A Master of Djinn

by P. Djèlí Clark

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What could be better than 1912 Cairo for the setting of a steampunk fantasy where djinn and mechanical angels coexist with humans? Fatma, the youngest woman to work for The Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities is on the occult murder trail of a deathly sect. Her partners provide more comic relief than clues to this whodunnit, where colonialism, mythology, religion and social standing all create an unexpected warp and weft to a spellbinding tapestry of a crime thriller.

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The book, according to the author

A Master of Djinn grew out of a short story I’d written called ‘A Dead Djinn in Cairo,’ which itself came out of my time in grad school – somewhere between showing Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and reading Edward Saïd, and looking at the anti-colonial era. I was thinking about the power of the Maxim gun in creating colonialism around the world, and I was teaching this as a grad student. Somewhere along the way, I guess the science fiction part of me thought, ‘Well, what would stop a Maxim gun? Oh – magic.’

I was looking for a place to set it, and I actually had several… Cairo ended up being the place, because like you said it’s a crossroads of places – from the Near East, the Mediterranean, and other parts of Africa. And it’s an ancient city. It’s great when you’ve decided where to set a story, then you get to dig into the history – and sometimes it’s more history than you can ever use! I think so many times when people do write speculative fiction about Egypt, they go immediately back to ancient Egypt – as if that’s where Egypt begins and ends. I still draw on aspects of ancient Egypt, but I really wanted to focus on other aspects of the culture that come after, that still exist.

So, I created a 1912 alternate Cairo – a Cairo that we are kind of familiar with, where we know some of these histories, and some of the political power players involved. But djinn have made themselves much more known in the world. They’re not just something that people may say, ‘Oh, that cat might a be a djinn.’ They’re walking around, they have jobs – some are lawyers, or architects, and what have you. Magic itself has returned, and altered this Cairo, made it this phenomenal power with a lot of steampunk technology.

It’s also altered the shape of the world and dynamics of power. Like in our history, you have a Berlin Conference in the late nineteenth century to decide what to do with the scramble for Africa. But in this alternate telling, this is because there’s magic in Cairo! European powers need to figure out how to stop that! It was interesting to pull on some of those things I knew from history and then imagine – with magic. What happens then? How does it keep some of the similar trajectory of our world, and yet alter it at the same time? And how do humans react to these other beings that are going to now compete with us and live alongside us?

That’s why I created the Ministry. I figured, if something like that did happen, the first thing people would do is create a bureaucracy, a ministry to try to figure out how to tamp it all down, or at least keep it in check. And the books show that as a work in progress.

From our interview with P. Djèlí Clark on the best historical fantasy