Book Review: The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

A good entryway to non-Western fantasy for readers in search of new ground

When I was a kid, most epic fantasy novels were decidedly Eurocentric. A lot hewed close to the Tolkienic blueprint; others diverged from it, but rarely from its Eurocentrism. Over the past three decades, fantasy authors have grown more daring in terms of the source material they draw upon, and more willing to explore the world and its rich tapestry of mythical traditions, so to speak.

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah is by no means the first work of epic fantasy to draw from The Thousand and One Nights for inspiration, but it is an excellent place to start for readers seeking something new and fresh, yet also familiar. After all, while these stories are not as central to Western culture as they are for the peoples of the Middle East, they long ago entered into our own cultural discourses—through art, books, film and so forth. Aladin’s lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor—not everyone will have read or heard the actual stories, but few people who read books (or blogs about books) aren’t at least passably familiar with these myths.

The Stardust Thief centers on Loulie al-Nazari, more popularly known as the “Midnight Merchant.” She is a famous collector—and purveyor—of magical relics, and as such is a celebrity in the great city of Madinne. Wherever Loulie goes, so does her companion Qadir, a jinn who can take the form of a human or a lizard. As the book progresses, we learn that Qadir saved Loulie’s life and gifted her an enchanted compass, a relic that leads its owner to other relics and the source of Loulie’s trade.

The city is ruled by a cruel and mercurial Sultan, whose son Omar bin Malik leads the Forty Thieves—a group of assassins who seek out and kill whatever jinn try to enter the city and pass for human. We learn that, in doing so, Omar obeys the commands of his father, the Sultan; and that wherever jinn blood spills, an oasis forms. This too, it seems, is at the heart of the Sultan’s rule—an onslaught of violence that transforms the city’s desert environs and enriches its inhabitants. This is clearly metaphor.

The Sultan, however, is restless and greedy. He hears of a famous relic hidden deep in the dunes of the Sandsea, far outside Madinne’s imposing walls—a lamp that cages a jinn, who will grant wishes to whatever human possesses it. He summons Loulie to his palace, coercing her to seek it out—and sends Omar with her to make sure she does not betray him. But Omar has other plans…

Since this blog’s inception, I have ruminated on the nature of imaginative genre fiction and why I’m drawn to it; why, in comparison, mimetic fiction often seems so dull and dreary. In part, it is the opportunity to “travel” to and “inhabit” different worlds. Given the sorry state of our own, it’s no surprise that readers increasingly want to imagine something different. But even the most imaginative epic fantasy (or science fiction) draws upon and ultimately is a vehicle for understanding the world we actually do inhabit. Sometimes this is hard-hitting and serious; other times, it is like a lightbulb that illuminates a part of the house you’ve never really explored.

That’s ultimately how I think about The Stardust Thief. This is a good story, with a brisk pace, centered on strong characters in a world you immediately want to get deeper into. It isn’t a work of high-minded literary fiction, but its prose is smooth and never gets in the way of the story. Its cliffhanger ending implicitly offers you a difficult choice: to go straight into the sequel or go find the latest translation of The Thousand and One Nights and explore the novel’s source material. At a high level, The Stardust Thief is a fun book that I wholeheartedly recommend to fans of epic fantasy who are looking for a fun summer read.

With that said, it’s not perfect. A few major character decisions are confusing; the goal is clearly to surprise the reader, but there’s a difference between a surprise that makes sense in retrospect and one that just leaves you scratching your head. Some of the interpersonal relationships are not well developed, which in turn makes character motivations more opaque than I’m guessing Abdullah intended.

Overall, though, this is a fun read that I highly recommend for readers who are looking for a good escapist fantasy novel that tries and mostly succeeds in treading new ground.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Fun, escapist “Arabian Nights”-derived fantasy
• Likable, relatable characters—but sometimes their motivations are unclear and confusing
• Different take on magic in a fantasy setting, which feels fresh

Reference: Abdullah, Chelsea. The Stardust Thief [Orbit, 2022].

POSTED BY: The G—purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

First Contact: The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The earliest surviving animated feature length film—a fairy tale from a lost world

A friend of a friend once said that one of the many terrible things the Nazis did was destroy the film industry that prospered in Germany under the Weimar Republic. That is, admittedly, by no means the worst thing that the Nazis did, but it was not good. You had some path-breaking filmmaking, pushing the boundaries of a totally new art form, replaced by endless rows of goose-stepping brownshirts, noisome propaganda films, Leni Riefenstahl using whatever artistic ability she had to defend a mass murderer, and Hitler yelling. History has shown us time and again that state-managed media is never profound, or deep, or interesting; it’s only ever a pablum to make you deny the evidence of your eyes and ears. The arts are inevitably a casualty of tyranny.

Here, I’ll be discussing another standout film from the Weimar Republic: The Adventures of Prince Achmed, directed and written by Lotte Reiniger and distributed by Comenius-Film GbmH in 1926. This is a milestone in cinematic history, as it is the earliest surviving fully-animated feature film (there are two from Argentina that are unfortunately lost—although all sorts of old films have been found in warehouses in countries people wouldn’t expect, so here’s hoping they find it). It is also remarkable that said first animated feature film was one directed by a woman; ‘Lotte’ is a German diminutive of ‘Charlotte.’

The plot of this film, as the title may suggest, is adapted from a number of stories from Arabian Nights. The whole film is a lush romp through a lavishly detailed Arabia, a portrayal that is no doubt Orientalist in a number of its tropes but is nevertheless dazzling to look at. It has a few different tales cobbled together, so you have Prince Achmed featuring, but Aladdin also joins in the proceedings. I liked, perhaps most of all, the beginning with the flying horse that operates something like a jetpack that Achmed doesn’t really figure out how to operate until he is already lost.

It is, in some ways, very much of its time. The portrayal of Arabia is clearly something out of an Orientalist fantasy, but as I said, it’s gorgeous. The primary antagonist is an evil sorcerer, stated to be from Africa (although I’m not familiar with the Arab source, so that may be older than this film), who has a miserly look and a big nose. It’s the sort of thing that I suspect to be a primeval antisemitism (see the images on this essay by a Rabbi about modern manifestations of antisemitism), not even consciously expressed, but rather so deep in Western cultural memory we associate it with evil while not being aware of its origin. There’s also something that is both groundbreaking and somewhat uncomfortable in presentation; there is a kiss between two men who apparently love each other—but it is between an evil emperor of China and a trusted servant, which has both uncomfortable power dynamics and the old trope that same-sex attraction is the province of a depraved upper class (see how the Communist world for so long called homosexuality ‘bourgeois degeneracy’). Reiniger herself was outspokenly in favor of gay rights, so she meant well so far as I can tell, but she employed tropes, as in other places in the film, that did not age well.

What really stands out is the animation. It was done with something akin to shadow puppets, in addition to a wide variety of other materials, to create a wide variety of environments; her team used sand, soap, cardboard, and tissue paper. The end result feels both very old and very modern, like a minimalist animation made on a computer and put online with a simple but sweet message. The effect is one that feels natural, logical within its context, a world where palaces can fly and so can horses (although for the latter you need some training). When Reiniger made the film, she said she wanted to make something that wasn’t possible in live action, a sentiment that has aged surprisingly well. You could certainly make a live-action film like this nowadays, but all the magic would be CGI (which is itself a form of animation, perhaps proving her right in a way she could never anticipate).

The plot is simple, and it feels like a fairy tale. Those who want labyrinth dramas twisting every which way will be disappointed, but given the source material, it could only be like this. And that isn’t even a bad thing; viewing the film in the twenty-first century, the plot and the animation complement one another. It looks like a children’s book, with odd plot contrivances here and there, and simple motivations, but Reininger and crew made it feel primordial, like something in our collective subconscious that when brought to the surface makes us feel warm and whole and secure as she tells a story about princes and princesses with a cartoonish visual style and a myriad of colors. Should you watch it, imagine you’re a small child again, and a parent is reading you a bedtime story. That’s the tone.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a film very much of its time, but even so, values can and do resonate. It’s another work whose fingerprints can be seen all over, should you pay attention. It’s a film that, to modern audiences, has the paradoxical effect of simultaneously immersing you and completely breaking your immersion, forcing you to see its place in the world in a sort of artistically-inclined Brechtian distancing effect. It is short, only about an hour long, and magical in a way that adults often forget. It makes you wish that the Weimar age of German cinema could have had more decades to develop and flourish, to create more beautiful things like this. For all its faults and all its moorings in the past, it is a beautiful work of art, and I recommend it to anyone who may be interested.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.