Hossain, Saad Z
Entry updated 10 November 2021. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Bangladeshi author whose first novel, Baghdad Immortals (2013; vt Escape from Baghdad! 2015), treats the world of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein as a surreal nightmare (see Imperialism; Satire; War); the tale traces the appalled and appalling "antics" of its two protagonists as they attempt to smuggle a torturer out of the land he has helped destroy. It is possible to detect Time Distortions as the hegira continues into darkness. Djinn City (2017) is a fantasy set in a Dhaka crosshatched with the world of djinns, whose vengeful emissaries interpenetratingly invade Bangladesh [for Crosshatch see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019) moves into Near Future Kathmandu in a tale whose dizzyingly Equipoisal twists and turns, from sf into fantasy-world djinns, again exposes a treatment of genres (see Fantastika) as indefinitely manipulable; within Hossain's work, the SF Megatext is an aberration. [JC]
Saad Z Hossain
born Dhaka, Bangladesh.
works
- Baghdad Immortals (place not known, India: Bengal Publications, 2013) [pb/]
- Escape from Baghdad! (New Delhi, India: Aleph Book Company, 2015) [vt of the above: pb/]
- Djinn City (New Delhi, India: Aleph Book Company, 2017) [pb/Brendan Monroe]
- The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (New York: Tor.com, 2019) [pb/Eric Nyquist]
links
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