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    Alif the Unseen
    Alif the Unseen
    Alif the Unseen
    Audiobook15 hours

    Alif the Unseen

    Written by G. Willow Wilson

    Narrated by Sanjiv Jhaveri

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line.

    Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God,” as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJul 3, 2012
    ISBN9781455895410
    Alif the Unseen
    Author

    G. Willow Wilson

    G. Willow Wilson is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Alif the Unseen, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2013; the memoir, The Butterfly Mosque; the graphic novels Cairo, Air, and Vixen; and the celebrated comic book series Ms. Marvel.

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    Reviews for Alif the Unseen

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    • 4/5
      An enjoyable fast-paced novel about a hacker in a middle eastern country who gets compromised and in trying to escape falls with the world of the "unseen". I don't normally feel that drawn to books that deal with the contemporary, high-tech world, but in this case I felt it was fairly well done. I enjoyed the mix of fantasy/religion with the contemporary theme, and I thought there were several insightful quotes about religion and Islam in particular. However, as a programmer I have high standards for descriptions of programming in novels, and I didn't feel that this quite lived up to those standards. I think putting programming in a novel is a tough thing to do, and the author clearly knows a bit about it, but she got into some questionable territory. Overall I recommend Alif the Unseen, but don't expect the next greatest fantasy novel ever.
    • 5/5
      Majestic! Brilliant storytelling. Masha Allah! The author really transported me to another world and the narrator did a good job in his reading.
    • 3/5
      In an unnamed Middle Eastern state, Alif is a grey-hat hacker who provides online privacy and security. But then his aristocratic lover sends him an ancient book of fairy tales, and shortly thereafter he's on the run for his life. His only allies are his childhood friend Dina, an old sheikh, and oh yes, Vikram the Vampire.

      The first 90% of this book is great. Fast paced, with believable characters and innovative and evocative descriptions. But. The last section of the book feels untrue and unearned, as the protagonists win everything they wanted, Alif's aristocratic lover proves herself false and easy to turn away from, mob violence only kills the baddies, etc. The ending feels too easy.
    • 3/5
      A fun fantasy novel about the Arab Spring, this book races along like an old movie. A tad too pat, it has an improbably happy ending. Nevertheless, it held my interest and filled my need for escapism.
    • 4/5
      A callow young hacker, jilted by his first love, stumbles into the bad graces of the chief of police -- and also, into the company of djinns straight out of the Thousand and One Nights. The publisher's jacket blurb claims the book has shades of Neal Stephenson and Philip Pullman. That's half right: like Snow Crash, Alif the Unseen includes a young computer whiz, brutal opponents, and a cool theory of information as a main driver of the plot. But the comparison to Pullman is misleading. Pullman's tale subverts religious faith in favor of a bleak, if clear sighted, atheism. In contrast, Alif the Unseen is religious, with dogmatic certainties embedded in the story in a way that reminded me of C.S. Lewis' Narnian Chronicles, albeit from an Islamic rather than a Christian perspective. The character Dina, a young woman who chose to take the veil at age twelve, is consistently depicted in a way that validates her modesty and strict observance of Islamic law; it's ultimately her faith, and the protagonist's gradual submission to it, that permits redemption (on an individual and social scale). It's no accident that the heroine, early in the book, describes the Golden Compass as 'dangerous' and 'full of pagan images'. Wilson is herself a convert to Islam, so it's interesting that she introduces a character -- an American usually referred to as 'the convert' -- into the story. The portrait is not particularly positive; the convert is, in some ways, the least mentally flexible character. Perhaps having her in the book insulates Wilson from the criticism that she's abused her new faith in writing this book. It's not hard to suspect that Wilson identifies much more with Dina than with the convert. At its core, the book is an extended wisdom teaching - a genre that's very much part (though only one part) of the original Thousand and One Nights. That agenda gives the book its better moments. Wilson's descriptive prose serves, without thrilling; but her dialogue is much stronger, especially when the characters are critiquing each others' values and choices. At their best, Wilson's characters, human or djinn, are believable both as individuals and as spokespeople for distinct moral views. On the other hand, if you find yourself resisting the underlying coercion of the Narnian Chronicles -- that Aslan knows best, and the only way to be happy is to accept the conventional and somewhat treacly moral lessons Lewis puts in his mouth - you may also find Dina/Wilson similarly frustrating.
    • 5/5
      SUCH a good read. Loved it. Loved everything about it.
    • 4/5
      Thoroughly enjoyed the book. Wilson did a good job of making a modern, fearful, realistic teenage boy protagonist (and growing him through out) without making me dislike him. Dina was a great character, realistic, strong, and refreshing. The descriptions of the jinn and their world were awesome and I'd happily spend more time there.
    • 5/5
      A very cleaver novel that truly helps non-Muslims understand the faith better. It was interesting to learn that jinn are in fact mentioned in the Quran as a third race created by God among the Angels and the Humans. Reading religious fiction makes me, at least, realize we are all one faith interpenetrating it in different forms and believing the common belief that good conquers evil.
    • 4/5
      I loved the world and the writing, but I never fully got into caring about the main character. He is very lucky in his friends for no clear reason. Maybe we all are.
    • 5/5
      Have you ever read a book you enjoyed so much you both wanted to devour it in one sitting and also hide it away because you never wanted it to end? This was totally that book for me. Action! Adventure! Hilarity! Bad, bad guys! Computer hackers! Jinn! Just the right amount of love story! It was just about everything I wanted out of a story. I loved how Wilson incorporated folklore and traditional Islam into a story about coding. Normally, I don't care for when an author creates a story within a story--as in taking up pages and pages with another pretend author's work. It generally just gets distracting and detracts from the overall plot. Maybe it's that I tend to like Middle East folktales and Wilson mirrored them really well, but I loved the few stories she made up for the Alf Yeom. I loved all the philosophical discussions of religion, mysticism, politics, and the digital age (and how they intersect), and that they kept up with the pace of the story. I loved, loved, loved all the jinn. I loved Alif's transformation in character over the course of the book. I loved how vivid Wilson's language was--there was no point where I felt like I was outside the book just reading the words.

      How did this not get nominated for an Alex Award? This is absolutely Alex material.

      I generally avoid buying books for my Kindle, but I happened to snag this as a Kindle Daily Deal as I had been meaning to read it for a while. I'm so glad I did, not just because I would have gone right out and bought it after reading it, but for the extra content at the end. The Kindle version includes a short section about the five types of jinn, a remarkable essay on how Wilson actually wrote this before the Arab Spring occurred, and an interesting interview about her aims to blend and communicate the East and West aspects of her life (plus a glossary, but between having a somewhat basic working knowledge of Muslim culture and the context the words appeared in the story, I never felt I needed to skip back to it and break the flow of reading). I noticed the hardbound copy my library owns does not have any of this, which, while perhaps not crucial to the book itself, is still somewhat of a loss.

      I can't wait for Wilson's next book. In the meantime, I'm going to scour her back catalog.
    • 3/5
      This was an interesting premise but too much plot. I think more character and a bit less complex story would have helped me engage a bit more.
    • 4/5
      The blurb and cover make this book seem like it is more contemporary than fantasy, but I would call it more fantasy than anything else. This book took me into a myth cycle that I didn't know much about and made it familiar, though not as familiar as it would be if I was from the culture of the book's people. I was very struck by how much like the good neighbors jinn were, and how much I liked them. I'll admit, several plot points I saw coming from a ways away, but that kind of thing does not bother me if the book is otherwise keeping my attention. Alif kept my attention. I didn't always understand him or his culture, but I liked him well enough, even in the beginning when most reviewers said he was an ass. Initially I did not like the neighbor, Dina, but she grows into one of the best characters, if still annoying to my sensibilities. I liked all the jinn, especially the fact that one is a vampire/dog and another walks around as a cat. All in all, this is an excellent book. I recommend it to those who have gotten tired of fantasy worlds that are just like every other. There is a lot of mention of religion in the story, which is consistent with the cultural setting. I would advise those who are bugged by that kind of thing to leave off this one, though it is a shame to do so.
    • 4/5
      This was great, really enjoyed it. Present-day-ish cyberpunk in a key similar to Doctorow's Little Brother, set in a fictional Middle Eastern country, with a supernatural layer of djinn thrown into the mix. Very well paced and plotted, a fun read.
    • 1/5
      The character of the convert was such a painfully obvious self-insert of the author that I could not read any further after she showed up. I flinched every time she spoke. This was a perfectly good story without you, G. Willow Wilson. Let your characters live and breathe without putting yourself in the mix.
    • 4/5
      This book is a lot of fun and quickly sucked me into its world. There are some ideas I wish it had expanded on. Ironically it seems a bit thin about some of the ideas that the author--as a USian convert to Islam who lived in the Middle East for a while--is more qualified than most to talk about, like the ways it plays with the contrasts between "western" and "Islamic" ways of seeing the world. I have to wonder if there was some fear, from editor or author, of putting off American audiences by going too deep into those. Still well worth a read, though.
    • 5/5
      I read this book so quickly, partially because it's easy to read, but also in large part because I did not want to put it down.

      The quotes on the back cover of this book comparing it to Gaiman and Harry Potter do not do it justice. Yes, it's in the same genre, but I have never read an urban fantasy that's ensconced in middle eastern culture before, and (with my very limited knowledge of that culture), she does a fantastic job.

      I hope Wilson writes many more adult novels, because she's a good feminist, she writes interesting characters (I especially love Dina), and she explores middle eastern culture in such a compelling way.
    • 5/5
      After falling in love with Ms. Marvel and Cairo, I knew I had to read this novel. And now I'm in that uncomfortable situation of liking a book so much that it's nearly impossible to write about it reasonably, my brain focusing on nit-picky details to avoid sounding like on big fangirl squee.

      The wonderful thing about this book is that it was constantly surprising. Every single character turns out to be far more interesting than they seem at first glance, which is entirely appropriate in a book that is all about the things we have learned to unsee.

      A fantastical mix of modern grittiness, political upheaval, magical creatures, religious discourse, and computer geekery, it somehow manages to balance all these elements without losing momentum.
    • 4/5
      Having essentially committed literature you could call this book a work of urban fantasy but it's probably better described as an exercise in fabulism. While Wilson has incorporated a variety of fantasy elements, starting with a prologue involving a scholar who has caught & bound a djinn, she's also writing a commentary on the contemporary scene in the Muslim World through the lens of a rogue IT-operator who protects his clients existing in the "Dark Web" from state "security" elements until things start going horribly wrong, and he's forced by events to rise above his "angry young man" pose to meet the challenge of his life. Well written and fast moving, I'm inclined to agree that the ending seems too positive under the circumstances, but there's no denying that we could all use a happy ending these days!
    • 4/5
      Think power, like the Hobbit ring or Lord Voldemort. Think young kissy love-like those vampires and non-muggles in England do. Think Arabian Nights-with jinns and a catwoman. Think Neil Stephenson channeled doing second-hand hacking. Then think the Koran and Arab Spring uprising.

      This book was written to bring bouncy young readers, the type who need a story racing breathlessly, into the post-US century. I give four stars, not because it was my type of book, but because it tries to break stereotypes. I have no idea what was true in the Arab Spring, probably no jinns were involved, but I see the events differently after this book.
    • 4/5
      Sort of cyberpunk, sort of fantasy, woven throughout with Muslim folklore and culture. The protagonist has a lot of growth over the course of the story. The supporting characters are complex and vivid.
    • 3/5
      Cyber-punk meets the Arabian Nights. Triumphant nerds and a solid dose of techno-optimism. A bit too anime trite with the characters and the politics. Computing as magic merger is nicely done but at its core the sentiment is a bit of a naive yawn. We have a lovelorn, super programmer who seems able with a good nights hard coding to come up with something almost AI-like by using metaphoric coding and some genie genius.

      Alif's world unravels around him, and in doing so, provides the setting for a coming-of-age story. With a standard Arab despot with all the usual state security apparatus and an Arab Spring with genies, you have politics that look concocted by the editorial desk of the New York Times. Minus the chopping off of heads or any of the real violence that accompanies these affairs. The love story/stories feel one dimensional. I just don't get what any of the female characters see in the naive and hapless Alif. Oh well, love is blind.

      Alif the Unseen was a fun read, albeit thin on ideas and shallow in its politics. Reminded me of Cory Doctorow's books.




    • 5/5
      Absolutely brilliant!
    • 2/5
      There is decent potential here, but the book really falls flat.The plot is uninteresting. Young hacker draws the attention of the government, tries to hide, gets involved with some jinni, eventually saves the world and gets the girl. The plot relies way too much on coincidences: for instance, it just so happens that when Alif realizes he is in trouble, someone makes the plot-moving suggestion of getting help from a guy who turns out to be a jinni. There are also some major plot holes that are never explained: for instance, Alif writes a program that turns out to do some very sophisticated things, and he doesn't understand how the program works. I kept expecting for a jinni to reveal that they had written the program for him or something, but this is never explained, despite the fact that this is the event that gets the whole plot started.The book also suffers from uninteresting characters. Even worse, it has the Trinity problem: just like Trinity from the Matrix, there is a female character who is way more mature, level-headed, and bad-ass than the hero, but in the end she is just a prize for the dumb doofus of a hero. A book about Dina would have been far more interesting than a book about Alif. The characters never really develop: even after being tortured with three months of sensory deprivation, Alif is basically the same person that he was before (okay, sure, he realizes that Dina is important to him, but that just exacerbates the Trinity problem).This is a hacking story, but the hacking aspects were totally ridiculous and unbelievable. Even in a book about jinni, the programming stretched my suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point. Finally, I couldn't help but think that Wilson has an agenda in this book: to expose Westerners to Islamic culture. That's a good agenda, and frankly that's part of the reason I wanted to read the book. Unfortunately, she doesn't pull it off very well. In her defense, this is something that is hard to do well - very few authors succeed at this sort of thing. The characters end up talking about their culture and their faith in ways that come across as very contrived and even pedantic, because the conversations are pitched for a Western audience that knows little about Islam.I listened to the audiobook, and I wasn't impressed with the narrator, which probably didn't help my perception of the book overall.
    • 4/5
      Really a lovely book. The mythological/fantastical elements are grounded, but not to the extent to which I prefer. The author is opinionated and admirably straddles the digital and traditional religious worlds.
    • 4/5
      Really a lovely book. The mythological/fantastical elements are grounded, but not to the extent to which I prefer. The author is opinionated and admirably straddles the digital and traditional religious worlds.
    • 4/5
      A novel with its heart (and soul) in the right place... the story is imaginative and not too tidy with a willingness to not always make sense. A fun read.
    • 1/5
      I thought this book had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the technical details fell EXTREMELY short. I work in computer security and I also work very hard to ignore technical flubs that show up in movies/TV/books, but when you are writing a book that deals with "hackers", you should at least put in some research. By page 14, there had already been too many goofy technical inaccuracies that I couldn't see myself reading through the rest of the book.
    • 3/5
      This is not a badly written book, but it held no appeal to me personally. I was never really invested in the characters and I found the fantasy elements to be rather underwhelming. Overall this book leaves me with a feeling of "meh", meaning it was not an unpleasant read by any means (and as stated the writing itself is good) but it did not leave any lasting impression on me and likely I'll soon forget all about it.
    • 4/5
      This novel combines cyberpunk and urban fantasy motifs, with an modern Islamic flavor. Alif is the nom de net of a young man, an Arab-Indian computer hacker, living in an unspecified, authoritarian, Persian Gulf emirate. He sells cyber security services to political dissidents in his own and other Islamic countries, keeping them safe from State discovery; in his personal life, he pursues a forbidden relationship with a wealthy, aristocratic woman. Her parents betroth her to a powerful man, head of the government security forces, who is intent on shutting down the activities of Alif's customers and friends. This precipitates a series of events that land Alif in trouble with the State - and with supernatural forces, for the jinn of The Thousand and One Nights are real, living in a world just outside our experience. Her last gift to him is an extremely rare book, a copy of the Thousand and One Days, a shadow version of the humanly-written 1001 Nights, as dictated by the jinn themselves. While being pursued by his country's brutal secret police, he realizes that its text provides insights for hacking, far more powerful than anything the humans know, insights he must master if he and his allies are to survive.Any book written by a Westerner, that attempts to see modern, Islamic culture from within, falls automatically under the suspicion of committing orientalism. Author Wilson avoids the problem to a fair degree - Alif and the other characters are convincingly modern people, not robed exotics. In particular, Alif possesses a degree of sexual sophistication that seems credible in a young man, living in a society where women are often veiled and always restricted, but where the educated have access to global media. The politics of relations between the ruling Arabs and their guest workers from the Indian subcontinent are explored through the lens of Alif's dual heritage. Herself a convert to Islam, Wilson owns up to her outsider status by putting a version of herself in the story - "the convert", a Western woman who participates in Alif's story, sometimes as a figure of fun, sometimes as a useful ally and important mover in the plot.Finally, however, while this book is not really fantasy from a non-Westerm, Islamic point of view, it is fast-paced, interestingly different, and worth reading on its own terms.
    • 3/5
      This book kept my interest, and I enjoyed the the mythological underpinnings, but I found the gender politics and embrace of purity culture disappointing. The girl who puts out is the bad girl; the girl who veils & is loyal is the good girl. And this line upsets me: "She would probably be raped in her prison cell. She was probably a virgin, and she would probably be raped." (p.18) Fucking purity culture, that values virginity, assesses rapes of virgins as more harmful than rapes of women who have had sex. An American convert to Islam is treated with mild contempt by several of the characters, but is viewed in a whole new light once she's married a djinn and gotten pregnant. And now she has influence through her marriage -- and can call in her chips. So that's again very traditionally gendered, and is just described in an unproblematic way. (Plus it's kind of a cheap trick, plot wise.)The protagonist, Alif, basically does a creepy stalking of his ex-girlfriend, setting up spyware on her computer to watch her; filter her; track her -- while blocking himself from her. I can see ordinary folks doing this, of course, but I call them jerks and creeps when they do it. I was bothered, also, by the frequent use of the slur "ass-coveter", which is the equivalent of "faggot". So there are a lot of straight men including the protagonist -- slinging that insult around, and no gay people or countervailing messages. Icky.It's not a total fail on gender -- Wilson is trying to show smart capable women who are underestimated, because of sexism and prejudice against piety, and she succeeds at that. So she's trying, and in future hopefully her treatment of gender will improve or become more sophisticated (ideally, both). Wilson's better on race and ethnicity, dealing with racism and class issues in a number of characters. And the book had an interesting blend of topics I like -- politics, religion, hacking, fantasy -- so I'll keep an eye out for future books from Wilson.