Like Intrusion, Alif the Unseen is a novel that straddles the line between high-tech political thriller and epic fantasy. Alif is a hacker in a near-future Middle Eastern city that looks and sounds very much like Cairo — a city where G. Willow Wilson has lived for much of the past decade. There, Alif works as a hacker for hire, helping pornographers and subversive bloggers alike maintain their anonymity in a world of futuristic cyber-surveillance and closed regimes locked

—Annalee Newitz