Iraq + 100: stories from a century after the invasion

Iraq + 100 poses a question to contemporary Iraqi writers: what might your home city look like in the year 2103 — exactly 100 years after the disastrous American and British-led invasion of Iraq? How might that war reach across a century of repair and rebirth, and affect the state of the country — its politics, its religion, its language, its culture — and how might Iraq have finally escaped its chaos, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line? As well as being an exercise in escaping the politics of the present, this anthology is also an opportunity for a hotbed of contemporary Arabic writers to offer its own spin on science fiction and fantasy.

Covering a range of approaches — from science fiction, to allegory, to magic realism — these stories use the blank canvas of the future to explore the nation’s hopes and fears in equal measure. Along the way a new aesthetic for the ‘Iraqi fantastical’ begins to emerge: thus we meet time-travelling angels, technophobic dictators, talking statues, macabre museum-worlds, even hovering tiger-droids, and all the time buoyed by a dark, inventive humour that, in itself, offers hope.

• Author
• Hassan Blasim, Hassan Abdulrazzak, Anoud, Zhraa Alhaboby, Ibrahim Al-Marashi, Ali Bader, Mortada Gzar, Jalal Hasan, Diaa Jubaili, Khalid Kaki, Ra Page, زهراء أزهر الحبوبي

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 182

• Publisher
• Comma Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9781905583669

• Genres
• fiction, anthologies, fantasy, adult, politics, audiobook

• Release date
• 2016