14C – Pyramids, Part 2b: Egyptian Representations

Unseen Academicals: A Discworld and Terry Pratchett Podcast

The third and final episode tangentially related to Terry Pratchett's 1989 Discworld novel Pyramids, providing a crash course in Egyptian fantasy and science fiction—as in written by Egyptians, rather than simply about them. We go all the way back to the beginning, talking about traditional fantasy precursors and the origins of the modern Egyptian science fiction tradition, talking about its development throughout the later part of the twentieth century and providing some (overly) close analysis of Mustafā Mahmūd's The Spider (1965) and Nihād Sharīf's The Conqueror of Time (1972), before jumping forward to the allegedly more "authentic" post-2011 Egyptian Revolution era and the currently available English translations by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, Mohammad Rabie and Ahmed Naji, among others.

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