8 - Import: Science Fiction

Summary

The human race must know:

The phones of the world have just rung.

– Arthur C. Clarke

1. INTRODUCTION

Out of all the various cases introduced in the present part of the book related to interactions and interplay between Arabic literature and Western culture, the case of the emergence of science fiction (SF) in Arabic is the most evident illustration of an imported genre. At least from the point of view of the beginnings of the genre, it grew by borrowing the Western pattern of the genre, though at a later stage, as I will show, the genre would pass through a process of Arabization and even Islamization. Science fiction in Arabic has been around only since the 1970s, a relatively very late time if we take into account that the genre first emerged in the West already in the nineteenth century. As with most genres of popular non-canonical Arabic prose, the scholarly academic research about Arabic literature in the Arab world and outside it has paid little or no attention to it. The present chapter attempts to partly fill that gap, approaching the topic within the theoretical framework for the study of Arabic literature discussed in the Introduction.

SF originated in the United States, and, as many things American, quickly proved to be a valuable export item; it did not take long for SF to be written, published, read, and studied throughout the world. The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction (1986), edited by Brian Aldiss and Sam J. Lundwall, “a collection of science fiction stories from all over the world,” includes twenty-six SF stories from, in order of presentation, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Brazil, Japan, Great Britain, Israel, the United States, Romania, Poland, Norway, India, Sweden, West Germany, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Uruguay, Italy, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Singapore, Hungary, Holland, France, Australia, and Ghana. This is a truly impressive array of countries, except for the absence of countries representing the vast population of hundreds of millions of Arabs. The editors have only one legitimate answer: they could find not one single work of SF in Arabic while they were putting the collection together.