This is a reissuing of an interview published originally in the former manifestation of this newspaper, 'The Levant', on 31 October 2022. Apart from some format changes and corrections the contents of the interview are exactly the same.

By Emad Aysha

Dear J.D. Harlock,

Lebanese SFF author and editor extraordinaire. First of all, thank you for this amazing opportunity. I’ve always wanted to get some insight into Lebanon's SFF and genre scenes. Secondly, I’m thankful for the number and range of stories you've gifted us with in preparation for this interview. You've clearly been in the writing business for a good amount of time and have figured out the nuances of the skill and the industry. Concerning your plethora of stories, all were really nice, by all means, but the ones where the narrative and the themes and motifs really grabbed me were these three – "The Frontrunner" (cyberpunk), "Dear Xutuix?" (editorial SF satire) and "An Odd Gathering Of Peculiar Cats" (dark fantasy, steampunk). Very deep and revelatory too. And the character that I most liked from your collection was Carna', but more on her below.

Third, and most importantly, where have you been all this time?! I'd recently coauthored and coedited a book for the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (ESSF), Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2022), and we had one solitary chapter on Lebanese S.F. about the brilliant youthful writer Jeremy Szal, and no more. (There were others I spoke to, but they were more concerned with getting paid than serving our strictly voluntary cause). It's like the internet was against you, the search engine, and the authors I spoke to had no idea who else was in the genre, even if they were living next door to them.

But that's enough of that. Let's begin at the beginning. J.D. Harlock. Your name alone sounds like a genre label. Is that your birth name?

No, my real name is Jad Youssef Doumani or Jade Doumani, depending on my passport. Lebanese for the former, American for the latter. Both my parents are fully Levantine. I was only born in the U.S. and have only visited once since when I was a teen, where I met GRRM (George R. R. Martin) himself at a book signing in Boston. I've only been writing professionally for three years, even though my pursuit of writing stretches as far back as when I was a teen.

Regarding my primary pen name, the first part, "J.D.," is because those are my initials, whereas  "Harlock" comes from an influential 70s anime character called Captain Harlock. I caught glimpses of reruns on MBC3 and was instantly hooked because I thought the character was so damn cool — both in design and concept. I only ended up watching something featuring him properly once I was a teen/early adult. The works are fine, but the character is a masterstroke of genius.

And why so many pseudonyms? Youssef Manessa, Raja Abu Kasm, May Haddad? Is it a stratagem to get published like Stephen King's alternate persona, Richard Bachman?

Yes, either so I can double dip (magazines refuse to publish the same author twice in a row) or because I suspect some editors have it out for me, and this is a way to bypass that. There's one who's an open Zionist and organizes the only SFF comedy anthology that matters. I've never been able to land one of my comedic shorts in his magazine, nor that anthology, and I suspect the reasons for it is obvious. Even with my pseudonyms, I can't submit to him because they're obviously Arab ones. One day, I'll come up with one that'll bypass their B.S.

You describe yourself as Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian. I'm half-Palestinian myself, born in the U.K.; my relatives live in Lebanon, actually. Please tell me more?

To elaborate on what I touched on in my first response, I was born in the U.S., but I've spent my entire life in Beirut, Lebanon, barring a few months spent in Jdeidet (Marj Ayoun, Southern Lebanon), Athens (Greece), Doha (Qatar), Amman (Jordan), Baku (Azerbaijan), and London (U.K.).

These excursions never lasted more than half a year and were the result of work, vacations, or my education. In the last years of his life, my dad worked for the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) in Jordan and Azerbaijan as an H.R. Manager, so we visited often. He had a green card because of his job, which is how he managed to have my mom give birth to me there. Initially, he worked in Saudi Arabia, but I was so young when we visited that I barely remember a thing.

My mother’s family is from Jdeidet, Southern Lebanon, and it features prominently in my work since it’s one of the few locations I’m familiar with. The town is easily where I’ve spent most of my time outside of Beirut. My grandfather, who was a communist and a carpenter, built the house that we stay in when we visit all the way back in the early 60s with his bare hands. My mother told me once that Pultizer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid’s memoir House of Stone mentions that there was a communist in Marj’ Ayoun who was so passionate about communism that he painted his house red but named someone that wasn’t my grandfather! We’re still vexed about the error, and this is as good an opportunity as I’ll get to point out the mistake. Worse yet, is that the house is now painted white and green.

For the rest of the locations I mentioned, after finishing my bachelor's degree at the Lebanese American University, I was a graduate student at University College London, but that didn't last long. A couple of months later, I worked as an accountant at CCC in Doha, Qatar, and that lasted only a short time, too.

The family history's complicated, but even if you don’t ascribe to the Syrian Socialist Nationalist’s take on the Levant being entirely Syria, I check off all three nationalities. Originally, centuries ago, my mom's family came from Homs, Syria, and my dad's family came from Douma. The latter is in my family name, "Douma-ni." There are places called Douma all over the Levant, but an older relative told us we come from the Syrian one. Not sure if that's verifiable. In any case, my mom's family is originally from Syria for sure. From my dad's side, one of my great-grandparents was an owner of a silk factory in Deir El Qamar back when Lebanon's economy was built around silk in the 19th century. The factory is still there, but we don't own it. Eventually, he lost it through gambling and drinking, and he and his brothers decided to migrate to the U.S. I think they were meant to migrate to the U.S. from Beirut, but this was around the time the Italians bombed it, so they redirected to Haifa in Palestine. There, he settled down with a local, and the rest of them went off to the U.S. There's a family of billionaires in Vegas with my family name, and I assume they're the descendants of my ancestor's brothers. My father's side of the family settled in Palestine for decades before my grandpa, who worked at the IPC as a nurse, was told that in six months, something bad was going to happen to Palestine. This was 1948, so that turned out to be true. The family was still registered in Lebanon, and so they had the passport. My grandpa's brother wasn't so lucky. I'm told he was in the Palestinian resistance army, and the Zionists showed up and shot him in the leg. My father's family owned multiple farms and a lot of land in Haifa (all of it's been stolen by the Israelis, obviously), and a farm hand took pity on him and put him on a horse, slapped it, and it made its way to the Southern Lebanese border where they amputated his leg. Finally, my grandma from my dad's side is originally from Akka. There’s an interesting story from my mother’s side that involves Mohammad Ali Pasha and my ancestor, who was a physician and former priest, but the answer’s long enough. The story explains how his dozens of descendants own large swatches of land in Marj’ Ayoun.

Oh, and would you say your sense of humor is Palestinian? Your sense of greenery and salad is certainly Lebanese!

All the Palestinians I've met spent their entire lives in Lebanon and are around my age. We're all westernized to a fault. The only person I've met who lived in Palestine was my grandmother, and she died when I was around three years old. The focus on greenery and salad in my stories are attempts at creating a Lebanese solarpunk aesthetic.

What drew you to genre literature and writing in general?

I was never drawn to genre literature, and most of the SFF I read growing up was by literary writers like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, or western comics by the British Invasion of the 80s and 90s like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. I’m so passionate about the latter that I co-wrote this official biography of British comics legend Bryan Talbot with the man himself. It has intros by Neil Gaiman and crime comics master Ed Brubaker. It raised 30K in crowdfunding and will be published by Dark Horse. Interestingly, Bryan Talbot is one of the first, if not the first, to write and illustrate steampunk comics, as well as the first British graphic novel. The Grandville series is one of my favorite steampunk works and an underrated gem. These western comics, as well as 80s and 90s anime and manga, and retro-video games, are where my passion for SFF comes from. I can't force myself to read American SFF literature outside of Robert E. Howard. Even though he wrote fantasy and westerns, my embrace of the short story series format and my approach to them are completely influenced by him, even if the series I write are mostly sci-fi.

The modern SFF I'm forced to read to keep up with the magazines is a chore, and I hate the time spent reading them. Thematically, I'm mostly inspired by manga and anime of the 80s and 90s. Even when it comes to cyberpunk. I'm completely inspired by the Japanese strand of cyberpunk which evolved independently of the American one and is superior in every way.

Let me also congratulate you on your English. It's impeccable. You do have a fondness for elongated sentences, an affliction all of us Arab writers have, by the way. Did you go to English schools as a kid? And why write mainly in English and not Arabic, or French for that matter?

So, I have to remind myself that we Arabs aren't really familiar with each other's countries as well as we should be. In Lebanon, no one in the country studies in Arabic either in school or university (unless you go to the only public university we have, and even then, there are a lot of French-language degrees people prefer to pursue instead). We study either in French or English, with only two of our classes being in Arabic. These classes are Arabic class and History, Geography, and Civics, which are counted as one class. That's the reason why Lebanese, on average, speak these languages better than other Arabs. Regardless, most people's English and French are still not up to snuff. When it comes to Arabic, the language has gone extinct here, and people can't write at all or speak it well outside of the local dialect, which is so far removed from proper Arabic that a lot of people want to see it codified as its own language. I remember a report on T.V. where our parliament was given a high school Arabic exam, and most of them failed it. The reason I speak and write English as well as I do is a bit complicated. My mother was French-educated and studied medicine in the Soviet Union. She can only speak Arabic and weak Russian. She can't speak English at all, and French never stuck with her. My father could speak English fluently with an eloquent voice because my grandmother taught English in Palestine. Ironically, he's not the reason I can speak English. He worked outside of the country, as most Lebanese fathers did, so I rarely got to see him. He eventually passed away when I was seventeen from lung cancer, and I never spent as much time with him as I would've liked. I was English-educated, but early on, I was failing English miserably, even though I was watching the Disney Channel, and especially Cartoon Network, religiously. My English started to improve in fifth elementary when our American teacher thankfully let us write our essays at home for once instead of in the classroom. I figured out how to use the synonym checker on Microsoft Word and did so obsessively to the extent that it rapidly expanded my vocabulary. I have Asperger's syndrome, so my fixation on something as odd as that probably comes from it. I had a natural cadence with English because of Cartoon Network, and that, combined with my expanding vocabulary and the freedom to write at home, allowed me to finally speak and write in English properly. Ironically, at around the same time, C.N. and Disney Channel were taken from me. During this period, 90% of Lebanese citizens who had cable were basically siphoning it off through shady services, and I assume that's the reason these channels were taken from us. From then on, I was only watching MBC3 and Spacetoon Arabic, where I was exposed to anime properly, even though it would take years for me to realize that these cartoons I was watching in Arabic were actually Japanese. I wouldn't go back to watching anything in English until I started watching adult shows on an Arabian channel called Showtime (now OSN) during the second year of middle school. The Cartoon Network phase was intense, and I essentially watched every episode of classic Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and whatever was on at that time, like Dexter's Lab, Johnny Bravo, and Megas XLR, among others. Barring a few notable shows, I generally hate western cartoons. I think they're woefully behind anime to an embarrassing extent though I am grateful that I learned English from them.

LEBANESE DOWN UNDER: The aforementioned Jeremy Szal is quite diverse himself, being half-Lebanese from Australia. But he's all enthusiasm and never content to be a party of one! [Personal photo provided by Jeremy]

Now to specifics. Your Frontrunner story is creepy as hell. You have the future Lebanese president on board a plane, encountering various unseemly female characters trying to tempt him one way or the other. I won't spoil it for the reader, but I assume this is all a veiled metaphor for political powers (local and foreign) trying to drag Lebanon towards one set of alliances and against another, and in the process pulling the country apart since none of them have the country's best interests at heart. Even the future president himself has to consult with the CIA to see if he'll win and get the country in shape.

Am I on the right track?

One correction: Prime Minster, not the president. The office of the president has been ceremonial in Lebanon since the Christians lost the civil war in 1990. Other than that, your interpretation of the story is on-point, and I have plenty of dark stories that I did not share and have trouble selling since the market is fixated on trying to tell positive, uplifting stories at the moment, which is creatively suffocating, to be frank, since the ones that do take dark stories snub in a way that the other top magazines don't. With them, it's nothing personal, and I'm thinking of Apex Magazine and Clarkesworld, which are seemingly impenetrable to me.

Again I commend you for the story. Who would have thought that Lebanon, with its troubles, could be fertile ground for cyberpunk? But you did it. You did the impossible and what we were all dreaming of. How did you do it?

This is not the only Lebanese cyberpunk story I've written. I've even written biopunk, and in the form of a poem to boot. It’s funny that you mention this because I actually had an epiphany back in college when it dawned on me — because of my association with a bunch of sleazy hackers — that Beirut is not only the perfect vehicle for a cyberpunk story, it is, in every way, a cyberpunk city.

You also have a supernatural element in the story, something you don't normally find in mainstream cyberpunk from the West. I actually participated in a session on Cyberpunk Traditions outside the USA, at Chicon 8. I kind of anticipated what I found in your story since I noted how supernatural elements and myths creep into our science fiction, as Arabs and Muslims, all the time. Not to mention using literary tropes and techniques from classics like The 1001 Nights. I'd like to say more about The Frontrunner, but I don't want to spoil it for the reader. I got the veiled references to seeing the future – believing in prophecy so to speak – and the media outlets who are happy about what happened to the frontrunner in the end.

But, more to the point, why do you like to do borderline SF/fantasy, and why incorporate fantasy elements into a cyberpunk story specifically?

So, the prognosticator is not meant to be drawing their power from some fantastical force but some vaguely defined science that allows them to see every possible branch in the timeline. They're meant to be reminiscent of the pre-cogs from Minority Report, which is a movie I'm not very fond of because of its last thirty minutes. Tying it to one of the latter questions, it is based on a short story by Philip K Dick, which I have not read. I'm not a hard S.F. writer by any means and have no background in science due to convoluted kafkaesque drama that only Lebanon can hoist on a person.

There's lots of love and tragedy in your stories, loss of loved ones to the stars and betrothment between witches and genies paralleling Adam and Eve, or Romeo and Juliet for that matter. Even a pleasant story like "Sariya Grants A Wish," where you have a half-genie who is struggling to grant wishes, you have her finding that love and companionship are what matter the most. Would you say personal drama is a bit lacking in modern Western sci-fi in the mold of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke?

I've never read Arthur C Clarke, or Asimov, though I am vaguely familiar with their work. I mostly know Clarke from the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey which I love, but I'm aware that this is owing to Kubrick's genius and not much from Clarke's end. I grew up on the Will Smith adaptation of I, Robot, which MBC would air endlessly. Even as a kid, I thought it was ridiculously cliché. I'm fully aware it has nothing to do with Asimov's short story collection. I just thought I should mention it. Again, I apologize that I have to keep harping on this, but my focus on high drama and emotions comes from anime. I find that most Western media fails to stir me. It's rare that you watch something like Mad Men or Rocky. Anime, on the other hand, is an emotional rollercoaster ride.

I hear you on that one. I watched an American review of Golgo 13: The Professional (1983) once, and the guy had the nerve to say there was no emotion in it. You have a scene where a priest kills himself after hiring Golgo to take out the mafia boss who butchered his whole family. How much more emotional can you get! To make literary comparisons, I'd say you have a lot in common with Philip K. Dick. I say this in part because he was borderline SF-fantasy too, and not good at hard science per se – outside of drugs, therapy and surgery. Since you mention PKD, he explored mental illness in his works, which reminds me of your story "The H Word: Embracing the Wolf Within" and your talk about bipolar syndrome.

Are you a PKD fan? I certainly am.

My relationship with PKD is a bit complex because of how often he's been adapted. Technically, I've only read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and a short story for a philosophy class where the protagonist doesn't believe the world is real, and reality ends up collapsing when he dies. That said, I'm a big fan of Blade Runner. It's nothing like the original novel, which I think is awful. I can't blame PKD, though. I'm aware that he was writing under financial constraints early on in his career and didn't give himself much time to polish and edit, which is sadly where I am now. From what I understand, his later novels are much better, but I still need to check them out. I consider almost everything I’ve had published works-in-progress and hope to one day find enough financial stability that I can revisit all of them.

On a lighter note, I loved the incredibly cute and satirical "An Odd Gathering Of Peculiar Cats." (It's very nicely written, with smooth English and a Dickensian feel.) You have a would-be dictator trying to rile up cats against their owners, despite the good things that people do for cats, such as food, shelter, and cleaning up kitty litter. He's dressed in the finest silks and has his own trained police force and keeps batting around terminology like politbureau and brotherhood, etc. There are lots of borrowings from George Orwell, am I correct? And I presume there's references there to Islamist parties and the 'morality' police too?!

George Orwell wasn't a consideration. This is actually inspired by one of the issues of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, which I fell in love with as a teen. That issue takes the premise seriously, and I love that, but I thought it would also make for a good political satire. This satire has nothing to do with Arab politics but more of a generalist Lebanese tendency. I’ve never dealt with Arabist themes, and the local ones I dealt with at the time were tackled in a universal way. The short story is a commentary on false power structures created by populist charlatans who pose as strongmen. This was the western and Lebanese political climate when I was writing it a couple of years ago. I need to note that this is not an anti-communist story nor a critique of communism. The setting was chosen as Britain because it's essentially inspired by a very British comic, and having the populist be a communist is appropriate for the Victorian Era period since the original ideology was taken by charlatans around this time and corrupted, launching the brutal regimes of the 20th century that in no way matched what communism was trying to do. I couldn’t find a proper publisher for it. The EiC at Wyldblood Press told me the structure was off, then immediately went into how he wasn’t sure what I was trying to get at halfway through the story, which is uncoincidentally where it’s made clear that Old Whiskers is modeled on pseudo-communist leaders. He was right about not being sure since he clearly got it wrong. I kindly explained to him that this wasn’t an attack on the left — it was influenced by far-right strongmen, after all, but then he was adamant about the structural “problems” in the story, even though this story is as straightforward as it gets. Unsurprisingly a couple of days ago on Twitter, that same editor responded with, “Depends on the angle and whether there might be views in it that would wind me up,” when asked if he would publish a short story collection about immigration, effectively stating that he wouldn’t publish anything that he believed didn't align with his ideology.

Is the inept laser weapon the leader unveils a reference to Saddam's super gun and his scud missiles, by any chance?

Not at all. I do have an S.F. story that is inspired by the invasion of Iraq, and it's a great political satire, but American magazines won't touch it. It's one of the few short stories I've written where I've received no personal feedback. I don't think it has to do with how controversial it might be, but more because it makes the American editors uncomfortable with being portrayed in the way they are in the story, even though, for the most part, the SFF magazine scene is extremely liberal.

The closing scene, with humans finding this rally and noting how cute they all are, is that 'moment-of-truth' scene where the cats – or people of the Third World – find out how superfluous they really are?

I wasn't thinking in terms of First and Third World. Basically, the falseness of the power structure this charlatan has created is exposed. He exerts great power over his people, but when confronted with something as benign as two human onlookers, his real power is made clear. The entire story is a commentary on the human tendency to uncritically follow charlatans for the most shallow of reasons. Thematically, it must be noted that Old Whisker's laser is actually completely useless on humans. It's basically a normal laser powered by steampunk science. Cats lose their minds over them, but humans don't.

Now tell me more about Cosmic Courier Carna'. How did you invent her, and what drew you to her? Is she the Arabic and female answer to Starman Jones, as I say? Is she your Susan Calvin, in the mold of Isaac Asimov? Someone who reasons her way out of awkward situations and crises instead of taking the zap-kapow approach?

I’ve never read Heinlein nor Asimov. Technically, she's inspired by Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim, though she has the personality of an upbeat but overworked female anime protagonist from the 80s and 90s. My desire to write a courier story comes from the anime film Kiki's Delivery Service, but the sci-fi aspect comes from Scott Pilgrim. Her outfit is kind of inspired by Roid's from Akira Toriyama's Pole & Roid one-shot mixed in with a different color palette.

There's also this anime artist who draws a mascot in an 80s-inspired style. The palette I imagine for Carna' which involves yellow, is partially inspired by that. I remember she had a helmet and glasses, but I could be wrong about both.

I feel so terribly out of date. My generation of SF writers were influenced by the classics, cinema, and comics to a lesser extent. How do Western superhero comics rate, in your opinion, compared to Japanese manga, and what's the comic book scene like in Lebanon? Do they have comic book conventions there and a whole subculture?

No SFF or comics conventions. There’s only an anime/manga convention that I’ve never been to. Not sure if it’s still happening, but I didn’t get along with the anime fans in LAU and had no desire to meet more. Readers of American comics are a rarity here. Manga is extremely popular, and to a much lesser extent, there are those who read Francobelgian comics, though, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why. The Tintin comics I’ve read are some of the worst artistic works I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing.

As for myself, I’ve read up on many of the classic DC superhero stories (mostly the Batman ones) and very few of the Marvel ones, but I was always more drawn to DC’s Vertigo line, which didn’t bother with superheroes. The Sandman was a part of it as well as a lot of great comics from the British Invasion. Generally, I don’t keep up with superhero comics and prefer the American, Canadian, and British stuff that isn’t in that genre.

COSMIC COLOURS: Mary Elizabth Winstead as Ramona Flowers in the 'Scott Pilgrim' movie, next to Scott Pilgrim. Sci-fi chicks always have the same taste in men whatever universe they reside in!

Do you think the overemphasis on superheroes in cinema is hurting both cinema and comics? Is CGI another avenue worth pursuing to get ourselves recognized?

Not really. What’s hurting cinema is the fact that home video isn’t a thing anymore. That was the equivalent of a second theatrical release to producers in terms of profits, so there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on making as much money at the box office. Less people are willing to go to the theatre to see quirky films that don’t focus on spectacle, but there are plenty of movies people will check out at home, even if they’re not great.

Can Arabs contribute to the global comic book scene? Something we discovered in our McFarland book is that Nigeria has its own cottage industry in this field (ask Ashiru Muheez Afolabi), and Kuwait's Naif Al-Mutawa was able to turn his The 99 into a 'computer' animated series.

I’ve written numerous comics with some self-published and some published in anthologies. From what I’ve seen in Lebanon, I don’t think we’re able to contribute much, and the Lebanese work ethic isn’t conducive to something as commitment-intensive as comics.

When it comes to CGI, I think that it’s one of the worst things to happen to animation. Kind of like 3D in video games; it was adopted way too early, and all the early stuff produced has aged like milk. The same goes for a lot of stuff made only ten years ago. To this day, the only CGI that looks good is found in films and video games made on Hollywood budgets. We don’t have that here, so I don’t think it’s an artistically fulfilling avenue. Even the Japanese can’t seem to pull it off well most of the time, and the transition to it is going to be worse than their transition to digital art. It’s only recently that their digital 2D art started looking good, and that doesn’t bode well for the transition to CGI at all.

You often talk about the known universe in your Carna' stories. That's an interesting restriction and creates all sorts of possibilities for stories, plots, and themes. Let me in on your mode of thinking behind that?

This isn't the first story of mine where it's mentioned. It actually comes from my IPE stories which I haven't shared with you if I'm remembering correctly, barring the flash fiction piece that was published in Flash Fiction Magazine. There it was meant to be humorous. However, within the context of the Carna's stories, there's a different reason I included it. Neil Gaiman once wrote an issue of The Sandman that didn't tie into anything later. It was about "soft spaces" in the universe. The plot of the entire comic was so complex that he thought he might fuck up somewhere, and he introduced this concept into his universe as a contingency in case something didn't end up lining up. When world-building, I like to keep the world as open as possible. I'm not fond of just having four nations like in Avatar. Keeping the boundaries vague lets me introduce elements without running into the problem of not establishing them before.

Now to the editorial side of your life. You've worked with an impressive list of publications – Poetry Co-Editor, then Poetry Editor at Solarpunk, Editor-at-Large at Wasifiri, and Poetry Editor at Orion's Belt. Does this actually pay decent wages? And please let us in on the insider knowledge. What exactly does an editor do, and what is his or her 'mission' in life? Apart from putting down unconventional writers, that is!

Not at all; Wasifiri and Orion's Belt don't pay me anything. Solarpunk Magazine is kind enough to offer a stipend, but it's only $100 per issue, and there are only six issues per year. We basically go through the slush, pick what works best, and prep it for publication. There's not much more to it than that, and it's been impossible to find a properly paying job in the U.S. with this experience. I’m passionate about it, but feel like I’m barred from the industry proper — both in the MENA and the West.

Is "Dear Xutuix?" inspired by your experiences as a writer and editor?

The former, not the latter. Some of the comments I've gotten from editors have been ridiculous, and I try to reflect that in the story. I've written a bunch of humorous letters before, but this one was, to me, the culmination of all of them because I was a lot more ambitious with this one. Usually, this would've been much shorter and ended halfway through without any of the "weird" S.F. humor that dominates the latter half. If I remember correctly, two magazines, The Magazine of F&SF and another, told me that it needed to be trimmed down and tightened. I guess my ambition here hurt me more than anything, but I think this is far superior and more original than what the standard approach would've resulted in.

The 'alien other' in the story, who also has a very different sexual-reproductive makeup from human beings, gets ditched by the so-called independent writer's blog. I'd suspected all along that the publishing industry wasn't really into marginal voices and indigenous authors and I've come across that sentiment from other authors, even established ones. Never mind religiously conservative dudes like me – (except when it comes to explicit movies!) – who actually devise local solutions to local, if not global, problems like renewable energy or recycling or water management on their own terms.

I got a hint of this satire on your part in your Utopia/dystopia solarpunk story, to be honest…

How silly of me. I forgot to ask you what the SFF scene is like in Lebanon! Offhand, how many 'big' names are there in the field? Is there a sci-fi book club or association? Any conventions? Are there lots of Lebanese fantasy and SF authors living abroad in Canada and Europe, for instance?

It doesn't exist. I'm the only one writing SFF in Lebanon. I don't even know if there are Syrian or Palestinian ones outside of Emile Habibi and Hanna Diyab, who are ancient. The ones who are "Lebanese" have never lived here and know nothing about the country. I have little to no contact with them. Their work doesn't deal with Lebanon. From what I've seen, it's basically an identity tag they leverage for brownie points.

Do Lebanese publishers and critics take S.F. seriously? What about the Palestinians?

No, for the former. For the latter, I've only dealt with Palestinian editors in the West who were in charge of the Strange Horizons and Fiyah Palestinian Issues that I was not accepted into. This was at a time when my supply of stories and poetry was running low, and I just had dregs that I could pass off to them. All the decent stuff had been sold off. One of the poems I read in the S.H. issue was called "Queer Arab Dictionary," and it was complete crap, so it's kind of shocking that some of the stuff I submitted didn't make it through when that did. That was the only piece from those issues I read.

What's your blueprint for 'fixing' the literary scene in the Arab world when it comes to S.F. and fantasy?

Most Arab or MENA-focused outlets only take "literature-in-translation," which is annoying, to say the least. All these western publishers dealing with Arab literature need to open up to Arab writers who speak and write in other languages. It's ridiculous that some of them aren't even founded by Arabs, and they won't take fiction by Arab writers unless it was originally written in Arabic. Somehow having it be written by an Arab in English stops it from being Arab literature, even though Lebanon's most famous writers, like Khalil Gibran (the third bestselling poet of all time), originally wrote a lot of their work in English.

Excellent point, and thank heavens we here at The Levant try to keep Gibran's memory alive. Finally, returning to J.D., the man, and the mission. Do you have a novel in you, and what are your plans for the immediate future?

There are so many I have outlined, and I would love to start writing them or, at the very least, complete the ones that were started and abandoned. I'm not sure if you're familiar with what's happening in Lebanon and has been for years now, but I'm in no mental state to pursue a novel. I desperately want to. Writing for the western SFF magazine market is killing me on the inside, and I want to break into traditional publishing, but it seems that every single wannabe writer in Lebanon has access to opportunities I have to fight tooth and nail for because they attended the American University of Beirut, and I went to the Lebanese American University, where dreams go to die. I do what I can to get ahead in this industry, which is why I’m publishing pieces I consider WIP (work-in-progress). I’m hoping I can generate enough interest to bring enough money to do this full-time.

Back to Robert E. Howards’s influence. The similarities between him and I are uncanny. I even look like him! Similarly to him, I don’t imagine I’ll ever be able to escape Lebanon — the way he couldn’t escape Texas— and I’ve come to treat my writing the way a mercenary treats his killing, even though I would much rather approach my work as an artist would. I’m trying to make the change before it’s too late. With the electricity back in my house as of September (after being gone for a year and a half), I’ve been able to write properly, and hope that I can reorient my writing and career in a more respectable direction. The early approach was a mistake, but it was an act of desperation more than anything since I started writing properly the week the failed revolution started in Lebanon. I even wrote a poem called “A Ceremony Centuries in the Making,” predicting it would fail. There was a crime comedy and political satire I started way before that predicted that things would fall apart too. Few around could see it coming and thought I was crazy when I kept warning everyone of an oncoming disaster. Till the day I realize my ambitions, I’m going to keep trying to steer the ship in the right direction, even if it kills me.