One pleasant stop on my recent trip to Cairo was the American
University’s bookshop near Tahrir Square. It’s a treasure trove of books
on Egyptology and Egyptian fiction in translation. Among the titles I
picked up was the dystopian novel Otared by Mohammad Rabie.

This novel, originally published in Arabic in 2014 and published in
English in 2016 by Hoopoe, the fiction imprint of the American
University of Cairo, is a grim dystopian tale of Cairo in 2025.

After several botched revolutions in which the people repeatedly fail
to effect real social and political change, Egypt is invaded by a
foreign power. The army crumples, most of the police collude with the
occupiers, and the general public doesn’t seem to care. A small rebel
group decides to take back their nation, and one of its agents is former
police officer turned sniper, Otared. The rebels basically become
terrorists, deciding the only way to get the people to rise up is to
make life under the occupation intolerable, which means killing as many
innocent civilians as possible.

The world Rabie paints reminds me very much of the insane landscape in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, with its violence, its cruelty, and its bizarre customs (in Otared almost
everyone wears a mask) that begin to make sense once you learn more
about the world. Throw in a nightmarish disease that affects only
children, plus a national death wish, and you have a grim but compelling
read. No science fiction novel has gut punched me this hard for a long,
long time.

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