- Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Salām al-Baqqāli (1932 – 2010, Morocco) – al-Ṭūfān al-Azraq (‘The blue flood’, 1976). The story of this novel is centred on ʿAlī, a Moroccan anthropologist living in the West, and Tāj, a famous physicist, and critiques traditional religious and cultural values. Both characters vanish from a transatlantic flight and eventually meet each other again at Jabal Jawdī, where, as Tāj explains to ʿAlī, many of the world’s scientists retreat to. However, the artificial intelligence that has become salient on the oasis starts to claim that humanity should be destroyed, a claim that the scientists secretly conspire against (reference).
- Ṣubḥī Faḥmāwī (1948-, Palestine) – al-Iskandariyya 2050 (‘Alexandria 2050’, 2009). This novel starts in the future and works its way back to the year 1948, providing both a portrait of the life of the Palestinian Mashūr and the history of Alexandria, Egypt. This is possible by an invention that can record every individual’s past life while they are dying. Mashūr started his as a Palestinian refugee and eventually moved to Alexandria in 1966 to study. The novel narrates his life in the city from that year onward: the great defeat of 1979, the popular films and music, up until the year 2050 in which robots fulfill the all the needs of the city’s inhabitants and liquid hydrogen is used as fuel (reference) (also in C: Cities: Egypt: Alexandria).
- Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s (1898 – 1987, Egypt) plays Law ʿAraf al-Shabbāb (‘If only the youth knew’, 1950). An old man, Ṣadīq Bāshā, regains his youth after having given a rejuvenating elixir, but then finds out that being young is no guarantee for happiness. As his family does not recognize him, he finds is entrapment in a youthful body a torment and asks for his old age back. The novel reflects on questions related to time and identity, and inter-generational conflicts (reference).
- Khālid bin Ḥamid (?, UAE) – Asrār Nāṣṣir (‘Nasser’s Secrets’, 2013). This sci-fi graphic novel combines Japanese manga and anime elements with a story about three Emirati teenagers who mysteriously disappear and resurface three days later having aged fifteen years (reference). The story unfolds what happened to them and how the Emirati community reacts to the supernatural elements the three bring to earth.
- Ṭayibah al-Ibrāhīm’s (1945 – 2011, Kuwait) two novels al-Insān al-Bāhit (‘The pale person’, 1986) and al-Insān al-Mutʿaddad (‘The multiple person’, 1990) focus on the human reproduction and aging process, as well as questions of tradition and modernity.
The first, al-Insān al-Bāhit centres on Khālid, a Kuwaiti man who moves to the country of Sirāl for business. There he becomes friends with the family who owns a company and who decides to unfreeze their ancestor who set up the company and legally still owns it. This ancestor Muwā, however, with his scientific perspective is a completely different from the family’s expectations. The novel critiques the attraction of Arabs to Western culture but also the clinging to aspects of traditional culture that do not function effectively in the modern age (reference).
al-Insān al-Mutʿaddad tells the story of ʿAlī who is the clone-son of the wealthy Kuwaiti man ʿĀdil. The story is narrated by Amal who manages a home for orphans where she collects testimonies and observations of the story of ʿAlī, who will eventually become her husband. She describes that ʿAlī, being only a partially successful clone, has no legal rights and is denied by ʿĀdil, who only wanted him to be a spare body for himself to use (reference). The novel can be read as a critique of the legal non-status of foreign workers in Kuwait (reference) (also in M: Movement (E) migration, Refugees and Return: (E)Migration: Non-Arab Migrants in Arab Countries).
- Mūsā Walid Ibindū (1956-, Mauritania) – Al-Ḥubb al-Mustaḥīl (‘The impossible love’, 1999) and Ḥajj 2053, Riḥlat Munīr Uwyū (‘Hajj 2053, the travel of Munir Uqyu’, 2021).
This first novel comments on reproductive technology through a love story. It is set in a world where single-parent families are the norm and there are two societies: one for men, one for women. Love is seen as an illness, and sexual encounters forbidden. But the protagonists fall in love and are forced into ‘rehabilitation’. Ibindū makes references to Greek philosophy to reflect on gender roles and love. He originally wrote the novel in French as L’amour impossible and himself re-wrote it to Arabic years later, a similar process to his novel Madīnah al-Riyāḥ in the section ‘Time travel’ below (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Gender Issues).
Ḥajj 2053, Riḥlat Munīr Uwyū (‘Hajj 2053, the travel of Munir Uqyu’, 2021) describes the pilgrimage in the year 2053, in which an American agency offers package service for pilgrims including far advanced technology, such as eye implants that feed on the sun and a program to download the Qur’an, the biography of the Prophet, the rituals of Hajj, and the most important Arabic language books to the pilgrims’ brain (reference) (also in R: Religion and Sectarianism: Quran, Ḥadīth and Religious Practices).
- Luṭfī al-Khūlī (1929 – 1999, Egypt) – al-Arānib (‘The rabbits’, 1964) in which a lawyer and his wife try out a synthesized chemical which causes biological change in the human sex: the male converts to a female and vice versa (also in L: Love, Lust, and Relationships: LGBTQ+: Sex Change).
- Muṣṭafā Maḥmūd (1921 – 2009, Egypt) is considered the ‘father of Arabic SF’ due to his elaborate sci-fi oeuvre. Among his works are al-ʿAnkabūt (‘The spider’, 1965) and his best-known novel, Rajul Taḥt al-Sifr (‘The man with a temperature below zero’, 1993).
Al-ʿAnkabūt is the author’s first novel and is written as a dairy of an Egyptian brain surgeon, Dāwūd, who lives in Berlin in 1963. The surgeon investigates the story of Damyān, a patient who he met in Cairo in 1957 and who suddenly disappeared. He eventually traces Damyān to a lab in Egypt’s rural area and discovers that he is preforming research on brain waves of peasants and is injecting himself with a serum extracted from a spider that allows him to experience past lives. However, Damyān is addicted to the serum, which leads to his death after which Dāwūd himself starts taking it. Instead of analysing the serum, he also dies of an overdose (reference).
Rajul Taḥt al-Sifr focuses on a university professor, Shāhīn, who travels to London to give a lecture on his predictions for the future. Among others, he describes the ability for people to keep living after they have been frozen and the ability of the human body to turn into waves. This last process he himself made possible by creating a machine that turns biological beings into wave forms. The professor predicts that in the future human life will be controlled by materialistic interests and forecasts that people will only be able to turn to God for redemption (reference). Reuver Snir emphasizes the role Islamic concepts play in this novel (reference).
- Ṣabrī Mūsā (1932 – 2018, Egypt) – Sayyid min Ḥaql al-Sabānikh (‘The gentleman from the spinach field’, 1987). This novel is set in a 23rd century society wrecked by environmental catastrophe, but in which the totalitarian leadership provides its citizens with all necessities of life while at the same time monitoring their every movement. Spiritual and intellectual developments of the population are non-existent as they are primarily preoccupied with television and drinking beer. Hero of the novel, Hūmū, is working on a spinach field when he discovers a government project to colonize space (reference).
- Aḥmad Saʿadāwī (1973-, Iraq) – Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (2013, English trans. Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2018). This novel refers to Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein story to portray the horrors that have wracked Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Hero of the story, Hādi al-Attag, a junk dealer, wounders the streets during the Iraqi war looking for body parts of those killed to sew them together. But when the soul of a hotel security guard who died in a car bomb enters the body, it turns into a terrifying creature revenging the murders of ‘all his parts’ (reference). The novel won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 (also in 2003 – 2011 US-led invasion of Iraq).
- Ānn al-Ṣāfī (?, Sudan) started a literary project titled ‘al-Kitābah lil-Mustaqbal’ (‘writing for the future’), in which she addresses sociocultural questions on the future and technology, the environment, data science, and their relation to traditional cultures, among others. An example is the novel Khubz al-Ghajr (‘Bread of gypsies’, 2019), which describes the interaction between a multi-cultural society and modernity, specifically addressing questions related to behavioral economics.
- Nihād Sharīf (1932 – 2011, Egypt) – al-Shayʾ (‘The thing’, 1989) and Qāhir al-Zamān (‘The conqueror of time’, 1972).
In al-Shayʾ, a thing from outer space has landed on earth, in Egypt, and the novel presents the daily reactions of the Egyptian people and authorities. The novel holds a pacifistic message (reference).
Qāhir al-Zamān is about Kāmil who works with a megalomaniac scientist, Ḥalīm, who invented a process to cryogenically preserve and revive animals and, as he later discovers, also secretly applies that process to humans. Shocked by this fact, Kāmil tries to escape the scientific facility together with Zayn, Ḥalīm’s niece who he has fallen in love with. The novel can be read as an allegory and critique of the Nasser period in which scientific and technological development was stagnant, and Egyptian society suffered under its ruler’s totalitarian and despotic manners (reference). The novel was made into a film in 1987 (also in 1954 Nasser comes to power in Egypt).
- Ṭālib ʿUmrān (1948-, Syria) has written a huge number of science-fiction novels. For example, al-Zaman al-Ṣaʿab (‘Difficult times’, 1999), in which the hero hoovers over the earth in his war plane until he crashes. He is forced to find refuge in an underground city in the desert, where he is surprised to find the large number of wars between people that take place.
- Fādi Zaghmūt (1978-, Jordan) – Jannā ʿAla al-Arḍ (2014, English trans. Heaven on Earth, 2017). Set in Amman, Jordan, in the 2091, in a world of technological and medical breakthroughs, the novel’s main protagonist Janna faces a family drama as her brother decides to forgo life-extending medication. Other innovations include smart lenses and the ‘golden pill’ that can make people younger. Through the description of these technologies, the writer explores their social implications and questions the religious permissiveness of the technological inventions (reference).
- In the analogy Iraq +100 (2016, eds. Ḥassan Blāsim), 10 short stories are collected that reflect the imagination of what several writers think Iraq will look like 100 years after the US-led invasion, in the year 2103. Among the writers are ʿAlī Badr, Ḥassan ʿAbdulrazzak, Jalāl Ḥasan and Zhrā al-Ḥabūbī. They are translated by different translators. The short stories are written in a range of genres, from science fiction to allegory and magical realism (also in 2003 – 2011 US-led Invasion of Iraq).
- The analogy Palestine +100 (2019, eds. Selma Dabbagh and Mazen Maarouf), like Iraq +100, collects the views of several Palestinian writers who in short stories describe what they think Palestine will look like 100 years after the Nakbah, in 2048. Among the authors are Talal Abu Shawish, Liana Badr, and Mazen Maarouf. The Nakbah of 1948, the year Israel proclaimed its statehood, caused the displacement of more than 700,000 people. In various stories that use different literary genres, the authors reflect on how they think Palestine is still affected by or escaped the effects of the Nakbah (also in 1948 al- Nakbah).
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Ian Campbell. 2018. Arabic Science Fiction. Palgrave MacMillan: London, p. 143, 154, 185, 186, 219, 286, 295
- Aḥmad Faḍl Shablūl. 2010. “‘al-Iskandiriyyah 2050’ Riwāyah Mudhishah” www.diwanalarab.com, 13 March 2010 https://www.diwanalarab.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B3%D9%83%D9%86%D8%AF%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9-2050 (last accessed 14 November 2021)
- Ibrāhīm ʿĀdil. 2018. “Masraḥiyah ‘’Law ʾAraf al-Shabāb’: al-Zaman wa Ṣirāʿa al-Ajyāl fī Mirāah al-Ḥakīm.” www.ida2at.com, 25 November 2018, https://www.ida2at.com/if-youth-knew-tawfik-alhakim/ (last accessed 7 September 2023)
- Mai El Shoush. 2013. “Khalid Bin Hamad’s novel blends Japanese styles and Emirati culture.” www.thenational.ae, 13 January 2013 https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/khaled-bin-hamad-s-novel-blends-japanese-styles-and-emirati-culture-1.478937 (last accessed 5 January 2019)
- Alakhbar. 2021. “‘Ḥajj 2053’ Riwāyah Jadīdah lil-Kātib al-Kabīr Mūsā Anbū.” www.alakhbar.info, 31 July 2021 https://alakhbar.info/?q=node/34534 (last accessed 23 November 2021)
- Walīd al-Nuʿaymī. 2015. “Sīrat al-Kitāb: Riwāyah ‘Rajul Taḥt al-Sifr’ li-Mustafa Maḥmūd.” www.alwasatnews.com, 28 November 2015, http://www.alwasatnews.com/news/1050423.html (last accessed 17 November 2021)
- Reuven Snir. 2000. “The Emergence of Science- fiction in Arab Literature.” p. 274, 279
- Rachel S. Cordasco. 2018. “‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’ by Ahmed Saadaqi.” www.worldliteraturetoday.org, January 2018, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/january/frankenstein-baghdad-ahmed-saadawi (last accessed 7 September 2023)
- Jona Fras. 2015. “Fadi Zagmout’s ‘Paradise on Earth’: Family Dynamics in Futuristic Jordan.” www.arablit.com, 15 April 2015, https://arablit.org/2015/04/15/science-fiction-jordan/ (last accessed on 22 November 2017)
- Khālid ʿAbd al-Muḥsin. 2014. “al-Riwāʾī Fādī Zaghmūt li-‘Bawābah al-Ahrām’: Aradtu law Arsum Ṣūrat Sabāḥ Shābah min Jadīd… lil-Asif Umniah lam Tataḥaqaq.” www.ahram.org.eg, 16 December 2014 https://gate.ahram.org.eg/News/573454.aspx (last accessed 17 November 2021)