Iraq + 100. edited by Hassan Blasim. 2016
Iraq +100 is rated 85%.
AVERAGE STORY: 3.90
10 Stories : 2 great / 5 good / 3 average / 0 poor / 0 DNF
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What will Iraq look like in the year 2103? That was the question proposed by writer/editor Hassan Blasim to Iraqi writers around the world. The result is what is being hailed as “The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq.”
Blasim is blunt about Iraqi Science Fiction in his introduction.
Iraqi literature suffers from a dire shortage of science fiction writing. … Perhaps the most obvious reason is that science fiction was allowed to track the development of actual science from about the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. The same period was hardly a time of technological growth for Iraqis, languishing under Georgian ‘Mamluk’ then returning Ottoman overlords; indeed some would say the sun set on Iraqi science centuries before — as it set on their cultural and creative impulses— in the wake of the Abbasid Caliphate. …
Today there is great hope in a new generation, a generation native to the internet and to globalization. … Serious attempts to write science fiction have started to appear, especially not that science is so much easier to get hold of.
The future Iraq’s created by these authors are very unlike the science fictional futures traditionally presented. Aliens and robots appear, but large global movements are more important. Many imagine an Iraq still under control of another power, often China. Others imagine the United States shredded by its own religious extremists. Still more discuss extreme horrors in such a matter-of-fact way that modern readers would want to label these with a “content warning,” but I feel would insult so many that have lived with and through those horrors.
This is an offbeat and alien collection and it is for those reasons that I strongly recommend it. Thoughtful and strange visions of the future - visions that are really of the present - are what makes Science Fiction so interesting.
Two stories in this anthology really stand out:
“Baghdad Syndrome” by Zhraa Alhaboby. Trans: Emre Bennett. This is a beautiful and delicate story of an architect coming to grips with the fact that he has Bagdad Syndrome while he is designing a town square. He is haunted by exotic dreams that focus his attention on the history of the square and its former occupants. This is a bittersweet story told is crystalline prose.
“Kuszib” by Hassan Abdulrazzak. Hard. Ugly. Brutal. Extremely violent. Weirdly sexual. Angrily satirical. This intense story follows a low level employee and his wife who get the chance to take part in the Feast. The gourmet festival highlights human delicacies. Read that sentence again! A savage allegory for the kindly horrors of colonial power and pulling no punches whatsoever. You may not like this, but you will not forget it. Not a word is wasted.
Iraq +100 is rated 85%.
10 Stories : 2 great / 5 good / 3 average / 0 poor / 0 DNF
“Kahramania” by Anoud
Good. A young woman, fleeing from an arranged marriage to a warlord, seeks asylum with the Americans and finds herself a pawns in a game of propaganda and bureaucracy.
“The Gardens of Babylon” by Hassan Blasin. Trans: Jonathan Wright
Good. An artist of video games, living in Chinese-controlled Iraqi domes, needs help from a psychedelic brain insect to find inspiration for a new work.
“The Corporal” by Ali Bader. Trans: Elisabeth Jaquette
Good. An Iraqi solider, killed by an American sniper in 2003, returns from the afterlife to experience the dramatic changes and tell his story..
“The Worker” by Diaa Jubaili. Trans: Andrew Leber
Average. The Governor of Basra uses the horrors of life elsewhere to say that the horrors his people are experiencing aren’t that bad, but there is someone else in that town square.
“The Day by Day Mosque” by Mortada Gzar. Trans: Katharine Halls
Average. 99-year-old vinegar sparks a tale of a Snot Collector and a local mosque.
“Baghdad Syndrome” by Zhraa Alhaboby. Trans: Emre Bennett
Great. An architect who is slowly becoming blind - the Baghdad Sydrome - becomes fanatically focused on his last product. To design a town square.
“Operation Daniel” by Khalid Kaki. Trans: Adam Talib
Average. A Chinese overlord censors everything about the past, but a few young people casually rebel.
“Kuszib” by Hassan Abdulrazzak.
Great. Brutal, horrible, disgusting, and brilliantly conceived. An alien couple go to a high end Feast where human delicacies are served. An unforgettable inversion of the Iraqi occupation in horrific alien allegory.
“The Here and Now Prison” by Jalal Hassan. Trans: Max Weiss
Good. The past, including the dead, exists within the Old City, but one young couple with sneak inside to experience it.
“Najufa” by Ibrahim al-Marashi.
Good. A large family of Iraqi Alaskans - now its own country - make a pilgrimage back to a Iraq that has been transformed by benevolent AI. The purpose of the trip become a very important turning moment in the family.
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