Ahmed Naji

Another review about our latest book published at : Egypt +100: Reimagining Egypt a century after the revolution (newarab.com)

Egyptian writers are great at writing sci-fi and dystopian fiction but are completely unappreciated.

This is quite a bold and generic statement to make, but hear me out: for decades, Western writers have been conjuring up dystopian world orders in which your every move is monitored by state surveillance, every written word censored and every spoken sentence informed on, but Egyptians have been living this authoritarian reality for the past seven decades.

This then poses the question, what does an Egyptian sci-fi writer write about when your current reality is as far-fetched as the sci-fi novels of American and British writers?

Egyptian author and journalist Ahmed Naji attempts to answer this question in the recently released anthology he edited for Comma Press, Egypt 100 +: Stories from a Century after Tahrir.

In his introduction he asks, when you live in a country where the authoritarian leader has an “unlimited appetite for… science fiction,” is already obsessed with absurd architecture and mega-structures, and where an army medical general (Dr Abdel Atty) has people believe that he has an invention that can zap AIDS and hepatitis and convert the viral proteins into kebabs and kofta for people to eat, how can an Egyptian sci-fi writer conjure something even more far-fetched?

— Read teh rest of teh article here: Egypt +100: Reimagining Egypt a century after the revolution (newarab.com)