Issue 18 of Apex Magazine, the “Arab/Muslim” issue of November 2010, will no doubt go down as one of the most memorable installments of the magazine, and an emblem of Catherynne M. Valente’s brief but influential term as editor. If nothing else, the issue will be remembered as Valente’s response to Elizabeth Moon’s blog post about Muslim immigrants to the U.S.—a post that sparked a storm of controversy and led to the withdrawal of Moon’s Guest of Honor invitation to WisCon 35 last year.

In an announcement on her blog in September 2010, Valente wrote that the Arab/Muslim issue would showcase writers of Arab and/or Muslim descent and highlight the validity of Islam as an inspiration for speculative writing. She added: “It will be a small thing, in the grand scheme. It will not save the world. But it will exist, and perhaps in its own way can stand beside the recent ugliness in the SFF world as something bright and good.”

What began as a response to bigotry became a startling, quirky and beautifully textured issue of Apex. Now, over a year after its publication, what stands out about the issue is both the diversity of the individual pieces, and the shared ethos they evoke.

Most of the poems and short stories show some engagement with Islam or parts of the world influenced by Islam. Pamela K. Taylor’s “50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire” concerns a Muslim vampire of Cairo, and reveals, among other things, a way for pious vampires to get around the prohibition against consuming blood. Ali, the protagonist of Saladin Ahmed’s “The Faithful Soldier, Prompted,” travels on the Old Cairo Road, and his thoughts echo the everyday language of the Muslim world, though with a satirical futuristic twist: “In the name of God, who needs no credit rating, let me live!” Samer Rabadi’s poem “Me and Rumi’s Ghost” recalls the ghazals of Sufi literature; Jawad Elhusuni’s “Tur Disaala” meditates on how the course of history might have changed had al-Andalus, otherwise known as “Moorish Spain,” persisted; Sara Saab’s breathtaking “Al Manara Dirge” addresses the city of Beirut in a manner that recalls the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. The delightful Turkish fairy tale “Kamer-taj, the Moon-horse,” collected by Ignácz Kúnos, resembles the stories of A Thousand and One Nights in that it takes place in a Muslim context; while it doesn’t treat Islamic themes directly, as some of the other pieces do, it is certainly informed by Islam.

Amal El-Mohtar’s story, “The Green Book,” is the one piece in the collection set in an entirely imaginary universe. As such, it contains no direct references to Islam or the Muslim world. The story, which was nominated for a 2010 Nebula Award, depicts a love affair between a librarian and a book. It is the strongest piece in the issue, achieving a near-perfect balance between poetry and suspense. It also highlights a common thread that runs through the issue: a preoccupation with texts.

El-Mohtar’s Green Book is a book that is also a woman, a speaking text. The story literalizes the relationship between text and reader. The other stories in the issue, though they may not focus so strongly on this relationship, do tend to give it a certain prominence. Taylor’s narrative is broken up by quotations from Muslim vampire literature, such as Culinary Etiquette for the Islamic Undead. Ahmed’s protagonist, a war veteran, has the text of his orders delivered directly into his eyes. For both Ahmed’s and Taylor’s main characters, the relationship with texts is crucial: it enables them to understand the world and solve their dilemmas. This manner of approaching texts, while it is by no means exclusively Muslim, does reflect, even more than direct references to Islam, a Muslim world view.

There are many threads one could follow through Issue 18—enough that it’s worth rereading, and will no doubt continue to be read. Long after the circumstances that gave rise to it have passed, it will remain as “something bright and good.”

The first blurb on the back of Saladin Ahmed’s debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, comes from Nebula winner Walter Jon Williams. Williams writes: “Readers yearning for the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser will delight in the arrival of Adoulla and Raseed.”

The comparison accurately places Throne in the genre of adventure fantasy, and specifically in the sword-and-sorcery subgenre of Fritz Leiber’s famous duo, who first appeared in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. Adoulla and Raseed, like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, are fighting partners with little in common beyond a determination to combat evil: Adoulla the ghul-hunter is sloppy, pleasure-loving, irreverent and old, while the dervish Raseed is stern, single-minded, scrupulously devout, and young. These differences make for a lot of entertaining bickering between the two, but they also mean that the heroes complement each other. Adoulla’s spells combined with Raseed’s forked sword pose a formidable threat to all who would disturb the peace and safety of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms.

However, these heroes also need help. The novel teems with colorful characters, from the shape-shifting nomad Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, to the dangerous leader of a band of thieves known as the Falcon Prince. These very different individuals join forces with Adoulla and Raseed against a ghul-maker strengthened by ancient and malignant magic. To destroy him and save the Kingdoms, they must avoid distractions: grief for dead kin, guilt over those they’ve slain, and the complications of love. Adoulla, Raseed and Zamia all find their deepest commitments—to guild, religious order or clan—tested in the process.

This is bold, rip-roaring stuff: the kind of story that demands the vivid, high-contrast color of the pulp magazines that are its direct forbears. The cover art, with its grim-faced heroes and half-incinerated ghuls, evokes that ethos. So does Ahmed’s prose, which ranges from the mildly baroque—“When he was outside of Dhamsawaat, stalking bone ghuls through cobwebbed catacombs or sand ghuls across dusty plains, he often had to settle for chewing sweet-tea root”—to the ker-pow: “A crossbow bolt! Men and women screamed.”

What Throne of the Crescent Moon offers, then, is a decidedly old-school pleasure. Here be secret scrolls, ancient curses and various types of undead. Yet the book is also emphatically contemporary, especially in the way it deals with age and gender. Adoulla, the old man, is the main character, not a Gandalf who pops in and out of the tale to guide and advise the real, youthful subjects. He even gets a love story. And his love interest, the courtesan Miri, is a sensible, realistically portrayed, and erotically powerful woman of his own age. These mature heroes are so compelling that they threaten to eclipse the less complex Raseed and Zamia—but hey, that’s the privilege of the old. Adoulla and Miri have a long history together, and their difficult, charged relationship allows them to steal the show.

Zamia and Miri, with the alkhemist Litaz—another vibrant, gifted older woman—form a trio of strong and highly individual female characters, something not typically associated with the sword-and-sorcery genre. For me, Ahmed’s interest in characters who fall outside the traditional young, male hero-type is what makes his book unique. His representation of a complex, religiously-based society is also welcome, but it’s his subversion of the most common definition of “hero,” within an uncompromisingly heroic fantasy story, that lets Throne of the Crescent Moon deliver something we don’t get every day: an old-school pleasure that’s not a guilty one.

The Mirage, Matt Ruff’s new novel, is based on a striking reversal of history. Set in the Islamic and democratic United Arab States, it opens with the traumatic events of November 9, 2001, the day a group of radical Christian terrorists hijacked four planes. The terrorists flew two planes into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry building in Riyadh. Now, in the aftermath of 11/9, three agents with Arab Homeland Security discover a secret that pits them against the crime lord Saddam Hussein and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Osama bin Laden.

The Mirage is more a mirror-history than an alternate: while set in the “U.A.S.,” it’s really about the U.S.A. The implications of this mirror-trick take shape when the three security agents find a weird artifact in the apartment of a suspected suicide bomber: a New York Times newspaper from September 12, 2001. The goal of the characters through most of the book is to find out what that alien newspaper means–and whether it’s real, or just a mirage.

A lot of people, I suspect, are going to read The Mirage. They’ll read it because of its gripping concept, and because they’re eager to see a new take on 9/11. They’ll read it because they want to see Muslim characters portrayed with sensitivity, something Matt Ruff does well. By and large, he succeeds in crafting a varied Islamic world, with different kinds of Muslims–Sunni, Shia, doubting, lapsed. There are also Jews, who have a comfortable relationship with Arabs, as Israel is now located on the Baltic Sea. There are Christian Arabs, Russian Orthodox, and a variety of extremist Christian groups, who have broken North America into fundamentalist dictatorships.

Part of the fun of The Mirage is turning this upside-down world over again, and catching a glimpse of our own reality. Twirl Matt Ruff’s globe around a few times, however, and a curious gap emerges. The Mirage pits a democratic Islamic state against Christian fundamentalist terrorists who, in a clever bit of historical sampling, call themselves “crusaders.” Every country has a religion, and an Abrahamic religion at that. There is no secular state.

This is strange, because it results in a reversed version of the U.S. that is missing the secular voice–a voice that wields a good deal of power in the world we know, and one with a specific position regarding not just Islam, but all organized religion. Jewish, Christian and Muslim perspectives, however much they differ, share a good deal, especially when placed opposite a secular worldview. The similarities are even stronger when it comes to extremists, which is why it works so well for Ruff to change the 9/11 attacks into attacks by crusading Christians. His careful portrayal of Muslims is laudable, but by making their enemies Christian extremists he misses the chance to portray any version of the secular West, from which he will probably draw a large proportion of his readers. One might argue that Samir, a non-practicing Muslim character, is meant to stand in for a possible secular reader, but Samir lives in an Islamic state, and his position within it is weak. What’s missing from The Mirage is a secular voice with power.

By leaving a culture like that of the U.S., with its strong secular influence, out of the picture, The Mirage gives the non-religious reader an easy out, and might even be taken to suggest a link between religion and violence–an idea that is not exactly new. This means that while The Mirage is a fast-paced and clever thriller, it never crosses the line that would make it a thought-provoking meditation on history. It remains a colorful spectacle of religious folks fighting each other–an entertaining, but not at all challenging, mirage.

Abdourahman Waberi’s Aux États-Unis d’Afrique was published in 2006, and the English translation, In the United States of Africa, came out in 2009. It’s a brief, lyrical and pointed satire that imagines our world in reverse: Africa is a region of stability and prosperity, united by a single government, with the desperate multitudes of the impoverished West begging for its aid.

In the United States of Africa is science fiction only in the loosest sense, in the way that Gulliver’s Travels is science fiction: it’s a social commentary that creates an imaginary world in order to critique the world we know. Waberi is not interested in exploring how technology might have developed differently in the United States of Africa, or in inventing new socio-political systems. His interest is in images: “the moon, polished by Malian and Liberian astronauts” (p. 4); a “shelter for destitute Caucasians, with their straight hair and infected lungs” (p. 5). It’s his exuberant prose, laced with just enough irony to sting, that gives these images the destabilizing force of the best science fiction.

At the center of the novel is Malaïka, called Maya: a white girl adopted by African parents and raised in comfort in Asmara. The book describes Maya’s life and her development as an artist, but it’s also addressed to her: “You were an angel, Maya,” declares the unnamed narrator, “both light and vigorous. You were as fresh as a newborn butterfly in the pure air” (p. 29). This creates a curious mirror effect: Maya is shown, but she is also told about her own image, so that she is present both as an actor and as the observer of her own story. Mirrors figure prominently in the novel: “[I]s the person you see every morning in the mirror—that double, that twin—so familiar? Or is she already taking up too much space?” the narrator asks (p. 38). Maya’s mirror-twin is a sinister, threatening figure, but its disappearance later in the novel is even more disturbing: “You are…absent from your own dreams. You really are invisible, there’s no doubt about it. It happens at night, when you take your clothes off before going to bed: you look at yourself in the mirror and you can’t see a thing” (p. 82).

Maya’s alienation is caused by her status as a privileged young woman who nevertheless bears the white skin of “the wretched of the earth” (p. 15). To find herself, she sets out to seek her birth mother in the decaying slums of Paris. “You put on a calm face as you drag two suitcases stuffed with clothes to fight the cold, medicine against the thousand microbes they have in Europe, not forgetting small presents for the people you’ll have to deal with. You were told many times never to leave empty handed” (p. 95).

Maya’s journey provides plenty of opportunities for Waberi to frame Europe in the terms commonly used to describe Africa. There’s a certain amount of glee in this reversal of stereotypes, but the novel is more than just an extended joke. It is, itself, a mirror. In its pages, a reader of any background will see herself or himself reflected in the body of the other. The insistent address of the narrative voice, the repeated you—you are seeing this, you are doing this—underscores the urgent call for self-examination that lies at the heart of the book.

Often, science fiction imagines the future; In the United States of Africa re-imagines the present. Yet it also gestures toward a future in which Maya will find peace, a peace that the reader is called to seek as well. In that future, the narrator declares, “the world will refuse to turn into mud.” This future must grow from the quiet reflection of the present, but it is far less static, less dependent on the image in the mirror. “You will convert the blue sky to palpable works, you will wave azure handkerchiefs in farewell” (p. 123).