Ahmed Khan: Best of Everything
Jun. 26th, 2018 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaBest of Everything is a self-published pdf-only anthology of short stories (some very short) by sff author Ahmed Khan (the collection is available from the author, who can be contacted via his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ahmedkhanwrites/ - at the time I acquired the pdf, the author was asking a donation of one dollar for the compilation)
Khan has a definite gift for writing stories that challenge expectations - you think they are going somewhere, but they end up someplace quite different. His stories are, generally speaking, fun to read, but his endings - now those can be quite thought-provoking indeed.
I often feel when reading one of his short stories that his style has been heavily influenced by oral story-telling traditions. He’s not one for lush description, or complicated proses. There is a deceptive simplicity to his style, something that often makes me think of his stories as parables, or fables - and yes, his work often carries with it a moral of one kind or another, as parables and fables are wont to do. Sometimes, however, I feel that this tendency to write in parables tends to sidestep the ethical complexities of real life, and present things which are multi-hued as though they must be black or white.
There’s often a touch of dry satirical observation in Khan’s writing, which I find quite delightful. An example:
“Earth people live like animals. Our conquest will be a blessing for them in disguise," said the Commander, as is typical of so many commanders all over the universe.
"How true!" murmured his men, as is typical of commanders' men all over the universe.
Bits of writing like this make me smile, and sometimes even giggle.
Among the stories in this collection that I particularly enjoyed were:
“Close Encounter of the Preposterous Kind,” in which an attack on Earth is foiled by a most unusual saviour. The story combines the tropes of two very different genres of speculative fiction to produce an unexpected ending in a way that strikes me as quintessential Khan.
“Face It” is a science fictional in-joke - but it’s also a comment on rushing into things you know little about. A plastic surgeon convinces a man disfigured in an accident to participate in an experiment to test the premise of physiognomy - with a result that will leave every long-term science fiction fan nodding in recognition.
“Knock, Knock” is perhaps my favourite of the stories collected here. Khan notes that the piece is inspired by the work of Urdu novellist Qurratulain Hyder - and after reading this piece, and reading about her on the Net, I’m going to have to see if I can locate any of her works in translation. It is, I think, a definitely non-western story in its approach. Deeply lyrical, it places importance on the journey rather than the goal, the state of mind more than the specific achievement. It spoke to me in profound ways about the standards we use to assess the value of a life.
“Mynah for the King” is a teaching parable of leadership and governance - but though it speaks about what kinds of things should inform the policies of a ruler, it is also applicable to the ways in which we make our own decisions, reminding us that wisdom and creativity can be better guides than pragmatism.
“Veils” is a story about a young woman who learns that judging the value of others by their outward appearance and sweet words leads to disappointment, while looking behind the surface to the real feelings and actions can be a much better way to discovering the real value of a person.
Several of the stories here are very short - a paragraph or two at the most, and it is in these that Khan’s playfulness shows most strongly - most notably in “Infringement.” But inherent in the word play are ideas worth thinking about seriously.
A few stories rather missed the mark for me, though. This feeling was strongest in the story, “How To Write a Fantasy,” an otherwise clever piece of metafiction, Khan describes the sole character in the story as “A man-hater of the variety who would like to decimate all the men from the face of the earth and spend the rest of her life making love to machines.” As a feminist who has ben described so many times as a man-hater, and seen so many other feminists described the same way, this shook me right out of the necessary receptive mood. I don’t know if Khan intended this to evoke the idea of a feminist, but it’s such a common insult, and one that many men as well as women would interpret as referring to feminists, that the impact was to turn what might have been an ironic twist into a something that felt like a nasty revenge fantasy.
Two of the stories in this collection would appear to rely rather heavily on the idea that consensual sexual activity outside of marriage is intrinsically wrong - a belief that I do not share, and that made my appreciation of these two stories, “Seventeen” and “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” less than complete. However, in both stories, it is possible to engage in a somewhat subtextual interpretation, in which the moral failure is not so much the physical fact of having sex, as it is the reasons and choices leading to it. Read this way, both stories are, in different ways, about choosing the spirit over the world.
In “Seventeen,” a young man meets a girl who seems to him to embody innocence and hope, but after he spends an evening in a casual sexual encounter, he feels unworthy of her affection. I’m not comfortable with the idea that sexual ‘purity’ equals innocence and sexual expression is a loss of innocence. But the choice he makes, can be seen as one of greed, of wanting everything without regard for the feelings of another. In “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” a man is offered a choice between great wealth, and a fantastic journey to an alien land. He chooses wealth, but is stymied when, in order to achieve that wealth, he must find a virgin within a specific period of time, and he fails. Here, I choose to read the fault as a choice of materialism over the chance fir new experiences and deeper understandings. When he chooses wealth, he dooms himself to an unfulfillable condition, not because the world has no virtuous women in it to give him what he wants, but because his own greed traps him. I’d like to think that the author would not object to these readings.
Taken all in all, there’s quite a lot to enjoy in this collection, and I’m glad that the author assembled these pieces and made them available.
Khan has a definite gift for writing stories that challenge expectations - you think they are going somewhere, but they end up someplace quite different. His stories are, generally speaking, fun to read, but his endings - now those can be quite thought-provoking indeed.
I often feel when reading one of his short stories that his style has been heavily influenced by oral story-telling traditions. He’s not one for lush description, or complicated proses. There is a deceptive simplicity to his style, something that often makes me think of his stories as parables, or fables - and yes, his work often carries with it a moral of one kind or another, as parables and fables are wont to do. Sometimes, however, I feel that this tendency to write in parables tends to sidestep the ethical complexities of real life, and present things which are multi-hued as though they must be black or white.
There’s often a touch of dry satirical observation in Khan’s writing, which I find quite delightful. An example:
“Earth people live like animals. Our conquest will be a blessing for them in disguise," said the Commander, as is typical of so many commanders all over the universe.
"How true!" murmured his men, as is typical of commanders' men all over the universe.
Bits of writing like this make me smile, and sometimes even giggle.
Among the stories in this collection that I particularly enjoyed were:
“Close Encounter of the Preposterous Kind,” in which an attack on Earth is foiled by a most unusual saviour. The story combines the tropes of two very different genres of speculative fiction to produce an unexpected ending in a way that strikes me as quintessential Khan.
“Face It” is a science fictional in-joke - but it’s also a comment on rushing into things you know little about. A plastic surgeon convinces a man disfigured in an accident to participate in an experiment to test the premise of physiognomy - with a result that will leave every long-term science fiction fan nodding in recognition.
“Knock, Knock” is perhaps my favourite of the stories collected here. Khan notes that the piece is inspired by the work of Urdu novellist Qurratulain Hyder - and after reading this piece, and reading about her on the Net, I’m going to have to see if I can locate any of her works in translation. It is, I think, a definitely non-western story in its approach. Deeply lyrical, it places importance on the journey rather than the goal, the state of mind more than the specific achievement. It spoke to me in profound ways about the standards we use to assess the value of a life.
“Mynah for the King” is a teaching parable of leadership and governance - but though it speaks about what kinds of things should inform the policies of a ruler, it is also applicable to the ways in which we make our own decisions, reminding us that wisdom and creativity can be better guides than pragmatism.
“Veils” is a story about a young woman who learns that judging the value of others by their outward appearance and sweet words leads to disappointment, while looking behind the surface to the real feelings and actions can be a much better way to discovering the real value of a person.
Several of the stories here are very short - a paragraph or two at the most, and it is in these that Khan’s playfulness shows most strongly - most notably in “Infringement.” But inherent in the word play are ideas worth thinking about seriously.
A few stories rather missed the mark for me, though. This feeling was strongest in the story, “How To Write a Fantasy,” an otherwise clever piece of metafiction, Khan describes the sole character in the story as “A man-hater of the variety who would like to decimate all the men from the face of the earth and spend the rest of her life making love to machines.” As a feminist who has ben described so many times as a man-hater, and seen so many other feminists described the same way, this shook me right out of the necessary receptive mood. I don’t know if Khan intended this to evoke the idea of a feminist, but it’s such a common insult, and one that many men as well as women would interpret as referring to feminists, that the impact was to turn what might have been an ironic twist into a something that felt like a nasty revenge fantasy.
Two of the stories in this collection would appear to rely rather heavily on the idea that consensual sexual activity outside of marriage is intrinsically wrong - a belief that I do not share, and that made my appreciation of these two stories, “Seventeen” and “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” less than complete. However, in both stories, it is possible to engage in a somewhat subtextual interpretation, in which the moral failure is not so much the physical fact of having sex, as it is the reasons and choices leading to it. Read this way, both stories are, in different ways, about choosing the spirit over the world.
In “Seventeen,” a young man meets a girl who seems to him to embody innocence and hope, but after he spends an evening in a casual sexual encounter, he feels unworthy of her affection. I’m not comfortable with the idea that sexual ‘purity’ equals innocence and sexual expression is a loss of innocence. But the choice he makes, can be seen as one of greed, of wanting everything without regard for the feelings of another. In “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” a man is offered a choice between great wealth, and a fantastic journey to an alien land. He chooses wealth, but is stymied when, in order to achieve that wealth, he must find a virgin within a specific period of time, and he fails. Here, I choose to read the fault as a choice of materialism over the chance fir new experiences and deeper understandings. When he chooses wealth, he dooms himself to an unfulfillable condition, not because the world has no virtuous women in it to give him what he wants, but because his own greed traps him. I’d like to think that the author would not object to these readings.
Taken all in all, there’s quite a lot to enjoy in this collection, and I’m glad that the author assembled these pieces and made them available.