Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (19 page)

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* * * * *

Edited by Jim Steel

•

Throne of the Crescent
Moon

Saladin Ahmed

plus author
interview

•

nexus

Ramez Naam

•

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 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?

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.