Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Alif the Unseen
by G. Willow Wilson

Originally published: 2012
Read: August 2024

This is the debut novel of G. Willow Wilson, better known to me as the cocreator of Ms. Marvel. I've classified it as "fantasy" on LibraryThing (it's got a genie in it), but it arguably lies at the overlap of fantasy and science fiction, as advanced computer technology is also a key aspect of the plot. The book takes place in a generic Arab state during a sort of "Arab Spring"–like moment, fueled by social media. Wilson says in an afterword to my edition that she wrote the book to unite the three audiences for her previous work: sf&f fans, Muslims, and the kind of people who listen to NPR!

This combination of genres and approaches is the high point of the novel. To me, as a western reader of genre fiction, the book takes a lot of familiar ideas and presents them in an unfamiliar way, which I really enjoyed. Despite being over 400 pages long, it's a pretty quick read. It's largely undemanding, I would say, but occasionally has a really tough moment, highlighting the difficulty of the concepts it works through.

Two things of interest to me. One, I don't know how many readers of the book were in the market for Lawrence Durrell jokes, but I thought the book's comment about the Alexandria Quartet was laugh-out-loud hilarious. I was squarely in the target audience, anyway. Second, if you are a Marvel fan, you should note the book has a couple mentions of World of Battlecraft, the same fictional MMORPG that Kamala Khan plays in Wilson's Ms. Marvel comics.