Saladin Ahmed 2010 Interview
Saladin Ahmed is nominated for the short story “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameel”.
Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did you first get acquainted with speculative fiction?
My father had a love for all sorts of ‘genre’ stuff, so I grew up with everything from The Hobbit and Dune to Heavy Metal magazine and Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials lying around the house. I’m lucky in that my dad inspired and encouraged geeky pursuits very early on.
What’s the appeal of the genre for you?
As a reader, I’ve always had a deep love for escapism – and I still love fantasy that provides a haven from the banal ugliness of this world, or from the limits of being human. But I think that my escapism has grown more complex over the years. I love reading work that imagines – that provides an escape to—a more exciting, more just, more beautiful world, but I’ve also come to love writing that gives more meaning to boredom, injustice, and ugliness.
As a fantasy writer, the genre’s appeal is multifold: Obviously, there’s the great range of possibility fantasy allows for. But there’s also the deep enthusiasm of fantasy readers, and, quite frankly, fantasy’s popularity. It may sound crass, but years of writing poetry and academic papers have made me deeply appreciative of a genre with a readership that numbers in the tens of thousands instead of in the dozens!
What made you decide to pursue writing, whether it’s fiction or poetry?
Again I can blame my father for that. The schools I went to growing up were…not very good. So my father was always supplementing my education in unorthodox ways. One of my clearest early memories is from the summer after first grade. My dad gave me a kind of summer school assignment: to write a little story every day for him. The result was the adventures of “Saver Mouse and the Human Dog,” a superhero duo of my own making. Saver Mouse (he *saved* people, you see) was basically a Mighty Mouse rip-off, and the Human Dog was...well, just a guy with a dog’s face, near as I can remember.
Maybe he had a gun.
Anyway, from there I was hooked.
Does your poetry have any impact on your fiction or vice versa?
I don’t write a lot of poetry these days, as I’m pretty tightly focused on fiction. But there’s definitely some crossover. My poetry appears mostly in academic and ‘literary’ small press venues, but much of it is certainly ‘speculative’ in terms of its imagery and sensibilities. Valkyries and djinn and geek references abound in my poems. And the plot of my Nebula-nominated story actually stems from a short poem I’d written years earlier.
Most, if not all, of your published stories have an Arabian flavor to them, whether it’s the characters, religion, or setting. Is this inclusion a conscious decision on your part, or more of what comes naturally?
Well, I’d avoid the word ‘Arabian,’ which is a sort of antiquated and inaccurate term on the order of ‘oriental.’ But yes, certainly, many of my stories feature Muslim characters prominently. And I’d say that this is both a conscious decision and what comes naturally, if that makes any sense. Of course, the curmudgeon in me feels compelled to point out that interviewers rarely bother to ask white American F/SF writers, “Hey, most of your stories have a white American flavor to them—why is that?”
Do you think there’s an absence of Arabian literature in the genre, or is there a piece of genre fiction that deeply resonates with you?
Well, there are obviously not a lot of Muslims or Arabs publishing genre fiction, though I think that’s beginning to change with writers like, say, Amal Al-Mohtar, who is writing and selling wonderful stories. Of course, a number of non-Arab/Muslim writers have written about Arab/Muslim or Arab-ish/Muslim-ish characters and settings, with inevitably mixed results. Hateful ‘terrorists in space’ military SF is hot right now, but beyond being patently offensive, most of that stuff is just plain bad. More positively, though it’s full of problematic depictions, I still love Dune. Ditto Robert Jordan’s first few Wheel of Time books, with their desert tribesmen, the Aiel. But my favorite spec fic depiction of the Middle East by a non-Muslim writer is probably When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger. I loved that book!
How have comics and RPGs shaped (or not affected) your path as a writer?
Profoundly! As I said, the schools I went to were crappy. Comics and RPGs—in particular, old school AD&D books and 80s Marvel comics – expanded my vocabulary, introduced me to all sorts of mythic themes, and made me want to tell similar stories. Thank you Gary Gygax and Chris Claremont!
What projects are you working on right now?
The big project is a series of Islamic-inspired heroic fantasy novels that are, subgenre-wise, somewhere between sword & sorcery and epic fantasy. They’re set in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms, the same secondary world setting as a couple of my short stories. But I’ve got chunks of a couple of other books that I’ve been toying with as well, including an early 20th century pulp hero story that’s sort of “Doc Savage and Mandrake the Magician meet Old New York racial politics.”
Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Clockwork Phoenix 2, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Expanded Horizons, PodCastle, and DrabbleCast. His poems have appeared in over a dozen journals and anthologies including Callaloo, The Brooklyn Review, Big City Lit, Inclined To Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry. He is an alum of the Taos Toolbox and Rio Hondo workshops, an Active member of SFWA, and a member of the writers group Altered Fluid. He lives in Brooklyn.
Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.
2 comments so far.
Thanks, Karlo! I’d only heard of the Grimwood series in passing, but will have to check them out…
BTW, I’m happy to say I’ve just acquired an agent for my own books, so hopefully they’ll be on Toronto shelves before too long! Also, there’s an RSS feed at http://www.saladinahmed.com if you want to keep tabs.
best wishes, Saladin
1. Karlo G on 16th April 2010 at 8:51 am
I would echo your comments on Effinger’s books. John Courtney Grimwood had a trilogy in a similar vein, but not done as well.
Fingers crossed for your Crescent Moon series to get published. I’ll watch for it in the stores up here in Toronto. Cheers, K