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A review by looseleafellie
Palestine +100 by Basma Ghalayini
In my opinion, sci-fi is one of the best vehicles for exploring questions of politics, society, and philosophy through a slightly unfamiliar lens. Palestine +100, an anthology of twelve science fiction short stories published in 2019, exemplifies the strengths of this genre.
Twelve Palestinian writers were given the prompt to write a story imagining Palestine in the year 2048, 100 years after the Nakba. The futures they imagine deal with alternate dimensions, virtual reality, cyborgs, the 2048 Olympic Games, and ghosts of the past haunting the future.
This is the first time I’ve read an anthology that gave the writers all a specific prompt, and it was fascinating to see what each writer did with it! My favorite story was the first one, Song of the Birds by Saleem Haddad (largely because it contains a sci-fi trope I have a soft spot for), but the rest of the stories drew my interest in their own unique ways.
The publisher, Comma Press, has other sci-fi anthologies in the series — Egypt +100, Kurdistan +100, and Iraq +100, with Iran +100 coming next year — and I’m interested to check those out as well!
Twelve Palestinian writers were given the prompt to write a story imagining Palestine in the year 2048, 100 years after the Nakba. The futures they imagine deal with alternate dimensions, virtual reality, cyborgs, the 2048 Olympic Games, and ghosts of the past haunting the future.
This is the first time I’ve read an anthology that gave the writers all a specific prompt, and it was fascinating to see what each writer did with it! My favorite story was the first one, Song of the Birds by Saleem Haddad (largely because it contains a sci-fi trope I have a soft spot for), but the rest of the stories drew my interest in their own unique ways.
The publisher, Comma Press, has other sci-fi anthologies in the series — Egypt +100, Kurdistan +100, and Iraq +100, with Iran +100 coming next year — and I’m interested to check those out as well!