The best science fiction, they say, tells us more about the context it’s written in than the future it’s trying to predict. The future may offer a blank canvas onto which writers can project their concerns, in new and abstract ways, but the concerns themselves are still very much ‘of their time’.
This was the thinking behind Iraq + 100: to offer writers a space in which to explore the troubles of the present, many of which were direct consequences of the 2003 invasion, in an uninhibited way—through the allegory of the future, or through the long lens of speculative fiction. It was also an invitation to construct positive visions of Iraq’s future, stories of hope and speculations on what long-term peace and self-determination might look like.
When Hassan and I first devised the commission, in late 2013, the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq had just passed. We both found ourselves wondering if the horror and scale of that atrocity would now, in Britain at least, be neatly packed away and sent down into the long, high-vaulted archive of ‘crimes this country has committed abroad’, never to trouble the British conscience again. We wanted to commission a book that kept the consequences of 2003 at the forefront of readers’ minds; one that presented them anew, somehow—even if that meant dressing them up in the shiny future-dress of science fiction. We also wanted to invite other Iraqi writers into the space that had been created by Hassan’s own literary success,1 as suddenly, there was a genuine appetite for new fiction from Iraq.
A call for submissions was posted in late 2013, and stories started coming in from all over the world—both from writers inside Iraq, and Iraqi diaspora writers elsewhere in the world—many of them showing a flare for the surreal and the fantastical that Hassan’s readers will recognise. (Three of the stories here, being written in English, were selected by myself, rather than Hassan, so in that regard the editorial duties were shared.)
Then, in June 2014, everything changed. Mosul fell to ISIS, and a new war spread its shadow across the country. The long-term consequences of the 2003 invasion were suddenly, tragically, back at the forefront of people’s minds. No one needed any reminders. On top of this, the very existence of Iraq, as a distinct sovereign entity, had become uncertain.
Many of the stories gathered in this book were written before this second invasion, and some readers may feel this automatically puts them out of step with events unfolding on the ground; the immediate reality of Iraq has since become more terrifying and unpredictable than anything fiction could envision, even for the distant future. But Hassan and I stand by all of these stories—whether written before or after June 2014—for they offer glimpses at a genuinely different Iraq; one in which the original ambitions of the country’s capital, founded by Caliph al-Mansur as the ‘City of Peace’, might still be detected; one in which the great scientific aspirations of that Round City, and its House of Wisdom,2 might one day be realised.
Ra Page, October 2016