Publications

Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian novelist, journalist, and documentary filmmaker whose work has been translated into multiple languages. His novels — Rogers, Using Life, And Tigers to My Room, and Happy Endings — include two that imagine the environmental consequences of futurist urban projects in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, critiquing visions of technologically intensive, highly gentrified cities that ignore social justice. He also edited the SF anthology Egypt +100 Stories from a Century After Tahrir. In 2016, after a reader claimed an excerpt from Using Life violated public morality, he was sentenced to prison but released the same year following international support. His memoir, Rotten Evidence - Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison, recounts this experience. Naji has received several honors, including the Dubai Press Club Arab Journalism Award (2012), the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award (2016), and The Open Eye Award.

in Cultural History and the Anthropocene: Old Turns, New Encounters edited by Anders Ekström, Marit Ruge Bjærke, Brita Brenna, and John Ødemark, Bloomsbury, forthcoming (2026). This chapter outlines a framework for studying and practicing Anthropocene imaginaries. It treats the future as a dynamic semiotic and material object, central to current debates on the Anthropocene. Emphasizing the plurality of Anthropocenes, it highlights the need to consider diverse cultural, geographical, and historical perspectives. The chapter traces how Anthropocene futures take shape as technoscientific, popular cultural, and curated historical objects, while remaining alert to reductive tendencies such as Eurocentrism or singular scales. The proposed framework helps identify and critically unpack the future objects circulating across cultural sites of futures thinking.

The Speculative Route examines science fictional and speculative traditions across South and Southwest Asia and North Africa (SSWANA), highlighting their historical links, regional entanglements, and distinct perspectives. Framing SFF as a mode rather than a strict genre, the volume challenges literary boundaries and explores how speculative thinking addresses political, cultural, and social issues. Featuring both scholarly essays and contributions from contemporary authors, it tackles themes such as decolonization, ecology, memory, and myth. This interdisciplinary collection offers valuable insights for readers and researchers interested in global SFF, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.

Over the past two decades, science fiction and futuristic imaginaries have become increasingly visible in creative works from South and Southwest Asia and North Africa, spanning literature, film, video games, and urban design. While Anglophone scholarship has largely focused on Arabic and Indian science fiction and Gulf futurisms, Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life expands this discourse by tracing the history of scientific imagination about extraterrestrial life in “the Muslim world.”

Our Critical Forum explores speculative visions of the Mediterranean as a site of cultural encounter, social conflict, and environmental crisis. Building on shifts in utopian studies and Mediterranean studies, we highlight narratives from Türkiye, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia that challenge Eurocentric frameworks. By engaging with speculative fiction and dystopian imaginaries, this forum examines how literary and cultural texts reframe the Mediterranean as a space of hybridity, contestation, and future possibilities.

This article explores how contemporary Arabic speculative fiction, particularly after the Arab Spring, addresses ecological concerns and conceptions of futurity. Focusing on Ahmed Naji’s Istikhdām al-ḥayāh (Using Life), it examines the text’s portrayal of hegemonic techno-futurist visions akin to Gulf futurism and its resistance through an assemblage aesthetics. This approach, central to the novel’s counter-futures, redefines the human relationship to urban ecologies and literature by emphasizing embodiment.

This text was a contribution to the catalogue of the exhibition “ARABOFUTURS, Science Fiction and New Imaginaries” (April 23 – October 27, 2024) at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, which explored futuristic and speculative visions in Arab artistic and literary production. It introduces the concept of CoFuturisms, a broad term for transmedial movements like Afro-, Indigenous, and Arabfuturisms that assert the rights to existence, imagination, and difference in response to colonialism, capitalism, and cultural erasure.

This article explores the overlap of fantasy and magical realism in Turkish climate fiction, focusing on how Ayşegül Yalvaç’s Bir İstanbul Efsanesi and Oya Baydar’s Köpekli Çocuklar Gecesi address climate change complexities and promote multispecies solidarity. Through a feminist ethics of care, these works create speculative legends that challenge universalizing Anthropocene discourses, ironize messianic figures, and reveal the potential of multispecies cosmopolitics while highlighting the limitations of utopian cosmopolitanisms.

This article compares Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s play Poet on the Moon and H. G. Wells’ novel The First Men in the Moon. It highlights al-Ḥakīm’s engagement with Wells and his contributions to transnational drama through “intellectual popular non-realism.” Both authors question scientific knowledge and artistic expression, but al-Ḥakīm uses Sufi-inspired aesthetics to challenge colonial perspectives.