Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“That had been a little more than forty years past. Fatma was born into the world al-Jahiz left behind: a world transformed by magic and the supernatural.”

A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Dead Djinn Universe, #0.5) by P. Djèlí Clark

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The highlight of this short story is definitely the world-building. I was immediately intrigued by the way Clark wrote about his alternate-history Cairo in 1912, populated with djinn and angels and steampunk machinery, and refreshingly devoid of colonialism. This takes place in a Cairo about fifty years after a curious man opened up a gateway through which djinn and other supernatural creatures, along with magic, entered the world. Egypt has become a world superpower, as the djinn helped them to kick the British out of […]

An Interesting Woman in a Sharp Suit

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark

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A Dead Djinn in Cairo is like a bonbon. It’s perfect exactly as it is, but it leaves you wanting more, more, more. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the interesting woman in the sharp suit, and we are dropped into her world with little fanfare. In Clark’s Cairo of 1912, the British and the French tried to colonize Egypt, but the sudden arrival of magical creatures drove them out. Some 40 years earlier, a man named al-Jahiz opened a portal allowing all kinds of djinn, […]

Steampunk Cairo!

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djeli Clark

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I only recently became aware of award-winning author P. Djeli Clark, although he has been writing sci-fi/fantasy novellas and novels for at least 5 years. Novels that involve djinn are especially interesting to me, and when a couple of different folks (including our own Emmalita) mentioned Clark within days of each other, I decided to check him out and I downloaded EVERYTHING!! These first two offerings feature not just djinn and magical entities but also Cairene investigators whose backstories and interactions will, I hope, be […]



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