Post-apocalypse, Egyptian style: A Future informed by the Past

Emad El-Din Aysha and Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi

Post-apocalypse, Egyptian style involves the rival of history, Islamic and Pre-Islamic. Two immediate examples, The Black Winter by Ahmed Al-Mahdi, a nuclear war breaks out between North Korea and the US and the nuclear winter turns the skies black everywhere. Law and order breaks own in Egypt, even with military rule, and armed gangs kidnap people to eat them; based on a famous episode in Egyptian history during the failure of the Nile when people resorted to cannibalism. Black Winter itself is a prequel to Malaz: City of Resurrection, a steampunk post-apocalypse novel where Egypt recovers in the future from the nuclear war with two major power centers. These are the city states of Malaz in the north run by the Sayyadin (Hunters, or warrior caste) and Abydos in the south where the worship of the ancient Egyptian gods is revived, with priests and Pharaohs and forbidden technologies. The Sayyadin themselves are modeled on the Mamluks, the famous slave soldiers who ran Egypt for hundreds of years, in effect till the 19th century.

Guest of Honour of the 8th FantaSTikon Emad el-din Aysha is an academic researcher, journalist, translator and author currently residing in Cairo, Egypt. Bilingual, have a PhD from the United Kingdom and have published his first English language non-fiction book - Arab and Muslims Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2022). He has one SF anthology, in Arabic, and have translated several novels from Arabic to English. He is also a member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction.
Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi is a YA author, translator, graphic artist; author of Malaz, Black Winter. Both are members of the Egyptian Science Fiction Society.