Translated from the Arabic, Layali alf layla, by Denys Johnson-Davies

The American University in Cairo Press, 2005, 229p

I bought this in a charity shop on our October trip down south. I had been wishing to sample Mahfouz’s fiction for some time but was also intrigued by the “EgyptAir Duty Free” sticker on the back! It’s a 2005 reprint of a 1995 translation of a 1979 publication.

It takes as its template the tales of One Thousand and One Nights but begins where that ends as the Sultan Shahriyar decides to marry the Nights’ spinner of stories Shahrzad.

It’s many years since I read the Arabian Nights so I’m not certain how closely this reflects those tales but some incidents seemed familiar. Well-known names do appear, such as Aladdin (who here has no magic lamp) and Sindbad (a several times shipwrecked sailor) and there was a resonance about a call to open a door. Genies – Singam and Qumqam, Sakhrabout and Zarmabaha – ply their trickery on the inhabitants of the city. Not even the Sultan escapes their attentions. Humans dance to their tunes as if free will does not exist. The authorities seem much exercised over the activities of heretics like the Shiites and Kharijites (the second of whom I’d never heard of before. Wiki has this.)

I also don’t have enough knowledge of Egyptian politics of the 1970s to tell whether it’s an oblique comment on them though since the book dwells on corruption in high places it may very well. That’s a timeless (and ubiquitous) failing in any case.

The structure is episodic; it’s really a series of connected short stories – as was One Thousand and One Nights.

There’s a distancing inherent in any translation but especially in tales such as these, steeped in a culture different from the one to which I’m used; there are doubtless many references I missed.

I’ll look out for more by Mahfouz.

Gollancz, 2012, 302p.

In The Fractal Prince we meet once again characters from Rajaniemi’s debut novel The Quantum Thief in Jean le Flambeur, Mieli and the spaceship Perhonen. The Mars setting of the Oubliette has been left behind, though, as they travel to Earth to seek out Matjek Chen whose personality has been confined inside a Schrödinger box. Their adventures are interspersed with those of Earth dwellers Tawaddud and Dunyazad.

Where The Quantum Thief was concerned with memory The Fractal Prince is more about story, referencing – especially in the Earth sections – the tales of One Thousand and One Nights.

Rajaniemi’s prose is, as ever, dense. Don’t expect any info dumps. You will have to make sense for yourselves of terms such as zokus, jinni, Sobornost, hsien-kus, qutlinks, spimescapes, guberniyas, vasilevs and gogols though a familiarity with The Quantum Thief, where some of these appeared for the first time, will lighten that task.

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who is new to SF but techno-buffs will love it.

(There was a miniscule count of 1. You’d think someone at Gollancz would know.)