Sara Saab's Story in Clarkesworld's Latest Issue

Super-haunting supermoon over London (by user Colin at Wikimedia).

By Péter MARTON
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It's been a real struggle to get to this point, but -- finally -- here is a new post for the blogzine. Hopefully it will be followed by others over the coming period.

The inspiration (and, even more importantly, the time available) came for this at a major international academic conference on the relationship between migration and poverty, as the experience interfered with my load of daily fiction which I happened to read in the evening prior to the first day of the conference, from Clarke's World's latest issue: a piece by Sara Saab, a Londoner of Lebanese origin who, by her present working location, falls under the jurisdiction of European SF.

After a conference where I listened to a lot of really interesting presentations, including about OLAs (Onward Latin American migrants) in London, it is intriguingly coincidental to be thinking back to the short story of a Lebanese writer who moved from Beirut to the UK.

As to the virtues of the story itself: it was certainly an interesting read. The plot is centered around the triangle of three people, Nouri, Maschou and Szanna (the main character). Immortality is around, but an apparently unsafe procedure was what first became available to a broader group of people beyond the wealthiest of the planet. Some jumped at the opportunity, some decided that this is not for them, even if ultimately a safer procedure becomes available. This divides the group of friends. Szanna once rejected outright what Nouri was happy to embrace. The treatment went wrong, and Nouri ended up in a slowly degrading condition. Szanna and Maschou therefore devise some kind of concept (a treatment?) to save Nouri from his state, and then Szanna tries to deliver the solution to his metaphorical-slash-actual-slash-virtual door in the equivalent of a leper colony (for the "pestilents" suffering from the hi-tech leprosy of this future era). However, the door shall be opened by Nouri himself, should he be willing to do this -- saving him is only possible if it is according to his will. And so all sorts of games are played... meaning games, literally.

Honestly, the way this is told is rather convoluted most of the time, and the "world-building" of the story is the never-ending construction of a badly-messed-up world. The characters and their motivations are not fully developed. And the basic idea, that we may all relate differently to the practical availability of immortality, does not really compensate for a weak story -- it is not so novel/original that it could do that.

Yet it all still manages to be interesting somehow. How Nouri appears partly as a memory of distant times, from long-left shores, to which we flash back time and again, and partly as a person who might return to a more normal state in the future, gives a good impression of the haunting feelings of long-simmering attachment that people migrating internationally often account of. I have no way to tell if this is what Sara Saab wanted to convey, or if and how her own personal circumstances and sentiments may play into this, but this certainly made me flash back to the story at times during the conference I attended. I guess that is a kind of success.

Give it a try, even if I didn't do a very good job of explaining you why.