Sci-fi stories envisage Iraq in 100 years
A Chinese-run hive of digital development dependent on "water trains" from Europe. A hi-tech destination for a new generation of religious pilgrims. A dried-out wasteland with little left to trade but corpses and sand.
When the award-winning Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim and British publisher Ra Page asked Iraqi writers to imagine their homeland in 2103, 100 years after the US-led invasion, a plethora of haunting, dissonant - and sometimes uplifting - versions of the future emerged.
The resulting anthology, Iraq +100, published in the UK this week mixes science fiction with other genres including fantasy, fairy tale and satire.
The aim was to overturn literary traditions Mr Blasim felt had become staid under decades of censorship and violence, and create a platform for a generation of younger writers shaped by the internet and modern technology.
The opening story envisages Iraq divided into the "Islamic Empire of Wadi Hashish", run by extremists who eschew all digital media, and the fortress-like "American Annex of Sulaymania".
'Badass underdog'
The border of the American-controlled zone is "kind of like Calais... everyone wants to cross the fence," says its London-based writer, known only as Anoud for fear of repercussions for her family in Iraq.
The story's central character, Kahramana, is a reference to Ali Baba's slave girl in One Thousand and One Nights.
A statue of her has stood for years at a Baghdad roundabout, gracefully pouring boiling oil into metal pots in which, according to the tale, 40 thieves are hiding.
Anoud's Kahramana escapes a marriage to "Mullah Hashish", leader of a so-called Islamic State-style "Empire", only to find her fortunes fluctuating wildly at the mercy of bitterly caricatured humanitarians-cum-immigration officials and Western TV reporting. ...
Human remains
Eight of the nine writers are from the Iraqi diaspora, moving between Iraq and world cities such as Madrid, London, Brussels and Los Angeles.
Only one, Diaa Jubaili, lives permanently in Iraq, in the southern city of Basra.
His story, The Worker, portrays a grisly future, his home city littered with technological detritus and human remains after the oil, gas - and even uranium - have run out. ...
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