The highlight of this short story is definitely the world-building. I was immediately intrigued by the way Clark wrote about his alternate-history Cairo in 1912, populated with djinn and angels and steampunk machinery, and refreshingly devoid of colonialism. This takes place in a Cairo about fifty years after a curious man opened up a gateway through which djinn and other supernatural creatures, along with magic, entered the world. Egypt has become a world superpower, as the djinn helped them to kick the British out of […]
“That had been a little more than forty years past. Fatma was born into the world al-Jahiz left behind: a world transformed by magic and the supernatural.”
A Dead Djinn in Cairo (Dead Djinn Universe, #0.5) by P. Djèlí Clark