Waiting for the Waters to Rise: ‘Egypt+100’ (ed. Ahmed Naji, 2024)

A review of Egypt+100, edited by Ahmed Naji (2024)

In 2015, the Egyptian government announced ambitious plans for a new capital city in the desert east of Cairo. Taking inspiration from smart cities in China, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan, the new development would feature thirty-five square miles of solar farms, an artificial river feeding a six-thousand-acre park, and a city-wide security system powered by advanced AI. Ten years on, the first phase of construction is almost complete. The new capital, still unnamed, now boasts Africa’s tallest skyscraper and a colossal palace for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Beneath the surface, however, the project has already been disrupted by droughts, food shortages, and resurgent political opposition. Egypt’s ‘green hub’ is beginning to look like a walled garden, designed to shield the government from its unhappy citizens.

If nothing else, the flood of resources toward ambitious megaprojects has created fertile ground for science fiction. Egypt+100 is the latest entry in Futures’ Past, the anthology series which asks contributors to imagine their home countries a century after a formative moment in its history. Iraq+100 therefore takes place in 2103, one hundred years after the onset of the Iraq War, while Palestine+100 is set a century after the violent displacement of Arab families in the Nakba. Egypt+100 continues this conceit by setting its twelve stories in 2111, a century after the historic demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Like previous anthologies in the series, it also sets out to present a distinctly homegrown vision of the future. Where Iraq+100 features opportunistic prophets and dystopian green zones, Egypt+100 takes readers through a diverse set of extravagant megaprojects, eccentric dictators and oppressive media regimes which reflect all-too-present concerns.

Ecological collapse is a recurring theme in the collection, and hangs ominously in the background of some of its best stories. Heba Khamis’ ‘Drowning’, for example, is a visceral horror story set in Alexandria - and no small part of the dread comes from the revelation that the city is slowly being swallowed by a constantly rising tide. Michel Hanna’s ‘Encounter with the White Rabbit’, similarly, follows a government worker travelling from an isolationist new capital to an anarchic Cairo, now built into the rafters of the old city to help refugees survive the violent flooding of the Nile. ‘God Only Knows’, by satirist Belal Fadl, deserves special mention for a premise that seems like the set-up to an ill-advised joke: in the midst of a climate crisis, an overworked mufti passes a series of improbably liberal fatwas in an attempt to make life easier for his community. The result is a touching and surprisingly complicated exploration of faith in a changing world.

Another major theme of the collection is the control of physical space – a more direct response to the legacy of the 2011 protests. In Ahmed El-Fakharany’s ‘Everything is Great in Rome’, for example, the citizens of Cairo wake up to find that Tahrir Square has been replaced with a vast marble colosseum in tribute to a suspiciously familiar president-for-life. In Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s ‘The Wilderness Facilities’, meanwhile, political prisoners are forced to march endlessly through a transparent prison, turning their bodies into a symbol of the state’s carceral power. These ideas are taken to an uncomfortable extreme in Nora Nagi’s ‘Unicorn2512’, which takes place in a futuristic Egypt under the control of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. With all digital spaces under the control of a tech giant, the story ends with a telling reference to the continuing relevance of shared urban space.

Readers who approach Egypt+100 as speculative fiction may be disappointed. The twelve stories in the collection range from surreal and dreamlike to visceral and harsh, but almost all are less interested in earnest predictions of Egypt’s future than creative reinterpretations of its present. As the Sisi government pours its resources into high-tech vanity projects, this relentless focus on the here and now feels more than justified. After all, asks Ahmed Naji in the introduction to the anthology, ‘[w]hat could literary science fiction hope to achieve against a totalitarian regime that took its real-world claims out of the [same] playbook?’ The fate of the previous Futures’ Past anthology Kurdistan+100 provides few answers, but makes Naji’s question all the more important. In 2021, a Turkish court denounced one of the stories in the collection as ‘terrorist propaganda’ for depicting a peaceful autonomist in movement. The author, Meral Şimşek, was eventually forced into exile - a surprising testament to fiction’s ability to unsettle state power.

-Alex White