“Dystopian Technologies in the Science Fiction of Palestine+100 and Iraq+100.” In Global Science Fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl, McFarland Publishers, (2025): 147–156.
Excerpt: The relationship that this genre [of Arabic science fiction] has to modern technological progress, and what that progress and advancement can achieve in the Arab world, is fraught: authors are estranged both from their particular conditions in the nations they describe and from the paradigmatic aspirations of the modern Western project, which promises prosperity and power to those who become most efficient at resource-extraction, runaway capitalism, and the development of high-tech. Questioning the modern project and its broken promises for the postcolonial future are, in my view, more central to the sub-genre than retrospective reflections on historical Arab advancement that has grown stagnant and superstitious. […] Technology in this Arabic sub-genre is almost uniformly dystopian in its objectives and outcomes, refining and exacerbating the oppression that inhabitants already face at the hands of colonial and neo-colonial ‘progress.’ In short, the deployment of the novum in Arabic science fiction tends to combine technological newness with societal sameness.