A DEAD DJINN IN CAIRO, first in the Dead Djinn Universe stories, and THE ANGEL OF KHAN EL-KHALILI, second short story in the series

A DEAD DJINN IN CAIRO
P. DJÈLÍ CLARK (Dead Djinn Universe #0.5) And read Arley Sorg's interview with Author Clark!
Tor.com
FREE online read!

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Egypt, 1912. In an alternate Cairo infused with the otherworldly, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigate disturbances between the mortal and the (possibly) divine. What starts off as an odd suicide case for Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi leads her through the city’s underbelly as she encounters rampaging ghouls, saucy assassins, clockwork angels, and plot that could unravel time itself.

My Review: In honor of the publication tomorrow of the first full-length novel in Author Phenderson Djèlí Clark's Majgickqal-Cairo steampunk series, as well as his publishing career, let's revisit the place it all began.

Fatma of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, and Aasim, the Cairo policeman, are two of the series' through-line characters. They, and the utterly transformed-by-magic Cairo they live in, are introduced in this little gem of a procedural tale.

Fatma sat back in a red-cushioned seat as the automated wheeled carriage plowed along the narrow streets. Most of Cairo slept, except for the glow of a gaslight market or the pinprick lights of towering mooring masts where airships came and went by the hour. Her fingers played with her cane’s lion-headed pommel, watching aerial trams that moved high above the city, crackling electricity illuminating the night along their lines. Their carriage passed a lone man in a rickety donkey cart. He drove his beast at a slow trot, as if in defiance of the modernity that surrounded him.

“Another damned ghul attack!” Aasim exclaimed. He sat opposite her, reading over several cables. “That’s odd. They didn’t kill anyone—they took them. Snatched them and ran right off.”

Fatma looked up. That was odd. Ghuls fed on the living. Their victims were usually found half-devoured. They weren’t in the habit of stealing people.

Now, the scene and the stakes are set: These two are working on more than one case, like law enforcement everywhere, but they are clearly up to their necks in a very different place from where thee and me live. And, it turns out, this is *exactly* what I've been waiting for!

Beneath the tree, a tall figure inspected a curious structure of overlapping gear wheels—some massive, others small and delicate as a coin. Each had been cut with precision, so that their teeth meshed seamlessly together. Their surfaces were engraved with metal script, some she knew to be numerals. At their arrival, the tall figure broke from his inspection and turned about.

With effort, Fatma suppressed a gasp similar to the one that escaped Aasim’s lips. It was always an odd thing to be in the presence of an angel—or at least the beings that claimed to be so.

They had appeared after the djinn, suddenly and without warning. Considerable debate was expended on affirming their identity. The Coptic Church argued that they could not be angels, for all such divinities resided in heaven with God. The Ulama similarly asserted that true angels had no free will, and could not have simply come here of their own volition. Both issued cautious statements naming them, at the least, “otherworldly entities.” The self-proclaimed angels were silent on the matter—validating no particulars of either faith, and remaining enigmatic regarding their motives.

It's this kind of enough-but-not-too-much detail that is what makes Author Clark's writing work for me. This first-in-series story, nominated for a 2017 Locus Award for Best Novelette, convinced me to get as much of this Universe as I could as fast as I could; now my patience (enforced, but it still counts) is at last rewarded.

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THE ANGEL OF KHAN EL-KHALILI
P. DJÈLÍ CLARK (Dead Djinn Universe #0.6)
Tor.com
FREE online read!

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: We are overjoyed to be reprinting “The Angel of Khan el-Khalili” by P. Djèlí Clark, set in the same world as A Master of Djinn, out on May 11!

The story first appeared in the anthology Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, edited by Matthew Bright and published by Twopenny Press.

My Review: This meditation on the price of Truth and the unlikelihood of Honesty being its own reward is told in the second person. This is, I need not tell anyone of my acquaintance, a Literary Original Sin and usually causes me to slam covers and jab power buttons with disgust and outrage.

Author Clark, somehow, is immune to this inflexible rule being applied to him. In fact, these beahviors didn't so much as occur to me. After reading the very, very moreish A Dead Djinn in Cairo, and realizing that I would get some more background on the Angels introduced in that novelette I simply soldiered on into this short story. And look what rewarded me almost at once:

Angels arrived in Cairo some forty years past. Your parents had been children then, but they still tell you stories of al-Jahiz—the disappeared Soudanese mystic, scientist, madman—whose fantastic machines had sent magic pouring into the world with the force of an unstoppered sea.

I absolutely love this world. I am besotted with its clockwork boilerplate eunuchs (robots to thee and me), I am fascinated at the setting of Cairo, that most astonishing of cities with its shocking heat, its soft light, and its myriad of people all of whom seem to have a pack of Gauloises secreted on them somewhere. I even like its magjicqk system! Djinns and ifrits and Marîds and ghuls...turns out maybe what I've been allergic to all these years might not be majgiqck per se but just be the samey Tolkieny elves and fae and stuff.

So after meeting the Angel in the first story, I was really ready for this expansion of my knowledge about them in the contect of this glorious new Universe. I did get some satisfaction:

But angels are another matter. They are rarer things, ethereal beings who shroud their bodies behind contraptions of mechanical grandeur and hold themselves apart from mortals and djinn alike. None, not even the religious bodies of Cairo, have been able to discern the reason for their coming. And they have remained equally enigmatic.

But this is a short story. It's hard for me to get more than a partial lock on what the heck's going on and who will be repeating in the series from such a condensed dosage. The enigma of Angels is ongoing here and, well, like second-person allergy, I will just have to get over my greed for more until it's Author Clark's desire to give it to me.

None of the characters in this short piece appear to recur in the novel. It's not like that's a bad thing; I'm accustomed to being a little more fully knitted into the fabric of a series, though. What does happen here is the Universe expands its spiritual borders in an anti-capitalist direction, and that's just hunky-dory by me! Poor little Aliaa, the seeker of a miracle from Seeker the Angel, has a sister in dire, dire straits. The poor thing is dying of burns she got saving other workers from a fire that broke out in the dress facotry where she works. With, in fact, her fifteen-year-old sister Aliaa.

Shades of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. And, not coincidentally, Tor.com's 2014 Hugo-nominated novella Burning Girls, which I rated quite highly. That tragedy is intensely relevant again in this day and time, as workers' rights and voters' rights and the simple right of nonwhite persons to exist unmolested in the US are under active attack from the scum on the political right again. Still. Still and again.

And I can honestly, unreservedly say to you that second-person narration, majgiqck that works, and deeply, deeply painful life lessons for a teenaged protagonist...as fat a lump of Mudge-kryptonite as you can imagine, in other words...does not matter to my pleasure in this compact read. It's free. Give it a whirl. Then go read my review of The Haunting of Tram Car 015, a very, very funny and very wickedly pointed expansion of Hamed and Onsi's roles in the ongoing series.