Thyme Travellers

[psocoptera]

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction, 2024 anthology edited by Sonia Sulaiman. I manage to read about one anthology or collection a year, despite an interest in short fiction and a fondness for themed anthologies. Like any anthology this was a mixed bag, some stories that worked for me, some that didn't land, some that were just incomprehensible to me (but might have worked better if I had the right set of cultural references). The selection leaned towards stories in which Being Palestinian was a major concern of the story (although there were a couple that were more like stories that happened to be written by a Palestinian) and many were strongly... "Palestine-ist", I guess you would say, the ideology that centers return to specific ancestral or sometimes personal homelands as the central cultural/spiritual project? Anyways, I thought "Down Under" by Jumaana Abdu and "The Center of the Universe" by Nadia Shammas (which I vaguely recall from when it was in Strange Horizons) were standouts, and "Cyrano de AI" by Karl El-Koura was making a decent stab at doing an "interpersonal use of LLMs" story before it (kind of ironically) backed off from saying anything really interesting.