Saladin Ahmed says his debut fantasy novel feels like the only one he possibly could have written.
"It probably was almost an inevitable thing," Ahmed says. "I write, I have a pretty strong sense of coming from a specific cultural background, and I'm a nerd. It was almost like this novel came organically from those things."
The novel,
Throne of the Crescent Moon, has been nominated for two of fantasy writing's highest honors, the
Hugo and
Nebula awards. It's the first of three planned installments in the adventures of Dr. Adoulla Makhslood, an elderly ghul hunter in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Dhamsawaat. Almost all of the book's key elements - fantasy, Middle Eastern culture, a passion for classic storytelling, an elder hero - can be traced directly back to Ahmed's formative years growing up in Dearborn.
Ahmed's father, Ismael, was a founder of the Arab community center
ACCESS; more recently, he served as director of the Michigan Department of Human Services under governor Jennifer Granholm. Ahmed recalls his father encouraging him to write for pleasure as early as first grade, and he later dove into the family's copies of
The Lord of the Rings and
Dune. Ahmed says he was ushered into nerd culture at a time, and in a place, when it was far from the norm.
"That's the big culture today," he says. "The big movies today are superhero movies. But thirty years ago that was not the case. Anyone who grew up with it was marginalized by it. Especially in Dearborn, in the immigrant community, my dad was atypical for his interest in reading in general."
Ahmed says his father was "very conscious of himself as an Arab," a quality that Ahmed has carried into his own life and work. Even the decision to make his novel's leading man a sexagenarian, he says, was influenced by the Arab cultural value of "valuing age and wisdom, not the teenage hero."
"We didn't speak Arabic much, but the food, the way you interact with people, is all part of it," he says. "I heard the call to prayer growing up, and there's not a lot of people in America who can say that. During Islamic holidays, school was empty. The sound of Arabic was what I heard all the time growing up."
After graduating from the University of Michigan, Ahmed did his graduate studies in New York and spent several years focused on writing poetry. In 2007 he says he "stalled out" on poetry and refocused his efforts on writing fantasy. Critical acclaim came quickly and his second short story, Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela, earned a 2009 Nebula nomination. Ahmed made an even more significant return to his roots in 2010, when he moved his wife and newborn twins from New York to Huntington Woods. Although he says proximity to the New York publishing world was valuable to his career, a livable home for his family was more important.
"New York's an amazing city, but it's a very hard place to raise kids on anything other than an obscenely huge income," he says.
Upon returning to metro Detroit, Ahmed was surprised to still find considerable sci-fi and fantasy fellowship.
"I thought I was going to come back home and be totally alone," he says. "But there's a little community of sci-fi and fantasy fans, and there's a handful of writers as well."
Ahmed reserves especial praise for Dearborn sci-fi convention
ConFusion. Conventions, he says, are where "both the business end and the fan connection of science fiction happen."
"[ConFusion] has really become one of the premiere sci-fi and fantasy conventions," Ahmed says. "It's gone from being a smallish thing to being a pretty big, professional convention. And it's happening right in my backyard."
Since returning home, Ahmed has also reconnected with the local Arab-American community and his hometown. He's been invited to present at the
Arab American National Museum and the University of Michigan-Dearborn. While he enjoys his community's support, he says it can still be strange to return home.
"It's always bittersweet," he says. "Things have changed. Everybody's older. People have died. It's the same place and it's not the same place. So I'm kind of taking it as it is."
From his new home, Ahmed has ushered
Throne of the Crescent Moon into the world through a deal with Penguin Group fantasy publisher
DAW Books. Since the book's release, Ahmed says he's received fan emails from locations as far-flung as Sweden and Brazil. The book has even reached the hands of
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, who recommended it for a
Hugo. While Ahmed is enjoying that success, he's still not exactly living the high life.
"The biggest misconception that people have is probably how much visibility corresponds to actual income," he says. "People have read my book. People are sending me pictures from, like, Malaysia, and my book's there. All that said, it's still pretty much poverty-wage work."
Although he does freelance editing work in between childcare and writing, Ahmed has used his blog to request
donations. The road for an up and coming author can be a hard one. He says it would be "a different matter" if the
Crescent Moon trilogy was already completed, but a single book - even a fairly successful one - isn't much to go on. So eager readers can relax: a sequel is headed to shelves just as soon as Ahmed can finish writing it, likely sometime next year.
"The end-all and be-all is getting book two put to bed," he says. "Other than the kids, that's my whole life right now."
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and contributor to Metromode and Concentrate.