Lost in Lualand

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 with 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 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.