Giving the Game Away | Alif, Seen!

To tie a little knot on top of all the fun we had with G. Willow Wilson's tour-de-force debut, I thought this afternoon I'd announce the winners of the giveaway the lovely sorts at Corvus were kind enough to organise.

As ever, I received entries from all round the world, but on this occasion, alas, I was only able to accept those from the UK and Europe.

Before I give the game away, let's remind ourselves of the question I asked you to answer:

Which letter of the English alphabet is

the Arabic character 'Alif' equivalent to?

The solution to this particular riddle? 'Twas as easy as blank, B, C:

The letter 'A'

And almost everyone who entered the giveaway got it right. Next time, let's shoot for the moon, folks!

But enough beating around the alif. We have three lucky winners, and they are:

• Kathleen Hooper, of Nottingham
• John Elder, fae Glasgow
• and Latvia's own Ieva Zalite

Hearty congratulations to the winners — meanwhile my commiserations to the less lucky.

Kathleen, John and Ieva should expect to receive an email from me to confirm their details within the next few days. All else who entered, I'm afraid you'll have get your grubbies on this book the old fashioned way.

By bartering precious stones for it, of course. :D

About the Author | Meet G. Willow Wilson

In the inaugural edition of About the Author, I introduced you to Tom Pollock, author of The City's Son, one of my favourite first novels of 2012 to date.

Today, it gives me great pleasure to welcome the wonderful author of another such novel to The Speculative Scotsman: a tour-de-force debut that I made no bones about adoring in my review. In fact, it's safe to say Alif the Unseen may feature in my roundup of the year's best books, when the time comes to make such declarations. It really is that good, guys.

In the interim, if for some mysterious reason you're still not convinced, perhaps the fascinating chat I had with G. Willow Wilson will tip the balance in the correct direction. You need only read on, readers!

***

A very good afternoon to you, Ms. Wilson. I’m Niall. Pleased to meet you – and doubly so to have you here on The Speculative Scotsman.

It’s my pleasure! Thanks for the invitation.

First things first, then: could you tell us a little bit about yourself? For those folks not yet in the know, who are you, and how did you come to be here?

Let’s see: one of the questions I get asked a lot is “What does the G stand for?” the answer to which is ‘Gwendolyn.’ I’m about to turn thirty. I was born and grew up in the United States, but after university I moved to Cairo, Egypt, where I spent most of my early and mid-twenties. I got married and built a home there, and the city, as well as the wider Middle East, remains one of the primary inspirations for my work. I’m about to have my second child. I was a latecomer to video games, but now I love them. I think that covers the critical stuff.

Though it’s been available in the United States for some time, your first novel proper, Alif the Unseen, came out in the UK late last week. I’m of the opinion that everyone with eyes should buy it, but why? What do you think makes your fictional debut distinct?

High praise! And that’s a good question. When I finished writing my last book, The Butterfly Mosque (which was nonfiction), I wanted to do something completely different, giving free rein to both my pop cultural sensibilities and my interest in politics and religion. Alif was what came out. I suppose what makes it unique is the free mixing of low-tech mythology and high-tech computer culture. Djinn using wifi. Djinn ex machina. I don’t know that that’s been done before.

Given the opportunity, which I know many marketing departments deny their authors, how would you blurb your book?

A young Arab-Indian hacker in an unnamed oil emirate falls in love with the wrong girl and goes on the run from a shadowy state security apparatus known only as The Hand. Plus genies, the Islamist girl next door, a car chase through the desert, and much speculating about the place of myth and religion in the modern world.

As I’ve alluded, Alif the Unseen is a debut in technical terms, but it’s very far from the first piece of work you’ve had published. Could you talk a little bit about the many and various other things you’ve written?

Gosh, there’s a lot. I worked as a journalist for several years while living in Cairo, and then got into comics pretty seriously — I’ve written a graphic novel, one monthly series and several miniseries for DC Comics and Marvel, the two biggest comics publishers in the US.

Your first ongoing comic book, AIR for Vertigo, about an acrophobic flight attendant who becomes caught up in a terrorist plot to take over the skies, ran for 24 issues before being cancelled in mid-2010 due to low sales. That is, if I’m to believe Wikipedia.

Should I? Or is there maybe more to the story?

There isn’t more, I’m afraid. AIR garnered a fair amount of critical praise — it was nominated for an Eisner Award — but it just never sold very well. It was born into a soft market, and it was a very, very weird book. But it’s had a bit of a second life in the backlist. Someone sent me photos a couple of years ago of a woman cosplaying the main character at San Diego Comic Con. That made me feel I’d arrived.

Two years later, how do you view AIR today? I’ve been reading the first few trades in readiness for this interview, and this is no slight – as of the third collected volume, I’m enjoying the series a great deal – but AIR is very much a product of its time, isn’t it?

Very much so. I joked with Karen Berger, who edited the series, that in ten years AIR would look like a period piece. AIR was a response to a very particular post-9/11 moment in American history, when we came to see air travel not as this luxurious, jet-setting mode of transport, a la the 1960s, but as a threat to national security, a hassle, and the symbol of a changed world. Something in the American character really altered, and AIR is a sort of psychadelic tribute to that.

Is Alif the Unseen, equally? A product of its particular period, I mean.

Not intentionally! When I started writing it, no one had any inkling that the Arab Spring was right around the corner. I knew change was afoot in the Middle East and I knew that young computer savvy hacktivists were a big part of that, but I had no idea it was going to blow up the way it did. I frankly thought I was overselling the importance of the digital youth movement in the Middle East. But I wasn’t.

Getting back to the matter at hand, might I ask how the new book came about?

I don’t rightly know. I wanted to talk about the digital underground, and while I was mulling it over a hacker friend — upon whom Alif is very loosely based — disappeared from the internet. Like disappeared. And I thought, how might one go about that? And suddenly there was a book in my head.

You’ve spoken before about how Alif the Unseen was born out of rage. Could you explain what that means here?

I was tired of being forced into boxes. Pre-Arab Spring, people only seemed to want to hear about a handful of things when it came to the Middle East: terrorists, the exotic undeveloped Orient (which no longer exists), and The Crisis Of Muslim Women, about which most honest-to-God Muslim women are somewhat perplexed. Even for nonfiction, there was a script, a narrative one was supposed to follow. The fact that Arab youth were not only adopting cutting-edge technology, but using it in revolutionary ways, was not interesting to people. It didn’t fit the script. It didn’t involve camels or gender segregation. It was very, very frustrating. So I said screw it, I’m writing a novel. And then came the Arab Spring.

In a one-off column for Vertigo Voices, way back when, you wrote: “Once upon a time an observant therapist told me I had categorized and self-analyzed my subconscious so well that I could talk for hours without revealing anything about myself.” How then does Alif the Unseen speak to who you are?

I said that? How pretentious. Well, it’s true. And in that vein, Alif is the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written, and I’ve written an autobiography. Alif is a pretty good image of what my head looks like. I don’t perceive a proper line between the seen and the unseen, or between high culture and pop culture. I live a very odd life — I’m a comics and media junky living in a very conservative religious community, shuttling between civilizatons. Alif contains elements of all those things.

They say home is where the heart is. If I may, where’s your heart, Ms. Wilson, and how has that factored into your fiction?

Home for me is one place: Boulder, Colorado, which is a little university town in the Rocky Mountains.

It’s where I went to high school; my parents still live there, and I make yearly pilgrimages to see them and catch up with old friends at my favorite cafe. But like Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings, I can’t quite go back to living in the Shire, much as I might want to. I've seen too much of the rest of the world, and living in a small town involves a lot of pretending that the rest of the world does not exist. I suppose the profound psychological displacement that entails must have an impact on my fiction, but other people are usually better at detecting it than I am. To me, being unsettled is normal.

As a comic book writer, a journalist, an American Muslim, a successful memoirist and now (if I may) a genre novelist, I think it’s fair to say you engage with some significantly different audiences. Is there a hope that Alif the Unseen will perhaps bridge these gaps? 

Come to that, the book’s been out in the US for a few months. Has it?

One can always hope. That was one of my big goals with this book. Comics fans are very loyal and will follow one into whatever genre one pursues, but the reverse is less common. Will people who like reading nonfiction pick up a book like Alif? Butterfly Mosque seems to have resonated most intensely with women (I’ve done many a reading to a 100% female audience) and Alif is absent a lot of the qualities of personal intimacy and reflection that attracted those readers. It’s a little more action-y, and involves young men doing stupid things. There’s a whiff of comic book about it. So it’s difficult to say.

What would you say to people who think “genre” is a dirty word? And how does hearing Alif the Unseen described as such sit with you?

I’m perfectly happy to hear Alif described as genre. I think people need to get over the idea that genre fiction cannot have literary merit or political relevance. In fact, with trends being what they are — look at the success of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire — I think that’s already happening. Let’s not forget that genre fiction started out as a way to sneak cultural commentary into a highly censorious environment. (I’m thinking of the great sci-fi pioneers of the 1950s and 60s.)

Changing gears, are there any particular authors or novels that have been an inspiration to you?

Neil Gaiman; Neal Stephenson; Peter Milligan’s graphic opus Shade: The Changing Man, which I consider the best comic book series ever written; Umberto Eco — especially Foucault’s Pendulum, to which I feel Alif owes something; EM Forster, who never wrote a bad book; and a lot of 1980’s high fantasy, particularly Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders.

Meanwhile, how does it feel to inspire others in turn? Even if you aren’t convinced that it has as yet, I don’t doubt that your work will, Ms. Wilson.

I never know how to respond when readers say I’ve inspired them--it’s such an intense compliment that simply saying “thanks” seems inadequate. If you’ve written me a fan letter saying as much and I haven’t written back, that’s why. The most important thing is to go out and use that inspiration, because it’s precious. Where it came from almost doesn’t matter.

I dare say it’s about time we closed the book on this interview, but before I let you off the hook, how can people keep up to speed with all things G. Willow Wilson? I’ve already made reference to your blog, but I do believe you tweet, too!

I tweet like a bandit. That’s probably the best way to get in touch with my directly. I’ve become a very bad, neglectful blogger, but I do post when I can. My website also has info on upcoming appearances and links to buy books.

Speaking – albeit briefly – of tweeting, is social media going to bring down the world as we know it? I’m referring here to your essay entitled Who’s Afraid of Pop Culture?

Social media isn’t going to bring down anything, except perhaps work productivity. People used to be afraid of the printing press, but that didn’t turn out so badly, did it? Yes, there are intensely stupid conversations on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, but there are intensely stupid conversations in real life. Listen to the idiot in front of you in the checkout line at the grocery store. That’s Twitter. That’s life.

With which, what’s next for you? Another novel? Will you be going back to comics? Or is mum the word at the moment?

I’m in the midst of another as yet untitled novel, set mostly on the high seas. Fans of a particular long-haired lothario djinn from Alif will be pleased to see him again. There’s nothing on tap at this very moment comics-wise, but I’m sure there will be before long.

Last but not least: in the spirit of the secret world that features in Alif the Unseen, tell us something about yourself that no-one knows.

I never wear matching socks. This is not a reflection of my profound iconoclasm; only the disarray of my sock drawer.

And that’s that!

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, Ms. Wilson. Getting to know you a little bit better has been an absolute pleasure on my part, and I'm sure the folks at home feel the same way.

Thank you!

***

G. Willow Wilson was a great sport agreeing to speak with me in the first place, and I'm deeply in her debt for answering even the most inane of my questions. She was last seen (by me) in the comments section of my review of her book, so if for instance you've already read Alif the Unseen and you'd like to tell her how much you enjoyed it... well, by now I warrant you know what to do.

Coming up on The Speculative Scotsman shortly, my thoughts on The Underwater Welder by comic book mastermind Jeff Lemire, and the first flush of fun new feature wherein I ask that eternal question: is this sex scene Hot, or Not?

We'll all be talking dirty tomorrow! :P

Book Review | Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition 

"I will tell you a story, but it comes with a warning: when you hear it, you will become someone else."

He calls himself Alif - few people know his real name - a young man born in a Middle Eastern city that straddles the ancient and modern worlds. When Alif meets the aristocratic Intisar, he believes he has found love. But their relationship has no future—Intisar is promised to another man and her family's honour must be satisfied. As a remembrance, Intisar sends the heartbroken Alif a mysterious book. Entitled The Thousand and One Days, Alif discovers that this parting gift is a door to another world—a world from a very different time, when old magic was in the ascendant and the djinn walked amongst us.

With the book in his hands, Alif finds himself drawing attention - far too much attention - from both men and djinn. Thus begins an adventure that takes him through the crumbling streets of a once-beautiful city, to uncover the long-forgotten mysteries of the Unseen. Alif is about to become a fugitive in both the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. And he is about to unleash a destructive power that will change everything and everyone—starting with Alif himself.

***

"G. Willow Wilson was living in Egypt when she started writing Alif the Unseen in 2010. The fictional revolution in the book became a reality in Spring 2011 when ordinary people across many Middle Eastern countries rose up against their rules."

So reads the press release that accompanied my copy of G. Willow Wilson's tour-de-force debut, giving great weight to this exquisite tale of tales wherein a young man from an unnamed emirate comes into possession of an ancient text long thought lost, codes from its pages a program that could change the way we see the world, and becomes, finally, a figurehead in the fight against corruption in the government — all in the name of love.

Love.

Love is at the heart of Alif the Unseen. Love is what makes it so very special. In the first, Alif's love for Intisar, a princess of sorts to his digitally literate street rat. They've been seeing one another for many a moon, as of the outset; courting, of course, in a clandestine sense. But when Intisar is promised to a man closer to her social stature than the grey hat (read hacker) who has fallen for her, their affair comes to a crushing conclusion.

In the aftermath, all Alif has left of the love of his life is the Alf Yeom, literally The Thousand and One Days: a book of stories that is "the inverse, the overturning" (p.96) of The Thousand and One Nights, purportedly written not by people, but magical creatures.

And in the margins, Intisar's fascinating annotations:

The suggestion that the Alf Yeom is the work of a djinn is surely a curious one. The Quran speaks of the hidden people in the most candid way, yet more and more the educated faithful will not admit to believing in them, however readily they might accept even the harshest and most obscure points of Islamic law. That God has ordained that a thief must pay for his crime with his hand, that a woman must inherit half of what a man inherits — these things are treated not only as facts, but as obvious facts, whereas the existence of conscious beings we cannot see - and all the fantastic and wondrous things that their existence suggests and makes possible - produces profound discomfort among precisely that cohort of Muslims most lauded for their role in that religious "renaissance" presently expected by western observers: young degree-holding traditionalists. Yet how hollow rings a tradition in which the law, which is subject to interpretation, is held as sacrosanct, yet the word of God is not to be trusted when it comes to His description of what He has created.

I do not know what I believe. (p.104)

Intisar's crisis of faith is but the impetus behind the majestic vision quest Alif embarks on thereafter: the outcome is still a ways away. And would that it were still further, for this is a fantastic first novel!

I should stress that G. Willow Wilson has been published in the past. In 2010, The Butterfly Mosque - a memoir about her conversion to Islam - attracted an array of acclaim, and her name will be fairly familiar to comic book fans: she scripted the late, lamented Vertigo series AIR, Mystic for Marvel, and her credits also include a couple of fill-in issues for Superman. So Wilson isn't averse to a little seeming silliness, nor to more inwardly meaningful matters, such as class, censorship, fear and belief. In Alif the Unseen, she takes the high road and the low, trading on both areas of expertise to create a story about stories that stands out from the first word.

That said, the Alif is both more and less than a word. It is the first letter of Sura Al Baqara in the Quran; it is the first line of code ever written; it is a state of mind, a suggestion, a symbol that our hero becomes - inasmuch as it becomes him - over the course of this remarkable fantasy narrative. Alif "had spent so much time cloaked behind his screen name, a mere letter of the alphabet, that he no longer thought of himself as anything but an alif — a straight line, a wall. His given name fell flat in his ears now. The act of concealment had become more powerful that what it concealed." (p.3)

Alif the Unseen, too, conceals a great deal. The initial simplicity of the Aladdin-esque romance with which it begins belies the book's more challenging aspects. Seductive as it is, this early section seems fleeting when set against the heady concoction of faith, torture and politics that fuels its unforgettable finale. Indeed, these ends are so at odds that one can only imagine the inevitable clash, yet instead, Wilson shapes a careful, character-driven commingling — a thing both beautiful and terrible to behold.

Speaking of which, as easy as our characters are to grasp at the outset, as Alif the Unseen progresses they resonate with both emotional depth and intellectual complexity. Particularly when Intisar's part is played, Alif and his childhood friend Dina develop majestically, and the people (and the creatures) they meet on their journey - both within themselves and outwith the world they know - are fantastic fancies, finely described.

Alif the Unseen is an extraordinary novel, written with a hypnotic naturalness that reminded this reader of Neil Gaiman, whose blurb adorns the front cover of Corvus' delightfully designed British edition. He writes that "G. Willow Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic," to which assertion I would append a few further words about the part of Alif the Unseen that left a lasting impression on me: namely its rightfully abiding interest in matters of the heart.

A book to treasure, truly.

***

Alif the Unseen
by G. Willow Wilson

UK Publication: September 2012, Corvus
US Publication: June 2012, Grove Press

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Giving the Game Away | Free Alif the Unseen

Yesterday I posted an excellent excerpt from Alif the Unseen, and tomorrow, I'll run my review. As if that weren't enough, I had a long and involved talk with the author which should hit the site early next week.

Now I don't make a fuss like this about most books, so perhaps you've already intuited that Alif the Unseen is something special. Well, yes — it is indeed. It's "an exquisite tale of tales," truly a "tour-de-force debut," and you needn't simply take my word for it, because today it gives me great pleasure to announce that I have three copies of the gorgeous new Corvus edition to give away to you lucky lovers of literature.

I'm afraid we can't go worldwide with this one, but if you're based in the UK or Europe, all you have to do to stand a chance of winning is send an email to thespeculativescotsman [at] gmail [dot] com with the answer to the this question:

Which letter of the English alphabet is

the Arabic letter Alif equivalent to?

Mark your subject headers "Free Alif the Unseen," please, and remember to include your postal address in the text of your message.

May the odds be ever in your favour, folks!

Quoth the Scotsman | G. Willow Wilson on The Good Old Days

Over the next week, we're going to be talking a bunch about Alif the Unseen here on The Speculative Scotsman. So much so that I bet you'll be sick of this pretty picture before we're through. In our innocence, then, look upon this lovely cover!

For today, I wanted to share with you a short excerpt, taken from a debate between an ancient sheikh and our young hacktivist hero. Between the old, in essence, and the new:

"I know it's common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real. [...] It is all very strange indeed."

"I don't think what you're talking about is a modern issue," said NewQuarter. "I think we're going back to the way things used to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors through the distinction was necessary."

The sheikh considered this for a moment.

"Perhaps you're right," he said. "I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy. Once upon a time, students of Islamic law were encouraged to give free rein to their imaginations. For example, in the medieval era there was a great discussion about the point at which one is obligated to enter a state of ritual purity while traveling on the hajj. If you were on foot, when? If you went by boat, when? If by camel, when? And then one student, having exhausted all earthly possibilities, posed this question: what if one were to fly? The proposition was taken as a serious exercise in the adaptability of the law. As a result, we had rules governing air travel during hajj five hundred years before the invention of the commercial jet." (pp.366-7)

Just a tiny taste of what's to come!

Stay tuned to the site for a grand old giveaway, followed by my full review of G. Willow Wilson's wonderful first novel, and finally, an in-depth interview with the author.

I'm so excited to post all this it's silly.