arensb reviewed The Mirage by Matt Ruff
Review of 'The Mirage' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
It’s not clear whether this is alternate-history science fiction or straight-up fantasy, but there’s no rule that says a book has to fit neatly into one category or another. In fact, it’s good to have books that resist pigeonholing.
Without revealing too much The Mirage is about a world in which the roles of West and Middle-East have been reversed; Baghdad is the cultural and financial center of the world, while North America is a collection of states led by one religious warlord or another. It takes place a decade after 11/9, when a group of Christian terrorists hijacked four planes and brought down twin towers above the Tigris and Euphrates.
The book is not without its flaws: it wants to present a vast world in just a few hundred pages, so there’s a lot of exposition. And the middle drags quite a bit, though it’s worth soldiering through until …
It’s not clear whether this is alternate-history science fiction or straight-up fantasy, but there’s no rule that says a book has to fit neatly into one category or another. In fact, it’s good to have books that resist pigeonholing.
Without revealing too much The Mirage is about a world in which the roles of West and Middle-East have been reversed; Baghdad is the cultural and financial center of the world, while North America is a collection of states led by one religious warlord or another. It takes place a decade after 11/9, when a group of Christian terrorists hijacked four planes and brought down twin towers above the Tigris and Euphrates.
The book is not without its flaws: it wants to present a vast world in just a few hundred pages, so there’s a lot of exposition. And the middle drags quite a bit, though it’s worth soldiering through until it makes a sharp left turn and down the roller-coaster near the end.
It also suffers from a problem common to time-travel and alternate-reality stories: the author can’t resist having the characters meet just about everyone of note in the story’s setting. The Mirage includes everyone, from David Koresh, Dick Cheney, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and more.
At the same time, it’s interesting to consider how all of these people would belong in this alternate timeline. One of the premises of the story is that even though the world may change, people’s character remains the same: a sociopath in one world is a sociopath in the other.
