Reuven Snir, in the only English language examination of Arabic SF (ASF) prior to 2015, considers a short story, Imraâa fÄ« áčŹabaq áčŹÄâir [âA Woman in a Flying Saucer,â 1981] (SharÄ«f, pp. 121â133), by NihÄd SharÄ«f, a prolific Egyptian author of ASFâs formative decades. Snir describes the story as a rendering into SF of a trope characteristic of classical Arabic literature: the retreat from city life into seclusion, which brings a mystical vision. In SharÄ«fâs story, the narrator is an astronomer, and the vision is in fact a space traveler who has come to warn him that humanity is too bellicose: her advanced society is prepared to take action should Earth break into nuclear war. For Snir, this work and others give ASF a distinctive feel of mixing SF set in the Arab world with traditional genres of Arabic literature, especially those genres most closely related to religious experience. He also draws our attention to the prevalence of utopian societies in ASF, arguing that utopia is the common denominator of those works of ASF framed as belonging to canonical Arabic literature. Yet, he also argues that:
âŠunlike in the West, Arabic SF in general has as yet not generated any serious inquiry into the nature of contemporary social reality and most of the writers, instead of using the genre as âmedium for social commentâ, are still too prone to serve amusement or didactic aims. (Snir, p. 280)
This study will use close readings of formative texts to argue that Snirâs dismissal of ASF as lacking social commentary does not stand up to close examination: from its initial period, the genre is deeply involved in reflecting Arab society in a distorting mirror. This studyâs primary concern is to explore ASF in its own terms and those of its critics, especially its critics writing in Arabic. This will inevitably touch upon the theories that Western critics have developed to understand how SF functions. For example, when Snir implicitly states that Western SF is a medium for social comment, scholars well-versed in SF theory will understand that heâs referring to Darko Suvinâs understanding of SF as facilitating âa dynamic transformation rather than a static mirroring of the authorâs environmentâ (Suvin, p. 10). Suvin, arguably the most influential Western theorist of SF, views the genre as functioning via cognitive estrangement, where the âcognitiveâ denotes scientific plausibility within the world of the particular work and âestrangementâ a means of making the familiar seem unfamiliar in order to facilitate a critical perspective on the familiar.
Estrangement comes from the works of playwright Bertolt Brecht, who defined it as âa representation [that] allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliarâ (Willett, p. 192). Brecht uses the word Verfremdung, which translates directly as âalienation,â but Suvin renders it as âestrangement.â The use of Verfremdung in Brechtâs theory of drama is complex and often polyvalent: it centers around the negation of deceptively familiar surface reality in order to provoke a new and more complete recognition of the ârealerâ world heretofore masked. Suvin, whose Marxism explicitly informs his approach to SF, reserves the word âalienationâ for the German Entfremdung, whose doctrinaire meaning within Marxism is the alienation of workers from the products of their labor, or more generally, of humankind from possibilities (Bottomore, pp. 9â15). Verfremdung/estrangement can be politically motivatedâand generally is, for Suvinâbut can also be a more strictly epistemological estrangement, whereas Entfremdung/alienation is always political (White, pp. 120â126). According to Suvin, Brechtâs goal in writing theater for a scientific era was to create estrangement in order to permit us to recognize the portrayed object, but at the same time to render it unusual, forcing us to see it from a different perspective and thus reproduce the conditions of scientific discovery. The object in SF in Suvinâs theory is, for the most part, the society that produced the work. This leads to Suvinâs full definition of SF:
âŠa literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the authorâs empirical environment. (Suvin 1979, p. 10)
For Suvin, the alternative imaginative framework of a work of SF contains a novum or new thing. This novum is plausible as an extrapolation from currently understood science or as a rewrite of history based on the appearance of the novum before the time in which a work is set, hence cognitive. The work uses the consequences of the presence of the novum to reflect upon or question the current conditions in the authorâs society. Suvin borrows the term novum from one of his chief influences, Ernst Bloch, defining it as a âtotalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the authorâs and implied readerâs norm of reality.â This is not unknown in other genres such as fantasy, but SFâs novum entails a scientifically plausible change in the universe of the work and is thus the primary point of departure for analysis of the work. This in turn entails that:
âŠthe essential tension of SF is one between the readers, representing a certain number of types of [hu]Man[kind] of our times, and the encompassing or at least equipotent Unknown or Other introduced by the novum. This tension in turn estranges the empirical norm of the implied reader. (Suvin 1979, p. 64)
The novum in SF need not be a gadget or machine, but the alternative imaginative framework must be based on a realistic, even if implied, extrapolation from the world of the workâs creation. For a work to be SF, the novum needs to be hegemonic: âso central and significant that it determines the whole narrative logicâor at least the overriding narrative logicâregardless of any impurities that might be presentâ (Suvin 1979, p. 70). This excludes much of what is sold in bookstores as âscience fictionâ from SF, placing it within what Suvin calls the âmisshapen subgenreâ of science fantasy, where the scientific plausibility of the narrative can be revoked at the authorâs whim. SF, therefore, both differs from folktale, myth, or fantasy in the cognitive plausibility (and dynamicism) of its novum and is also always already fundamentally about politics or sociology. Suvin later cites Bloch in saying that SF provides âa shocking and distancing mirror above the all too familiar realityâ (Suvin 1988, p. 34). Suvin renders this as:
Strangersâutopians, monsters, or simply âdifferentâ beingsâare mirrors of humankind, just like the unknown country is the mirror of [our] world. But we must understand that this mirror doesnât just reflect: it distorts; itâs a virgin matrix and an alchemical dynamo. The mirror is a crucible. (Suvin 1977, p. 13)
Pure extrapolation for its own sake, then, is bad SF for Suvin because it is a âone-dimensional, scientific limit-case of analogyâ. Good SF is multidimensional analogy: an âaesthetic hypothesis akin to the proceedings of satire or pastoral rather than those of futurology or political programs.â (Suvin 1979, pp. 76â80) Its cognitive value lies in its analogical relationship to its authorâs present, not its predictive value. Estrangement reflects society in a mirror that distorts, and thereby focuses on, a particular aspect of society in order to render the work of SF a medium for social comment through an examination of contemporary social reality. The woman in the flying saucer in SharÄ«fâs story has not come to Earth in order to spread enlightenment and pacifism; rather, her society needs a resource found only on Earth and is prepared to destroy humanity should access to that resource be threatened. She is a familiar figure in Arabic literature, especially that of the medieval period when Arabic-speaking1 Muslims were the dominant technological power; she is at the same time a colonist from a more advanced, and foreign, civilization, who threatens violence should her access to a commodity be blocked.
SF critic John Rieder argues that Western colonialism, the imbalance of societal power and the Social Darwinist ideologies that explained and justified colonialism were deeply imbricated in Western proto-SF of the turn of the twentieth century (Rieder, pp. 2â3). He traces at length and in detail the complex interrelationships between proto-SF or early SF narratives in the West and the Western experience of the colonial encounter in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. âExplorersâ would meet natives who had much lower levels of physical technology, and extrapolate from there that the natives were distant from them in time as well as place, and that the explorers represented the end of a developmental process that began with the natives:
Europeans mapped the non-European world, settled colonies in it⊠In the process of all of this, they also developed a scientific discourse about culture and mankind. Its understanding of human evolution and the relation between culture and technology played a strong part in the works of [H.G.] Wells and his contemporaries that later came to be called science fiction.Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science fiction⊠scientific accounts of humanityâs origins and its possible or probable futures are especially basic to science fiction. Evolutionary theory and anthropology also serve as frameworks for the Social Darwinian ideologies that pervade early science fiction⊠Emergent English-language science fiction articulates the distribution of knowledge and power at a certain moment of colonialismâs history. (Rieder, p. 2)
For Rieder, echoing other postcolonial theorists, this encounter makes of colonized peoples the object of the colonial gaze, which comes from a position of unassailable military, economic, and technological power, buttressed by the theoretical apparatus of social sciences. The colonized have no real choice but to submit to the former, and only later, once theyâve begun to educate themselves in these discourses, do they understand the extent to which theyâve been compelled to submit to the latter. At its heart, the colonial gaze is about recognition and the master/slave dynamic: the colonizer looks at the colonized, subjects them to classification as Other and as inferiorâthe two go hand in handâand demands that the colonized recognize the colonizer as the master. The master/slave dynamic is always incomplete unless and until the colonized acknowledges their inferior status. The colonized were simultaneously aware of their own technological inferiority and unwilling to recognize the colonizers as masters. Many colonized subjects submitted in order to survive; many others benefitted from the colonial relationship, which often enabled the disenfranchised within their own culture to advance in status or power. The narratives of social science could be parroted back to the colonizers by these colonized subjects, who could seem more Western and thus higher up in the hierarchy and so deserving of benefits, both because they worked with the colonizers and also because they confirmed the colonizersâ sense of mastery. In the first decades of ASF, we often see the colonial encounter retold from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizer. This restaging or retelling is the dominant trope of postcolonial literatures; it should not astonish us that it occurs in ASF in multiple forms. The science and technology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are themselves colonial powers in the contemporary Arab world: they, like the novel as a genre, come from without and are perceived as destabilizing foreign threats. ASF will always already be a...