What we call fantasy now was once religious belief, or is still. The appearance of an angel or a djinn in a story means it will likely be classified as fantasy, but if you go by the texts of several world religions, angels and djinns are real.

The writers are here, the stories abound, it’s the telling that only needs to be done.

That oral language is not primary in a film made by abled people, and that interdependence and disabled survival is meant to be important, is revolutionary.

We should be able to write stories and invent technologies and have them be recognized for what they are, instead of worrying about whether they will be counted as steampunk.

What if you find yourself loving what is poison to you, even though you know it is poison?

The Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (ESSF) is a lighthouse that stemmed out of that moment of hope.

Is a film about circles that loops its ending into its beginning more than a gimmick? Is a story about boredom that’s intentionally boring a big deal? Is a sprawling book about the sprawl of existence doing anything interesting? By its nature, Always Coming Home contains a kind of resistance that other books by Le Guin did not, though maybe resistance is the wrong word.

I wanted humanity to lose its sense of exceptionalism and specialness. We’re just one species out of countless others, and we cannot survive without banding together and developing a more communal mindset.

I like to write from the point of view of monsters. I’m a Muslim-Arab man, and I think a lot about demonization—who gets turned into monsters and who gets viewed as monsters.

I look forward to reading more works of science fiction, especially space westerns, that can envision a future where tools of death, regardless of their shape or function, are not considered indicative of the “advanced” state of a culture.