I spent yesterday evening in Bristol for a Festival of Ideas event involving three Egyptian authors. The main thrust of the event was to show how Egyptian literature is involved in, and reacting to, the political changes in that country. This was interesting in itself, but the main attraction for me is that one of the authors involved is a science fiction writer, and he now has a book available in English translation, thanks to Bloomsbury whose Arabic literature imprint was behind the event.

First to be introduced was Khaled AlKhamissi. His book, Taxi, is the most “literary” of the three. It is composed of 58 fictional conversations that the anonymous narrator has with different taxi drivers. The point here is to illustrate how the Egyptian man in the street (or at least in the taxi cab) thinks about the current political situation. It looks like a lot of fun as well as being deadly serious.

Ahmed Khaled Towfik is a literary phenomenon in Eqypt. He has written over 500 books, though most of those are novella length. As well as SF he writes horror and medical thrillers. There will be a lot more about him in the interview, which has been promised to Locus, but I have started reading his book, Utopia, and am impressed this far. The Independent‘s reviewer loved it.

Finally we had Ahmed Mourad who is one of the few authors of political thrillers in Egypt. He’s a photographer and film-maker as well, so I’m expecting so really good action scenes in Vertigo. I was interested to note that, while AlKhamissi talked about his family’s love of Tolstoy, and Towfik talked to me about reading Asimov, Clarke and Ballard, the younger Mourad said he grew up reading the books of Ahmed Khaled Towfik. Novel reading is apparently a relatively new hobby in Egypt, and it is good to know that the new generation of book readers has SF available.

I don’t want to comment much on the actual politics as I know so little about it. I will say that I thought these three men were incredibly brave. AlKhamissi has spent some time in prison, as have most of his family. But it is worth noting how these guys saw the struggle. Asked what their hopes and fears were, they talked about how they expected to see the rich ruling classes impose a new leader who was very much like Mubarak. AlKhamissi talks of the revolution, not as removing a dictator, but as an attempt to win independence from the USA. As with when the UK used to mess with African politics, it is where the guns and the money come from that really matters.