Conrad’s success in producing such an interesting study lies in his continual acknowledgement of … the ongoing conflicts and opportunities available to women in science fiction films, and of the potential for future feminist film-making within the genre.
The Smoke’s strange blend of gender politics, British social realism, alternate history, and futuristic technology does not dovetail into a neatly unified whole.
The Psychology of Time Travel engages with the conventions of its genres while simultaneously managing to feel like no time travel book or mystery I’ve read before.
While reading these stories, we are called in fact to think about the very book we’re holding in our hands—the work that goes in to writing it, publishing it, translating it, publishing the translation, and getting the finished collection to us.
What sets Marshall’s novel apart from the bulk of apocalyptic literature is that she is considering a scenario in which humanity doesn’t simply collapse.
In an alternate, magical version of early twentieth-century Cairo, Agents Hamed Nasr and Osni Youssef, of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, are faced with an unusual problem: the haunting of one of their city’s aerial tram cars. Beginning at the office of the Superintendent of Tram Safety & Maintenance at Ramses Station, their investigation sees them traversing a vibrant, multicultural city, encountering everything from boilerplate eunuchs and Egyptian suffragettes to black market candy importers and librarian djinn. Though a single haunting is usually a small event, the origins and repercussions of this particular one draw a path between different parts of Cairo, linking the mundane to the magical and the old to the new, the whole story taking place against a captivating backdrop of social change.
