28 May 2011

Can science fiction save the Arabs?

Can science fiction save the Arabs?

That title is not meant as a joke. It’s a serious question. In our nation, from the Atlantic shore in the West to the coasts of Oman in the east, we face a significant crisis, a crisis not just of political failure but much deeper: a crisis of imagination. Formerly, we led the world in ideas, whether for good or bad. Arab scientists and thinkers thought up new ideas and new approaches for centuries, just as our ancestors had done since the dawn of recorded history. Nowadays, though, if one wants to find sparks of brilliance among the Arabs, those sparks will be looking at life overseas and in other lands.

We need to restore our lost brilliance. But how? How do we get the new generations of Arabs to think, not of what was, but of what might be? We could work to increase our level of education and many, many are doing that even now. New schools, new universities open almost daily. Illiteracy has begun to be eliminated in some parts of our nation and even in the most backwards parts, it has declined severely in this last generation. But we still have a long way to go and simple schooling won’t save us.

We need to be creative and playful. Ours is a language splendidly formed for communicating ideas and being creative; we have always loved the sound of our own words and using them inventively. Ours is a nation of poets and dreamers …

But that is not sufficient. We love our words and the power of our words so much that often times we mistake rhetoric for reality. A preacher or a demagogue who sounds wonderful will win an audience among us, even if his ideas are ludicrous if not dangerous. We take our words too seriously.

We need to learn to play with them and, while we play, sharpen our minds. And here is where my idea of how Science Fiction (and its sisters) can indeed save us begins.

What do I mean by Science Fiction? I am not simply speaking of rocket ships and robots or of adventures under the Moons of Mars but of a whole field of literature. Call it speculative fiction, call it what you will, but I am including all those books and stories and poems where the mind roams free, the stories that will carry a little girl who feels trapped in between countries to adventures beyond the farthest star or into the deepest past or the farthest future. We need those stories; we need the hard science fiction where the cutting edge of science is explored so that we inspire a new generation of scientists to discover the as yet unknown wonders of this universe or develop the technology that revolutionizes everything; we need the social science fiction that explores how different forms of life take shape with changes in a society; we need alternate history tales to explore how the past could have been different and how we might learn the lessons of the past; we need fantasy to give our dreams wings and to explore in play how society might have operated. And above all this, we need these things because they are fun and make us strive to communicate senses of wonderment and of enchantment.

We have stumbled because, for a century, our leading fantasists have tried to remake society to match the dreams in their heads and not realized the difference between dream and reality. We have all seen the ones who want to recreate a past that never was; here, they claim that they dress, eat and act just as the companions of the Prophet did and then act out on society their dreams. How much better off would we all be if they acknowledged that it was play? In other lands, people who want to dress up in ages past and live as though those days are now go off to Civil War encampments or do gladiator drills or to renaissance festivals; here, they try to impose a vision of the imagined past on everyone, rather than just having fun. Or we have had ‘leader’ who mesmerize with their tongues who fall in to monomaniacal desires, to build great dams and name lakes after themselves, who start futile wars, or build rivers in the sands. And unthinking we follow. Who among us would not say that we would all have been better served if Muammar, Saddam, Usama, or Michel had written down their dreams as tales and left us to enjoy them only?

We once led the world in tales of dreams and fantasies, adventures to the Moon and back. An Iraqi wrote of the quest for the herb of immortality; a Syrian wrote the first tale of interplanetary travel years ago, and so on down the ages. What is Alf Layla wa Layla if not the greatest collection of fantasy and science fiction of its age?

But where are the heirs of Lucian and Sin Leqi? Where are the Shahrazads of the present age? I do not know; Habibi might have written of aliens in his pessoptimistic tale but we lack a rich genre of such things.

So how do we get them to come forth? How do we get an Arabic Jules Verne, Wells, Asimov, Tolkien, Le Guin and so on to step forth?

There’s no easy answer but first, I would suggest, we begin by a massive work of translation, almost akin to that of the Bayt al Hikma in the Abbasiya, and publish all the great works of science fiction, fantasy, and so on written in English, French, Russian, Polish and so on in good Arabic editions. Not so long ago, I was amazed how little of this work has been translated; there’s a story by Asimov here, a novel by Wells there but nothing like complete. And there were editions of the Lord of the Rings (that supremely Islamic tale) available in Armenian, Faroese and Esperanto a decade before there was in our tongue.

We need translations of such works and making of our own tales. Down in Aqaba, the King is building a theme park for his favorite show (the one he himself appeared on); maybe he can lend an imprint? We need books that fire the imagination, tales that everyone can access …. And when we do, we will again amaze the world.

8 comments:

scott said...

SF is also a way to cushion future shock. 99% of such stories won't get it right, especially in details. But they do inculcate the habit of looking for second order social and cultural effects of possible new tech. See Gibson's novels and cyberpunk. Virtually every detail is wrong but it led some smart people to a lot of good places.

Comrade Cat said...

An Arab renaissance of scifi/fantasy would be wonderful! Right now there is some movement in the US to encourage Muslim-American scifi/fantasy. My favourite writer who has been mentioned in connection with this is Saladin Ahmed. He has an Arab-Wild West-zombie story posted online at http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/story.php?s=99.

akkadia said...

"Who among us would not say that we would all have been better served if Muammar, Saddam, Usama, or Michel had written down their dreams as tales and left us to enjoy them only?

alf layla wa layla

Habibi's aliens

Le Guin

Esperanto"

You are a dream to read! A real polymath.

Micah said...

The best thing that could possibly happen to the Arab world is a return to the freedom that gave rise to so much literature, poetry, great prose and art.

What gave the Europe- and the western world at the time- so much color, vibrancy and organized study has given way to an Islam which is monochromatic, dark and severe.

In a way, this blog is a pretty good start. There is a lot more light here than darkness.

We may disagree, at times a lot and at other times a little, but when all is said and done, we manage to get along.

That's a damn fine start.

Anonymous said...

I think that the problem is that some really, REALLY great works in Arabic are just not well known.

There are Sadallah Wannous, Colette al-Khoury, Ahlam Mostaghanemi, Zakaria Tamer, Hanna Mina, Ghassan Kanafani, Saadi Yusef, Badr Shaker al-Sayyab, Ahmed Mattar... I had no idea they ever existed before I moved to Syria, but their works are AMAZING. The only Arab writers I previously knew of were Nizar Qabbani and Naguib Mahfouz.

I also agree that we need to translate more books from English into Arabic. I think that we should also do the world a favor and translate more Arabic works into English, so people will stop thinking that Arabs are backwards, ignorant, and lacking in culture, because it is NOT TRUE!

Dumb Scientist said...

This is an excellent idea! Here are some suggestions regarding the first books to translate. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is the quintessential social science fiction saga, set in a galaxy populated only by humans. Arthur C. Clarke is another famous science fiction author; my favorites from his collection are Rendezvous with Rama and The Light of Other Days.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote The Mote in God's Eye (and its sequel, The Gripping Hand) which narrates humanity's first contact with an alien race. Conflict erupts because of the aliens' unusual skills and reproductive habits, but Horace Hussein Bury helps to build a bridge between the two species by drawing on his past experience leading an interstellar Arabian revolt against a brutal Empire. Larry Niven's Known Space series, including the Ringworld novels, deserves a mention as well.

Greg Egan's Teranesia is partly a hard science fiction story about the consequences of a hypothetical connection between evolution and quantum physics. But it's also a critique of the anti-science movement in Southeast Asia from the perspective of a gay man. Greg Egan's novels are generally so advanced that they probably require a degree in physics to fully appreciate, but they're also awe-inspiring and many of his short stories are available online. My other favorites are Diaspora, Quarantine, Permutation City, Schild's Ladder, Incandescence and other stories set in his Amalgam universe such as Glory, Hot Rock, and Riding the Crocodile (the last is freely available here.)

Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice describes an ad-hoc first contact mission that catapults a divided crew out of the solar system and into the distant future. The House of Suns is a separate tale set millions of years in the future that I've read maybe ten times... so far. His Revelation Space series is a darkly fascinating answer to the Fermi paradox; The Prefect stands out as my favorite stand-alone book in the series.

Geoffrey Landis wrote Approaching Perimelasma, a very hard science fiction story about falling into a black hole (available for free here.)

Marooned in Realtime and A Fire Upon the Deep are two separate novels by Vernor Vinge that deal with the technological singularity, a topic that's notoriously difficult to describe, almost by definition. A prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, deals with (among other things) first contact with an alien race who shuns a minority of their own members because of their "deviant" reproductive practices.

Anyway, I completely agree with you that we should look to the future and imagine how we can best improve it, and that science fiction can help ignite that crucial creative spark. Thank you for this blog as well; I've been impressed with your courageous writing for a long time. Stay safe, and good luck!

panoptical said...

My friend Cat Valente dedicated an issue of the spec-fic magazine that she edits to fiction by Arab and Muslim writers - the announcement is at http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/605873.html and the magazine is here: http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-magazine-november-2010-issue-18/

Anonymous said...

Thank you anonymous and panoptical for listing Arab writers. I will look them up. While translations of classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy is important I do not think it is necessary so long as writers have good fiction to draw on. Good writing is good writing regardless of the genre.

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