Have you ever heard of Alif the Unseen, computer hacker and recipient of an ancient scroll written by mythological spirits?
Or Ajwan, a teenager on an intergalactic quest to save her son from the clutches of those who wish to convert him into a super-warrior?
Probably you haven't. Possibly you should have. Introducing the rapidly evolving face of Arabic science fiction literature.
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Desert Island Discs is a radio programme presented by Krisy Young and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In this episode, Kirsty Young's castaway is the physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili.
He's spent his adult life studying sub-atomic particles - and trying to explain them to the rest of us. He fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Iraq. With an Iraqi father and English mother, the Baghdad he spent his early years in was cosmopolitan and vibrant but, once Saddam Hussein came to power, his parents realised the family would have to flee, and he has lived and worked in Britain for the past 30 years.
Jim is the author of the book Pathfinders; The Golden Age of Arabic Science, among others.
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On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist Albert Camus, the Smithsonian reporter returns to his birthplace, Algeria, in search for signs of his legacy. In this well-written article, he shares his findings, among which is a striking forgetfulness of one of the greatest writers of his time.
“Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean...the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.”
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