Books book reviews The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed Looks to Both Future and Past Alex Brown reviews the “thorny, sprawling” sci-fi epic inspired by the Arab Spring. By Alex Brown | Published on June 1, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share It’s not uncommon in speculative fiction to take a prefix or suffix and tack it on to every genre label. “Cozy” is popping up in conjunction with fantasy and science fiction, and I’ve even seen it attached to horror. Another popular one is “-punk,” with newer terms like hopepunk and elfpunk competing with stalwarts like steampunk and cyberpunk. We’re also seeing “-futurism” appended to racial/ethnic/cultural groups. I’ve dived into Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and Indigenousfuturism quite a bit, but Arabfuturism is a new one for me. Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory was my introduction to this subgenre, and what a starting point. The Republic of Memory is set in the 27th century, shortly before the 200th anniversary of Launch Day. The Safina and her crew are halfway through their 400-year journey to the Earth-like planet of Hurriya. After the artificial intelligence empire known as the Network colonized most of Europe, Asia, and South America, some great disaster befell the planet. To save its AI-assisted humans, the Network built a massive generation ship. Tens of thousands of people were put into cryostasis, not to be woken until they reached their destination. These ancestors also brought living relatives with them to keep the ship going so the chosen ones could live. Not long into their trip, the crew rebelled and abandoned the Network. The AI running the Safina was ripped out, but not fully destroyed, not as long as the ancestors remain. A Compact was forged, the berths realigned by language, and life went on. Two centuries later, the Ezz family finds themselves at the center of a burgeoning revolution, whether they want to be or not. Iskander is a Translator, a bureaucrat who liaises between crew and Admin. He wants things to change, and has a long-term plan to bring about reforms to help the common person. His younger sister, Damietta, is a hot-headed revolutionary ready for destruction and anarchy. She is in love with the idea of overthrowing the empire, but doesn’t have much of a plan for how to rule after. When an unknown group, either terrorists or rebels, depending on who you ask, temporarily disables the ship, a few hundred ancestors are woken up early. Distraught over what to them feels like a death sentence, the ancestors start formulating their own coup. One of those ancestors is Hilal, the sister-in-law of the first Ezz on the Safina. She wants nothing to do with restoring the Network, nor is she eager to either shatter or retain the Compact. She can see what most cannot: All three options lead to oppression (not that she is enamored with democracy either).  Various other characters step in and out of the narrative, such as Badreddine, the elder laying the seeds for rebellion for years; Billy and Britva, the young activists ready to sacrifice their lives; Lebanon and Taki, two crew trying to survive as the revolution washes over them; and even Safina and Juma, two of the artificial intelligences aboard the ship. Throughout it, the characters grapple with what to do with a civilization that has outpaced its founders. Reform or revolution? Slow-and-steady or an immediate explosion? Is it better for a society to have too many choices or too few? And what happens when too many factions can’t agree or refuse to collaborate? The crisis on the ship is a ticking time bomb. The crew has put off these questions for generations, but now they must answer them or die. Or answer them and die.  Buy the Book The Republic of Memory Mahmud El Sayed Buy Book The Republic of Memory Mahmud El Sayed Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget As much as I enjoyed the book, there was a stylistic choice that El Sayed made that didn’t work for me. Multiple POV is a common conceit in speculative fiction, and one I usually like. It’s fun to jump around with different characters as the author builds out an event through their unique perspectives. In The Republic of Memory, each POV brings the reader a step closer to revolution. My issue was that there were too many perspectives. I counted twelve individual close third person POVs, several of whom only get one personalized chapter before popping up in other people’s stories. Even having reread some of these chapters after finishing the book, I remain unconvinced that all were necessary. The book spends so much time exploring every conceivable angle of the birth of the revolution that it starts to feel like “can we get on with it already?” Perhaps the drawn out build-up was the point; revolutions aren’t instantaneous but put together by lots of people over time. From my perspective as a reader, with each introduction it began to feel like we were repeatedly kicking the tires instead of getting on the road—especially given the cliffhanger the first book ends on. Multiple POVs can be helpful, in that if your reader dislikes one character they have plenty to choose from. When you have a cast as big as this, sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes the reader doesn’t get to know anyone well enough because everyone comes and goes, or the author spends too much time building up a few characters only to divert the reader away from them just when their story gets juicy so the other characters feel interruptive or distracting. In the acknowledgments, El Sayed mentions that he originally had “plans for a three-hundred-thousand-word sci-fi epic,” and that DNA is still present. Were all the POVs enlightening? Sure. Did I like the slice-of-life aspect? Mostly. Could several have been cut without altering the main story? Probably.  The trouble with having a cast this large is that the author must do something with all of them. Weaker characters or ones who are less fleshed out stand out like a sore thumb. Case in point: Damietta. I work with teenagers and I read a lot of young adult fiction. To me, Damietta was more a caricature than a character. She is the kind of teenager people who don’t read YA accuse YA protagonists of being. If she were in a real YA novel, she would be the secondary character who does something foolish that puts the revolution at risk, and the main character has to fix it, at great cost. I understand what the point of her character was, particularly in contrast to Badreddine and Britva, but she also felt fairly one-note to me. The other big stylistic choice El Sayed made that did work for me: his use of languages. Language unites—and divides—each berth. It is the thing around which all culture revolves on the Safina. The crew speaks the future equivalents of Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, and English, and it is implied that others exist. On the Safina it doesn’t appear there were any people from countries where English or European languages like German or French were predominant, so “Inglez” became the lingua franca for Translators and Admin after the Compact. It has no cultural or spiritual connections to anyone aboard, so it is deemed “neutral.” (But what is neutral about the language of colonizers who were later colonized by an AI network?) There’s also NuPol, a sort of Frankensteined Esperanto. It’s cobbled together from words in all languages on the ship, slang, and pidgin, almost like a creole but only spoken by activists, outsiders, and rebels. El Sayed writes several chapters in NuPol, which isn’t the easiest to read but forced me to deeply engage with the text in a way I appreciated.  With twelve POVs, it’s pretty impressive that El Sayed managed to make them all sound individual. I could tell Taki from Kalila from Britva even though they barely appear. Hilal actually has three distinct voices. When Hilal is heard from the perspective of the crew and her descendants, she sounds like she’s speaking in an old-fashioned way described as “pristine Arabek” but written like faux-Medieval English (“‘Hold there, sirrah!’ [Hilal] called. ‘This physicker is with me.’”). In her mind speaking with her VI, Juma, she sounds like a regular person, no frills or accents. And when reading her POV chapters, the close third person narration is reminiscent of a detective in a hardboiled noir (“Hilal was just about to open her mouth to ask what the hell that meant when an ape wielding a gat stepped out of a doorway and pulled the trigger.”). In the Arab Spring-inspired The Republic of Memory, Mahmud El Sayed asks us what we owe our past and what we would risk for our future. It is a thorny, sprawling story that weaves between slice-of-life, detective mystery, political treatise, and family drama. It’s a heady novel with one too many digressions, but is nevertheless startling in its breadth and depth.[end-mark] The Republic of Memory is published by Saga Press. The post <i>The Republic of Memory</i> by Mahmud El Sayed Looks to Both Future and Past appeared first on Reactor.