Wilson is widely known as a comics writer (she's the author of the Vertigo-published series Air), and as an essayist and journalist on feminism and Islam, including her own conversion to that religion during her studies at Boston University in the US. He is "not an ideologue, as far as he was concerned anyone who could pay for his protection was entitled." He conducts his business in the fantasy precincts of The City, a place like but unlike contemporary Cairo, which author G Willow Wilson has made her home. Alif is a hacker who specialises in providing anonymity to clients who might have reason to fear the authorities, from political activists to pornographers. It is also a passionate romance and a delirious urban fantasy. Whatever we feel about religions today, we've often found them preferable to the oppression and violence without them in the past.Īlif the Unseen by G Willow Wilson is in part a novel about the need for faith, belief and religion in a technological age. Even the awakening of Gautama Buddha came in the midst of unremitting tribalism and warfare. The Islamic calendar begins with the migration of Muhammad and his followers to escape the persecution of Meccan tribes. Moses led the Israelites from slavery under the Egyptians. With shades of Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, William Gibson, and the timeless Thousand and One Nights, Alif the Unseen is a tour-de-force debut with major potential - a masterful, addictive blend of the ancient and the more-than-modern, smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.I t is significant that all of our great religions were born in the face of oppression.
They wrote the mysterious book centuries ago, and have knowledge that might just allow Alif to infiltrate the most sophisticated information technology the world has ever seen, and perhaps save himself, his loved ones, and freedom itself.
Alif, with the help of his childhood friend Dina, an ancient book sent to him in secret by his lost love (who may be frighteningly connected to the Hand) and a terrifying protector who almost looks human, must go underground - or rather, find a way into the hidden world of the djinn. While Alif scrambles to protect his clients - dissidents and outlaws alike, whoever needs to hide their digital traces, he and his friends realize that they've been found by 'the Hand' - maybe a person, maybe a program, but definitely able to find anyone, and that could lead to prison, or worse. Alif (that's his handle) is a brilliant young superhacker working out of his mother's small apartment, and his computer has just been breached. A tour-de-force of a debut that blends classic fantasy - the fascinating, frightening, sometimes-invisible world of the djinn - that's genies to some of us - with the 21st-century reality of a super-hacker in mortal danger in a repressive security state on the Arabian Gulf.
0 kommentar(er)
