for this. We can go back.” The man’s voice is kindly. “Let’s go back.”
“Back to your childhood,” the woman’s voice in the loudspeaker is saying. Mikhail whimpers, crouched down with his head between his knees.
He’s naked and cold, in the box. He’s afraid, he can’t recall how long he’s been in here, but the voice is soothing.
“Your childhood. Is that where the seeds of your aberrant behavior were planted? It’s not your fault. Was there a teacher, perhaps? A dorm patron?”
In the end, after the painful cold and hunger and endless interrogation, Mikhail screams the name of his nursery matron over and over, and the freezing temperature is replaced by blessed warmth. He is fed and clothed and he sleeps, soothed by voices singing softly to him over the loudspeaker. He presses his cheek to the inside of the box, sobbing, and kisses it, gratefully.
“That’s sick, little man,” says the man with the fake tooth. He’s bent over on the pavement next to the wall, cradling Mikhail’s head in his lap. A light rain is falling.
Joseph. His name is Joseph.
“You’re their man now.” Joseph’s cheeks are wet, maybe from the rain. “They broke you and rebuilt you.”
“I rebuild things,” Mikhail sobs. “I can fix it, I have tools. I work.”
“Of course you do.”
Joseph holds him a while in his hard, gangly arms, and Mikhail slides down off the Drift like walking downhill through a fog bank and out the other side. He closes his eyes.
“Joseph?”
“Hmm?”
“What was your dare?”
A chuckle, without humor. “Forget it, little brother. You’re not the dupe I took you for. Takes the fun out of it.”
Mikhail looks up into Joseph’s face. The man’s staring away, over the wall to the imposing tower of central administration.
“Can you see it?”
Mikhail cranes his neck up from Joseph’s lap. “The flag, up on top? That was the dare?”
“Yeah. Stupid.”
The two regard one another for a long moment. Joseph stands up. “I’m going to get it, for you. I’ll be bold for once.”
“Wait.” Mikhail pulls the repair tool, his only real possession, from the pocket of his coveralls and presses it into Joseph’s hand. “Take it.”
With a grunt, Joseph scrambles up and over the wall, and his footfalls recede in the darkness.
A sudden silence, like he was never there. Mikhail lies in the dark, the pavement cool against his cheek, listening to the rain whisper in his ears, until he hears the curfew siren sounding: three short, one long; three short, one long.
Stumbling to his feet, he starts to walk.
The street outside the Hangout is empty and quiet, but for a trickle of rainwater moving through the gutter. A green tablet of Drift dissolves on the wet pavement, crushed by the retreating feet of fellow young people, like Amrit and Roberto, returning through the gate to the dorms. Mikhail stares at the green speck, and his eyes water.
The lights of the first patrol approach, sweeping in to collect anyone on this side of the wall after curfew. Dimly, in the distance beyond the western wall, near the flag tower, he hears shouts, and the clamor of a trespassing alarm.
Mikhail begins to run.
He runs wildly, with no real energy to sustain him. He thinks of Amrit, her teeth flashing in the dark Hangout; he sees Roberto’s affable smile under dripping face paint. He thinks of Joseph climbing over the wall. Then he thinks of nothing at all, his feet pounding the pavement noisily, his arms pumping, until he sees the gate. Once through it, he sprawls on a bench where the sidewalk begins, breathless, on the right side of the wall at last.
Under the bench lies a broken bird.
* * * * *
Copyright © 2013 Tracie Welser
* * * * *
Tracie Welser is a graduate of the 2010 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her stories have been published in Crossed Genres, Outlaw Bodies, and in Interzone #240. Tracie blogs at www.thisisnotanowl.com.
* * * * *
"Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." (TVTropes.org)
Have you ever had to rack your brains to recall the title of an Interzone story? Perhaps after something cropped up on line. You want title, author and issue number. You remember a comic SF story with a plucky female waitress. A lack of specifics that makes the prospect of sifting a mountain of back issues less than enticing.
Enter skipforward.net, the 'neural link' everyone will need.
Skipforward is cutting edge research to develop a collaborative database containing both hard fact and subjective opinion. The system takes many differing personal annotations on a wide variety of media and gives tailored views of the aggregated data.
For stories users can also write reviews and assign tropes, from the, far too fascinating, TVTropes.org, (It's so easy to get stuck there!)
Suddenly finding that waitress is easy.
On Skipforward users can add whatever information they want, even when it conflicts with other opinions.
David Brin's 1990 novel "Earth" predicted a world wide web where reputation played a major role. Now current social networks feature some feedback data ("+1", "like"), but this has little influence unless, say, Stephen Fry is the source.
In Skipforward, opinions you see are weighted according to their source. If your entries frequently disagree with another's then, from your point of view, that other user's opinions will have less weight in the future.
Have a look, try skipforward.net! We want you to get an account and record your opinions of Interzone stories, books and even movies on Skipforward. Go to the website, send a mail, and get started.
No strings attached. Skipforward is an open source project, and the data entered into the system is freely available. It's all for Science!
Skipforward is still under development and aims to use crowd sourcing to counteract some of the obvious problems that plague say, Amazon reviews, Trip Adviser and similar web applications. Interzone is their guinea pig.
Why not help them, and Interzone?
* * * * *
BOOK ZONE
Edited by Jim Steel
•
Throne of the Crescent Moon
Saladin Ahmed
plus author interview
•
nexus
Ramez Naam
•
&nb
sp; bedlam
Christopher Brookmyre
•
steampunk III
Edited By Ann Vandermeer
•
TAKEN
Benedict Jacka
•
origin
J.T. Brannan
•
helix wars
Eric Brown
•
IN OTHER WORLDS
Margaret Atwood
•
THE CORPSE-RAT KING
Lee Battersby
•
The CREATIVE FIRE
Brenda Cooper
•
jagannath
Karin Tidbeck
Plus author interview
•
THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON
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 ve
ry 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?
I knew I wanted to have characters from the Soo Republic (the Crescent Moon Kingdoms’ rough Africa analogue) appear in Book 1. But Dawoud and Litaz really emerged as part of a dynamic. As I wrote Adoulla into existence, it became clear that old friends were a big part of what was important to him. The idea of a friendship with a couple kind of spun organically from there.
The Falcon Prince is an interesting figure. Does Arabic history boast Robin Hood-like figures, given that charity begins at the mosque?
I’d guess nearly every culture in the world has both trickster heroes, and every region’s history has populist uprisings. But the Falcon Prince is fairly Western – fairly Hollywood, even – in his genealogy. Quite a lot of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and Douglas Fairbanks’ Thief of Baghdad is in there… In general, Throne of the Crescent Moon does a fair amount of balancing that sort of problematic twentieth century Orientalist culture with more “authentic” (wince) influences. Harryhausen was a big influence on my monsters, for instance.
God is referenced frequently in dialogue throughout Throne of the Crescent Moon, but no one in the book actually performs an act of worship. Was this deliberate, and if so, why?