Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Color for his work focusing on Arabic and Islamic–inspired themes in a genre he is calling Arabfuturism. He lives in East London where he spends his time pondering linguistic oddities and running story ideas by his cat.
El Sayed applied the Page 69 Test to The Republic of Memory, his debut novel, and reported the following:
Page 69 comes in the middle of Chapter 5 which is the third chapter from the POV of Translator Iskander Ezz – a low-ranking bureaucrat on the city-ship Safina. This is a generation ship divided not according to race or religion, but language, with translators serving as something akin to lawyers. On page 69, Iskander is heading down to Stasis – where all the ancestors are asleep in cryo-stasis – to try and convince his cousin Lebanon, who works in Stasis watch, to help him with a favour. However, before he can even get on deck, he must blag his way past the ever-present Security.Follow Mahmud El Sayed on Instagram.“It’ll take five minutes, I promise.”I think page 69 is a pretty good introduction to TROM as a whole. It’s from one of the book’s main POV characters and catches him doing one of the main POV character things that he does, namely facilitating and negotiating between the various factions on the ship. Page 69 gives readers a nice, clean, snap-shot of who Iskander is and, just as importantly, what the ship he lives on is like. Yes, there’s Security barring his way but he knows how to circumvent them.
Vic blew out a breath. “Fine, but you owe me one.”
Iskander nodded and moved past the big Security officer – but not before jotting down a quick note in the secret ledger of his tab: Corporal Victory Kamunda. One favor owed for letting me into Stasis against standing orders.
I would conclude that the test works with TROM but only partially. The strength of multi-POV (and my book is very multi-POV with 12 POV characters) is that it allows writers to tell multiple disparate stories, and even genres, at the same time. Polyphonic storytelling. Iskander’s chapters might give readers the sense of a low-key slice-of-life story set on a generation ship. But if page 69 had fallen on a different chapter, they might just as easily think they were reading a sci-fi detective novel, a revolutionary bildungsroman, even experimental literary fiction based on a constructed language. Multi-POV is never just one thing.
--Marshal Zeringue
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