The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P Djèlà Clark takes place in an alternate-1912 with airships and brass vessels and Cairo is at a cultural crossroads.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P Djèlà Clark takes place in an alternate-1912 with airships and brass vessels and magic. Now let me say, I get put off by the accoutrement of “steampunk� these days as that aesthetic has been done and done. Yet there is so much going on HERE in a non-Western setting that you can put all the preciously dour, Dickensonian, bronze-goggled, gas-lit, coal-black-London fog-Steampunk to rest.
Haunting of tram 015 is a FRESH TAKE.
Yes, we have mechanical calculators but we also have boilerplate automatons, clockwork djinns, Arabic occult lore, a Zar ceremony led by a revolutionary sheikha, and a plethora of Mid-Eastern sweets, treats and teas! There are cultural references from North Africa along the Silk Road to Central Asia enriching the world of this story that had me checking wikipedia and googling history. The setting becomes fully formed on its own read, but it is also shared world with Clark’s novelette, A Djinn in Cairo.
P Djèlà Clark has a way with both words and telling a story. At the sentence level he is descriptive and stylish. Narrative-wise, he can spin a rip roaring yarn. I gobbled up Black God’s Drums in one sitting…Enjoying its shadowy New Orleans with Haitian pirates, Orishas, voodoo, and all its leaping out of windows, rooftops, hidden alcove. So with the same pulp-like pace, complete with derring-do and panache, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 had my attention from go.
Two agents from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural are recruited for an investigation. Something is haunting a tram system. ("Actually its a telpher system" - but that's another point ;) Story sounds simple, but there are twists and turns that kept my interest for its 100 pages. These two agents, Hamed and Onsi, are distinct and particular. I really appreciated that they came from slightly different backgrounds and locations. For me as a western reader, I was already once removed from the cultural setting, but with this minutiae, now making me twice removed, pleasingly nuanced my ignorance. It was subtle characterization that did not give Hamed and Onsi a dynamic point of difference, but just reinforced how Cairo is a melting pot of cosmopolitanism. There’s social change brewing in the back ground-becoming-foreground of the story that I don’t want to reveal. But it surely gives The Haunting of Tram Car 015 an enriching, hopeful twist.
Red Star is from 1908. With good reason, I first heard of Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Alexander was an “Old Bolshevik�, friend of LenRed Star is from 1908. With good reason, I first heard of Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Alexander was an “Old Bolshevik�, friend of Lenin and Trotsky, Victor Serge and many other early revolutionaries. This novella tells of a utopian civilization on Mars after a revolution. As an article of science fiction, it has some pretty accurate predictions and the influence is clearly felt in other early utopian SF and the works of Ursula K LeGUin. As a novel, it was slow, but as a creative product of historical ideology: 5 stars. The ideas in here read like pamphlet from the era and it was very exciting to connect the dots and read this in light of Serge’s book as where it perfectly falls in line with that year it was written/published. Matching this in other media, I watched the 1929 silent Soviet SF film, Aelita. Another Mars utopia. It got right a few things: 1) cutting edge Futurist architecture and Constructivist sets, 2) the message of solidary extending beyond borders/ beyond planets, 3) a woman leader. It misses the milestone of true visual revolutionary art with too many lengthy scenes of the bloody bourgeois having diner parties! Consider this film next to Lang’s Metropolis that came out three years later....more
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