---

---

Contents:

“The Wilderness Facilities” by Mansoura Ez-Eldin, tr Paul Starkey

“Drowning” by Heba Khamis, tr. Maisa Almanasreh

“Everything is Great in Rome” by Ahmed El-Fakharany, tr. Robin Moger

“The Mistake” by Mohamed Kheir, tr. Andrew Leber

“The Sky Room” by Azza Sultan, tr. Elizabeth Jaquette

“Encounter with the White Rabbit” by Michel Hanna, tr. Mohammed Ghalayini

“The Solitude of Prince Boudi” by Ahmed Wael, tr. Raphael Cohen

“God Only Knows” by Belal Fadl, tr. Raph Cormack

“Unicorn 2512” by Nora Nagi, tr. Mayada Ibrahim

“Mama” by Camellia Hussein, tr. Basma Ghalayini

“Oral History of Past, Obsolete and Forgotten” by Yasmine El Rashidi (written in English)

“The Tanta White People Museum” by Ahmed Naji, tr. Rana Asfour

---

“We asked all the contributors to imagine the Egypt of January 25th 2011[,] only a hundred years later–extrapolated, as Le Guin would say, but based on a political extrapolation of that moment in time, more than a scientific one…The result is a series of visions of the future inspired by the dreams and nightmares of the present.” – editor Ahmed Naji, “Introduction” (xv-xvi)

Egypt + 100 is Comma Press’s fourth book in the “Futures Past” series, following Iraq + 100, Palestine + 100, and Kurdistan + 100, where writers are asked to imagine life a century after a major event, such as invasion or revolution. This latest book in the series offers Anglophone readers a further interesting glimpse into the world of Arabic speculative fiction coming out of Egypt. Already in English are a number of works of Egyptian Arabic SFT: Basma Abdel-Aziz’s The Queue (2012, 2016), Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files (1976, 2009), Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping (2021), Ahmed Naji’s Using Life by (the editor of Egypt + 100) (2017), Mohamed Rabie’s Otared (2016), Khairy Shalaby’s The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets (1991, 2010), and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia (2009, 2011). Many of these texts are dystopian stories, though the Ghitani and Shalaby texts are darkly comic fantasies.

The current anthology, in which authors imagine what Egypt will be like culturally, politically, socially, and economically, in 2111 offers Anglophone readers a richly varied by also uneven text. Some stories, like “The Wilderness Facilities,” “Everything is Great in Rome,” “The Sky Room,” and “Unicorn 2512” are fully-developed, engrossing stories that show the authors’ skill and creative facility, while others seem to lack a plot or dwell on the authors’ gripes about political or social issues.

In his introduction, Naji begins with an important question: what exactly is “science fiction”? Of course, this question is asked constantly and will always be asked whenever the subject comes up. But Naji points out that, in the context of the Arab Spring, the revolution in Egypt, and the political realignments of the early 21st century, “science fiction” has become a more expansive term. Do we narrowly define it according to genre constraints, or do we think about it more broadly in terms of what the future might bring, whether or not the story includes advanced technology, alien visitation, etc.? Many of the stories in this anthology imagine an Egypt that has drifted toward authoritarianism or some sort of sterile, hyper-orderly, hyper-technological society. Floods and other natural catastrophes punctuate these texts, sometimes completely remaking the cities and towns of this near-future Egypt.

The stories I previously mentioned play with the genre of “science fiction” in creative ways. In “The Wilderness Facilities,” Mansoura Ez-Eldin imagines an Egypt in which people stay in their houses and do everything online–shopping, socializing–while those who have not submitted to the new way of the world must live in housing on the outskirts of the cities, under constant surveillance (see my discussion of “Unicorn 2512” below). When one woman in the city decides to go outside and experience the world with her own senses, she is found murdered in her bed, the image of her body projected to those living in the wilderness facilities to underscore that they must comply or face terrible consequences. We later learn that the professor who had first suggested this arrangement later regretted it, and was himself imprisoned in the facility.

“Everything is Great in Rome” opens with the startling declaration that on the morning of the 100th anniversary of the revolution, “we woke to find that Tahrir Square was no more and in its place stood the Colosseum, the most magnificent and brutal sporting arena in history” (35). Residents are told that, from now on, daily fights at the arena will be broadcast live across the country. Meanwhile, the ruler has withdrawn from sight and no one knows who is actually in charge. Eventually, the most talented fighter in the Colosseum is chosen to fight a special person, a fight that will change the direction of the country, and the absent leader is somehow involved….

Azza Sultan’s “The Sky Room” imagines an Egypt where the landscape is dotted with towers that have rooms projecting blue skies and other images to keep the population satisfied, since they are only allowed to walk the streets on certain days of the week. Everything is run by a harsh, controlling government, but the narrator recalls throughout the story the tales her father told her about what life was like before the revolution and authoritarian crackdown. Punctuating the narrator’s memories of life with her parents are glimpses of the narrator’s current world, where people have been thrown back to a pre-modern life after the towers and other buildings all collapsed.

“Unicorn 2512,” my favorite story of the group, follows the growing self-awareness of a young woman whose mother has just died in a “House of Noncompliance,” where people were forced to live who refused to join the metaverse. Unicorn has lived most of her days virtually–shopping, working, dating–while her mother, a writer, refused to join most of the rest of the world in doing the same. Disturbed by her mother’s smile of pity, Unicorn thinks through her life and realizes that it hasn’t been fulfilling and that she has grown old without realizing it. Deciding to write a story, like her mother used to, she then reads it in the middle of a square, in front of other real people, and for that her afterlife in the metaverse is deleted. Nonetheless, those who heard the first part of her story become interested in the rest, and they find her manuscript and start reading it out loud in public, surrounding her body.

Egypt + 100 is a great addition to the growing corpus of Egyptian and Arabic SFT, offering us a unique way of thinking about what life in that region might be like a century from now.