Mahmud El Sayed
Mahmud El Sayed is a British Egyptian science fiction and fantasy writer and translator. A former journalist, he won the 2023 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Color for his work focusing on Arabic and Islamic–inspired themes in a genre he is calling Arabfuturism. He lives in East London 
where he spends his time pondering linguistic oddities and running story ideas by his cat.
El Sayed's debut novel is The Republic of Memory.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Follow Mahmud El Sayed on Instagram.
Memory is definitely one of the meta-themes of the story (“what must this crew, so far from Earth in years and light-years, remember and why?”) so hopefully quite a bit. TROM was not the book’s original title (or even the second or third version) and it came about via a process with my editor and their publishing team. When I won the Future Worlds Prize in 2023, the novel was called ‘What the Crew Wants’ (probably it’s third title by then) in reference to a popular Arab Spring protest chant and I still have a soft spot for that one. However, having gone through so many titles before, it was easy to accept changing it. For myself, I always thought of it simply as “The Book.”
What's in a name?
TROM is multi-POV and while I’m not Dickensian in my character naming there are definite reasons why characters are named as they are. Given that the book is set on a generation ship that is divided by language, there’s lots of linguistic shenanigans to be had and multilingual puns for readers to discover. One of the main POV characters is Translator Iskander Ezz – named after the Egyptian city of Alexandria (Iskanderiya). It’s no accident that a translator is named after a city with an extremely cosmopolitan and multi-lingual history. Iskander’s younger sister, Damietta (also named after an Egyptian port city) gets embroiled in the revolution. Of course, the city of Damietta has a long history of protest and rebellion dating back to the Crusades.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
My teenage self would not be surprised at all by TROM. It includes all his favourite things. Science fiction. Revolutionary politics. Constructed languages. Hardboiled detective fiction. If anything, he would be surprised it took me solong to write. ‘What were you doing for all those years instead of writing, Mahmud? Working a nine to five? Ugh, so boring!’
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
This is a difficult one! Writing multi-POV means getting into my characters heads but, at the same time, that means getting out of my own. In real life, everyone thinks they are the hero of their own story. The same applies to fiction. In a story about revolution, every character has their own view (should I protest? And if so, how? Violently? Non-violently? Or maybe it’s better not to protest at all but to reform slowly?) and I worked very hard to keep my own personal views if not out of it altogether, at least opaque from the reader. If I’ve done it right, at the end of the book, the reader should have no idea where I – the author – stand on things.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
So many! Music? Yep, I was listening to a lot of jazz when writing the hardboiled detective sections of TROM, Miles Davies and Ibrahim Maalouf particularly. Movies? Science fiction is always in conversation with other science fiction and that, of course, includes film and TV. Andor is one of the best explorations of rebellion that I can think of. The news and politics? As a former journalist, I’m always embroiled in those and TROM is a soft retelling of the events of the Arab Spring, an event that continues to reverberate through the region, whether people realise it or not.
The Page 69 Test: The Republic of Memory.
--Marshal Zeringue
