The blurb:
A medieval physician asked to do the impossible. A gun slinging Muslim wizard in the old West. A disgruntled super villain pining for prison reform. A cybernetic soldier who might or might not be receiving messages from God. Prepare yourself to be transported to new and fantastical worlds.
The short stories in this collection have been nominated for the Nebula and Campbell awards. They’ve been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and other anthologies, recorded for numerous podcasts, and translated into several foreign languages. Now they are collected in one place for the first time. Experience for yourself the original voice of one of fantasy’s rising stars!
I'd heard a few of these stories on Podcastle and Escape Pod - search and you can find a couple of author pages for Saladin Ahmed on both. The earliest of these I think was Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela, back in 2010. Engraved on the Eye is a few years later, published in 2012, and I swear it's been hanging around my e-reader for almost that long. It's old enough that I slipped and didn't include it on my Mount TBR project tracking page.
It's an interesting collection of stories, mostly in the fantasy sphere, some of which feel like they come from the same world (Where Virtue Lives, Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela and Judgement of Swords and Souls), and a touch of SF in The Faithful Soldier, Prompted. With only eight stories in the collection, it's a brisk read and I do wish it were longer, and the same goes for some of the stories: Judgement of Swords and Souls in particular feels like an excerpt from the opening chapter of a novel, not a standalone short story. By contrast, Where Virtue Lives is a prequel, explaining how two characters in the Crescent Moon kingdom series originally met—but it still feels satisfying in a way that Judgement doesn't.
I appreciate the range of storytelling, and the skill at worldbuilding displayed in the collection.
Started: 15 January 2026
Finished: 18 January 2026
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