On Palestine +100
Ghalayini, Basma, ed. Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba. Manchester: Comma Press, 2019. pp. xiii + 222. eBook. $15.95.
This is a strong collection of Palestinian science fiction and speculative tales. A few impressed me especially — “The Key,” “Vengeance,” the story about the Olympics, the surreal concluding piece (or novelette), and “Digital Nation,” which was uncharacteristically utopian — while others were more mixed. I was glad to read it, since I hadn’t read much Arab science fiction or speculative writing before; I’d been trying to learn more, but the information seems genuinely limited, which is why Ghalayini’s introduction is so welcome — she goes into why the genre has been so thin in Arabic literature and why that may be changing. Lovely to see.