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To Follow the Waves

by  Amal El-Mohtar

 

Hessa’s legs ached. She knew she ought to stand, stretch them, but only gritted her teeth and glared at the clear lump of quartz on the table before her. To rise now would be to concede defeat—but to lean back, lift her goggles and rub her eyes was, she reasoned, an adequate compromise.

Her braids weighed on her, and she scratched the back of her head, where they pulled tightest above her nape. To receive a commission from Sitt Warda Al-Attrash was a great honour, one that would secure her reputation as a fixed star among Dimashq’s dream-crafters. She could not afford to fail. Worse, the dream Sitt Warda desired was simple, as dreams went: to be a young woman again, bathing her limbs by moonlight in the Mediterranean with a young man who, judging by her half-spoken, half-murmured description, was not precisely her husband.

But Hessa had never been to the sea.

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “To Follow the Waves” by Amal El-Mohtar, and if you enjoyed that then there’s more delights lurking in the vaults: from episode 111, And Their Lips Rang With the Sun, through 277, A Hollow Play, to 379, The Truth About Owls, as well as miniatures dotted throughout. There’s even more on her website, too, amalelmohtar.com, including links to buy her novella This is How You Lose the Time War, as recommended by Bigolas Dickolas on Twitter, and her 2025 solo debut, The River Has Roots. Amal is absolutely one of the leading lights of contemporary fantasy writing, so please do follow up on any and all of these, for your own delight and benefit.

I did more than just dig this story out from the vaults: I dug the original forum thread up too, when that was the centre of our communal conversation for dissecting stories. There were some interesting thoughts in there, including from Amal herself, primarily around two axes.

The first was the allegory, initially accidental, for writing fiction, and the ways that we intentionally or otherwise incorporate people we’ve known or even just seen into our stories, co-opting them without consent. Funnily enough it is just today that a court case has been settled in the UK, from an academic suing over a film’s portrayal of him as “misogynistic” and “weasel like” when relaying the search for Richard III’s remains under a car park in Leicester. That’s a very direct and obvious example, but I know I am guilty of it all the time—inevitably, when trying to round a character out and humanise them, make them more realistic, you pull on fragments (or more) of real people. I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding that, and if I were to go out on a limb I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, either? I think the moral imperative is not to avoid this, but simply to do it responsibly.

The other key thread of conversation was over the classification of the story as steampunk, given the anthology it was originally in and its express authorial purpose to broaden the genre beyond Victorian England and its white, colonial lens. Now I think that arguments over genre are inherently doomed to failure and part of the normal human urge to classify and demarcate what is, in fact, a continuous spectrum with no clean dividing lines when you get down to brass tacks—just another flavour of taxonomy, in the end, and one mostly for the benefit of marketing and conversations about where to shelve a book in Waterstones. Discussions over it are often illuminating for deeper reasons, though: unless you’re actually a marketer the question is surely academic if taken at face value, but oftentimes—and to be clear I am now talking in a general sense, rather than specifically about the forum thread!—discussions of genre are really about gatekeeping, which itself is really about control.

All of which, again, I think is something to be aware of rather than avoid. You cannot avoid writing in a genre, because others will decide it for you even if you insist you’re not: so instead you need to understand the conversation your piece is having with the rest of its natural genre, and be responsible with it. Which in the case of something like steampunk, which unavoidably inherits the colonial underpinnings of the era it is modelled on, means making a conscious effort to contradict the racism and imperialism inherent in Victoriana. It means making the effort to question why something is an accepted part of an aesthetic—for example, cyberpunk’s Orientalism, grounded in contemporary fears of Japan overtaking the US as a global economic power—and making sure you incorporate, or challenge, or discard with intent.

It’s similar to the conversations about sensitivity readers, I suppose, wherein certain sorts declared any attempt to have an informed party read a work to flag up any embedded prejudice or stereotypes as “censorship”. Which was always nonsense, given both the actual definition of censorship as being from a government power and given that the whole point was still to publish the thing!, but the root of what a sensitivity read is for is to make sure you’re doing the thing on purpose. Stories and characters should absolutely include awful opinions both to represent the full breadth of human thought and emotion, and also to challenge and dissect and process them. But if you’re going to include a racist character, or whatever prejudice you prefer, they ought to be like that intentionally, so that you know what you’re trying to achieve with them. If you’re doing it accidentally, well, that’s either just sloppy, or its indicative of some unpleasant attitudes lurking in your ego that ought to be pointed out to you so as you can do something about them.

So in the end, I think those two strands of thought from the forum thread, and the story itself, are about one thing: they’re about being conscious, intentional, and aware of your impact on the world around you. Which is, in the general sense, as close to a commandment as this godless heathen has ever known.