Arab literature about the future is key to develop local talent in the science industry.
“This will be the farthest point in the universe Arabs have ever reached”, stated His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, in a TV address to the nation and Arab world just hours before the probe Al-Amal entered Martian orbit. Millions of people witnessed an incredible moment in the history of space exploration when the first Arab interplanetary mission achieved its goal: Al-Amal correctly started to navigate around Mars, making the UAE the fifth country to have achieved this milestone.
Up until only very recently, this would have been inconceivable. Until the 70s, space programs were monopolized by superpowers like the USA and Russia or transnational entities like the European Space Agency. The rest of the world could only dream about reaching the stars in movies, TV series, and books. Science fiction and fantasy narratives performed a vital function in the path to progress by providing society with the anticipatory ideas needed to undertake existing or future problems. We cannot start to consider embarking ourselves on such an epic journey, away from our home planet, if we are unable to imagine it first. We cannot develop new technologies or find solutions to current problems if we have not first envisioned them.
Did you know that in 1888 Edward Bellamy predicted credit cards in his novel Looking Backward? That was 60 years before Diner’s Club first popularized it. Something as familiar as video calls was first anticipated in 1911 by Hugo Gernsback and, in 1994, Bruce Sterling already imagined cryptocurrency in his work Heavy Weather, fifteen years prior to Satoshi Nakamoto’s launching of Bitcoin. Authors of science fiction and fantasy have been predicting many groundbreaking innovations for years. After all, imagination is one of the most powerful tools humankind possesses to fuel creativity, resourcefulness, and innovation.
If the UAE wants to lead in its tackling of the many challenges in the 21st century, it needs to develop talent on the technological, scientific, and economical fronts. This cannot be achieved by attracting only scientists, scholars, and tech companies. The newer generations will need to synchronize society’s imagery with its technologic medium, answering humankind’s dreams about the becoming of civilizations from a postcolonial perspective and in a sustainable manner.
A comprehensive editorial line of science fiction and fantasy stories is a necessity to grow local talent. This is the object of a current multi-national initiative: Arab Futurism, an anthology of contemporary Arab science fiction to be published by an Emirati publisher and its international partners, bringing together cutting-edge stories that take on board some of the pressing challenges of this post-modern and late postcolonial moment. The stories, translated first into Italian, English, and Arabic, will explore and expand on topics as diverse as solarpunk, biopolitics, new media and language, Big Data, 3D printing, prosthetics and human augmentation, cybersecurity and surveillance, avatar afterlife, and cancellation rights from social networks, climate change, and the Anthropocene, as well as artificial intelligence, robots and the future of relationships.
Fostering stories locally will allow ideas to burst into life taking into account, first and foremost, the Arab perspective. Because tomorrow, the future, is also taking place in this very moment right here, in the Arab world, with determination and a new point of view. One that must be heard by the rest of the planet.
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