Fadi Zuwail’s 2070: The War of the Zanoun (2024) has been on my review list for quite some time now, especially because of this interesting sci-fi connection: a TV production from the 1990s - Virtual Obsession (1998).
By Emad Aysha
The novel is about a future world divided into two clumps of nations and genetic categories of people: the first world, or Western world, made up of the genetically perfect A graders, and the third world, or East, made up of the ‘flawed’ C graders. The irony here is that this unholy division resulted from the unintentional machinations of an Egyptian AI programmer!
The guy was fed up with being unable to make an impact despite his skillset and disenchanted by families wanting nothing but more. So he envisioned a world where AI androids, the infamous Zanoun servicemen, release him from material wants to focus on creativity and the good life of easy pleasures.
He explicitly calls this paradise, modelled by our vision of Firdaus in Islam, with wine, women, beautiful gardens, and fruits. He developed the know-how through his tech startup in South Africa, and he inadvertently let the genie out of the bottle, with his own country rejecting him and Western nations adopting the technology in mass.
DEVIL'S BARGAIN: Bridgette Wilson-Sampras and Mimi Rogers [right]. The hapless hero of 'Virtual Obsession' has to choose between crass, and class!
That’s when the genetic segregation begins, and he can’t even get his own family into the grade-A world, given their bad genes, or go back to his own homeland with his kids getting scattered over the globe. Slave traders snatch the boy, and his daughter gets adopted by a wandering Indian family who then becomes a rebel leader against the First World.
I won’t spoil the rest of the novel for you, but what interests me here are two things. One is the book's stylistics since it’s true to our tradition of storytelling as Arabs. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a key character in the story and in causal chains, with the tribulations of one person leading to problems and decisions by the next that push the story along.
The proviso is that this is done in a crisp, flowing and lighthearted fashion. Our older storytelling is actually tedious with too many details, flashbacks and side plots, so the author is being true to the spirit of The 1001 Nights but in a linear and updated fashion.
The other concern is contrasting visions of paradise. In Virtual Obsession (itself adapted from a sci-fi novel, Host, by Peter James), a seductive woman who has only so much time to live uploads herself into the AI mainframe of an ambitious (but well-intentioned) inventor tycoon. And she calls her new limitless existence like Eden, only so much better.
Mind you, she was already pretty possessive and jealous before she became all-powerful, trying to steal the man from his loving and already sexy wife (Mimi Rogers) and cute kid. Now, she threatens the entrepreneur's family and begs and bargains with him to come inside the machine. She doesn’t want his body; she wants his soul.
This is all very Christian, with no sex and just the life of the intellect. We do actually have that in Islam, in the top level of heaven with the martyrs and prophets who only gaze at the beauty of God’s face – but the rest of paradise is for the fun-loving masses. (No comment!)
There are also parallels here with a movie like Angel Heart (1987) too, which I reviewed before. In a key scene, Lucifer talks about how the flesh is weak and the only thing that’s eternal is the soul, which is precisely what he wants. That’s essentially what you see here, and it reveals so much more about the misgivings Western SF has about technology – doctor Frankenstein was compared by Mary Shelley to Prometheus, after all.
The same is true for the Pygmalion myth, where a creation disobeys its creator and goes beyond his desires, and the Golem myth (from Poland, actually) to boot. We have different dispositions as Arabs and Muslims, and more so in the case of Egyptians.
The Zanoun robots, for instance, never rebel against their creators and do everything to please them. And that includes sex, of course, as well as waging war against the C graders. (In Egypt, we expect women and families to obey; why else would we get married?!)
PROPHET OF DOOM: Fadi Zuwail is an Egyptian AI expert in real life too, with many other pessimistic novels for the Arab audience. [Photo from El-Balad News].
Now, take a second look at Virtual Obsession. The AI businessman is named Dr. Joe Messenger (like a prophet of doom), and the temptress is Juliet Spring—like a new season or a wellspring (the fountain of youth, and played by the very youthful Bridgette Wilson-Sampras). The morality debates in this movie, which are great, are very explicitly theological—they discuss the soul and God’s plan, with Juliet’s father saying she died young in life for a reason.
The father commandeers her body from cryogenic freezing, and in the nicest scene in the movie, the wife finds Juliet’s head stored in her fridge by her dumb husband. (And she smashes it on the sidewalk!) Did I mention the father is named ‘Adam’?
On the plus side, the movie does question the mind-body problem since what makes us human may be our body; hence, the soul or nafs in Arabic is a combination of the spirit (ruh) and the body. (We don’t seem to have a concept of ‘psyche’ in Arabic, seeing different faculties as wedded to other body parts, too.)
Alas, Virtual Obsession does have a happy ending, which is more than I can say for the Zanoun novel. This article’s title should have read paradise in Egyptian hands, not a pretty sight!!
Author’s Note: Please see my earlier article with 'Room 19 magazine', “Differed moralities… Artificial Intelligence in Arabic Science Fiction and Business Fact”, pp. 26-28.
