Premee Mohamed

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

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My Review: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed pinned to the mat of argument.

There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.

The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.

Sound familiar, y’all?

Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.

That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning meditation on war, nationalism, violence and courage by a rising star of the genre.

The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.

Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.

Ordered to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying the show more bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?

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My Review: As you would expect from Premee Mohamed, this is a carefully constructed secondary world, with a deeply tendentious story playing out inside its rules. Moral greyness and relativistic morality are always welcome sights in the secondary-world fantasy genre. Meditating on what makes a villain villainous, what makes it possible to fight and kill in service of peace (as George Carlin famously observed, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"), all the while still feeling Very Certain of one's own cause's Rightness. No one in one of Author Mohamed's worlds is Right. That being the reality of life on the Earth I like seeing it shown this way in very appealing fiction.

Bioengineering plays a very significant role in this fantasy world. (Including a use of wasps that absolutely *never* would've occurred to me!) I think it is best to leave the whats and hows of that fact alone, as there are surprises in store that hang on those hooks. If I am transparent about it, I would have been five-star warbling my fool head off had some of those fascinating facets found even greater, and sooner, uses in the story.

While I comprehend the metaphorical use of a flying city, I am deeply skeptical of any use of them because they use unrealistic tech to solve...nothing. There is no actual, practical benefit to a flying city that is not outweighed by real, unaddressed increases in the complexity of urban living. I guess the metaphorical "coolth" and visual appeal is just too much to resist, and the people with the flying city in this story definitely seem like the sort of culture that would develop one. Still...just no. Resist the pointed contrast of tech "coolth" to natural development and augmentation!

The absolute joy of the read is the very carefully natural debate between the competing moral certainties of pacifism and Security Über Alles from the alleged same side of the war. This is, to me, the best use of fiction: Don't give one side the monopoly on the good stuff or the bad stuff. Humankind doesn't, hasn't, and won't ever work like that. As you are telling this story, albeit set on a different world, to Humankind, follow our rules when it most counts. This being one of Author Mohamed's storytelling's strong points, I always enjoy her stories.

So, while not a masterpiece, this story of pacifism and its moral greyness, warmongering and its honest, if misguided, aims, and what men will do to WIN, is one fine read, indeed. show less

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.

At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.

No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever show more rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.

So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.

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My Review: Being one who really internalized the truism "No good deed goes unpunished" and its corollary "Never reveal how competent you are because then you will always get the job," I was all set to like this iteration of these aperçus. I am happy to say, nothing in the read convinced me otherwise.

Veris, whose shocking, likely unique ability to survive a trip into Elmever forest has landed her the unenviable and possibly lethal job of rescuing kids lost in there, is a good person. Her exploit in Elmever was not last year, or even last decade...she is solidly in her middle years now. She would also like to enter cronehood, thank you very much, and that might not happen unless she gets the stupid kids out of this haunted, evil forest. The stupid kids that belong to the local wicked overlord. The foreign, wicked overlord.

Of course this woman of middle years and possessed of close loving ties to her community of friends and family will drop everything and rush off to rescue this awful man's kids at risk of disappearing into the horrors she overcame before. You just need to ask!

And threaten everyone she loves with horrible deaths.

Thus are the stakes established. This is going to be a Quest with a difference in dramatis personae. Since Quests are about inner discovery through outer-world problem-solving, we are accustomed to seeing them feature young people. This time Verity, who has already solved the puzzle of surviving a day in accursed Elmever forest, must return to figure out the mystery of the place. The difference? A puzzle has one correct answer, a mystery has many possible solutions, varying shades of Rightness.

Part fairy tale with its lessons quietly taught, part adventure horror story with its body horror lightly sprinkled in, part cosmic horror with its universal stakes salted on...this novella packs a lot into its one-sitting length. Enough that it might repay breaking the read into two sessions.

While the ending fits with the story, and concludes the stakes satisfyingly, I do not think the usual audience for Quests will be all that pleased with this iteration of the storyverse because its stakes are...mutable. Veris faces down lots in this tight package. She makes her peace with the past, as all of us around her age must; she does the right thing by her lights, as we all hope to do in life; she learns that her life of answering puzzles and solving mysteries can not prepare her for anything to come except in habits of mind. The answers are, maddeningly, never the same.

Sound like my forties. Yours too, I wager. show less

The brothel at the end of the world. In an endless city the beautiful resourceless are saved from culling to be courtesans, trapped in interminable debt to their owners and at the mercy of the clients, deadly in itself. One returns from death seeking revenge and the narrator's ambivalent connection to the returnee and to her own life is a tale not of a heart of gold, but of a heart, as stained and tattered as her world, but still beating. It is a bit softer really than it should be, this show more conclusion a bit less pitted than the body of the story. show less