skygiants

I didn't realize that P. Djèlí Clark's The Haunting of Tram Car 015 was the sequel to an existing novella so I accidentally read it first ... anyway, that worked fine for me and I loved it VERY much. And then I went back and read the first story, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, and enjoyed that as well although not quite to the same degree!

Steampunk is definitely a genre that has soured for me over the last decade, but Clark's world here is really joyously steampunk in a way that's both fun and compelling -- the premise is that a Soudanese mystic opened a portal to the realm of the djinn for mysterious reasons in the 1870s, dramatically shifting the international political stage and launching Egypt into the role of a major world power. The stories take place in Cairo about 40 years after the inciting event, which is just enough time for the world to have adapted and offer interesting opportunities for stories about established bureaucracies and commonplace magical technologies in turn-of-the-century magical Egypt, but not actually enough time to fall into the fatal alt-history suspension-of-disbelief trap of "but why is [x] the same when the world as established would be so profoundly different?"

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is told from the POV of an amiable middle-aged government inspector, working with an eager rookie to research mysterious (haunted) circumstances on Cairo's automaton tram system during the same weekend as a vote on women's suffrage; I thoroughly enjoyed the loving discussion of paperwork and budgetary challenges from the very beginning but I'll be very honest, when it really got me was when they went to ask a discount exorcist to solve their train problem and the exorcist was like "yes, but ONLY if I get the opportunity to have a teach-in with the automaton tram about revolutionary conciousness?" And like, that's not the major plot of the story, just one relatively minor incident, but it's a good illustration of how the novella functions as a depiction of a world on the cusp of societal change in various exciting directions (with the protagonist as a vaguely alarmed observer) while simultaneously providing a fun time with a haunted train.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo, while set in the same world, has kind of a different vibe -- almost Kaori Yuki-ish, full of ambiguous angels and shrieking ghouls and world-weakening apocalyptic conspiracies -- which is a lot of fun but less inherently interesting to me than the devastating one-two combo of women's rights activists AND robot rights activists presented in Tram Car 015 ... on the other hand this story's inspector-protagonist, extremely dapper Fatma el-Sha'awari, is a walking argument for lesbian rights so that's a definite plus.

In any case The Haunting of Tram Car 015 has definitely dropped Clark onto my auto-read list and I'm very excited for the novel he's got coming out later this year!