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8 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE FICTION Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2021 ISSN 2472-0837 8 Reflections Science Fiction, Rational Enchantment, and Arabic Literature The Arab world is known for pioneering a plethora of literary genres and forms: one reflexively imagines the couplets of pining ghazal from the seventh century that rippled across the Asian continent, or the fantastical stories of A Thousand and One Nights that mutated through eighteenth-century Orientalism from low-brow and largely oral entertainment to European romanticism and gothica. And how do they overlap with recent surges in science fiction elsewhere in the Global South and diasporic culture, like Chinese and Indian science fiction, or the generative Afrofuturistic genre? A useful example through which to explore this double estrangement is a comparison between Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein, held by many to be one of the founding texts of science fiction, and Ahmad Saadawi's 2013 retelling of the story, Frankenstein in Baghdad. In the end, the bonds between human and nonhuman are crucial to revolution within the city itself and to finding 11 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE FICTION Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2021 ISSN 2472-0837 Rational Enchantment, continued a way to fix what has been broken in the larger world and environment. [Extracted from the article] |
