Fantasy and sci fi in
Iran
We are in the 20th century and how come
any good fantasy fiction that ever came out of our beloved land belongs to the
negative centuries. Do we not have the imagination to create sci fi or is it we do
not recognize it as a fine art?
Is it possible that our culture does not see
the tools it provides to explore further matters where ordinary story telling or old fantasy tools
fails?
Shabnam
Answer:
Dear
Shabnam
Good question, but there
are also many good answers to it.
One of them is that the
Iranian writers still are in a political war with their government. This problem
has overwhelmed us since the first really fiction novel of Sadeq Hedayat “Boofe
Koor”. This short novel should start a novel movement which could end in the
different kinds of literary genre as well as the fantasy genre. But it didn't
really happen. We still can't forget the political problems in our country when
we write.
Without knowing much about
the fantasy novelist in
But where is the writers?
To start a literary
movement in a country like ours whose cultural and industrial development and
imagination of the new worldview was not started in Iran, but outside of the
country, in US and Europe, should happen in another form and step by step
without loosing
what you call our “negative centuries”, which shows the Iranians
greatness in creating fantacy worlds and an imagination activity in literature.
This happened among certain big poets as Ferdowsi, Attar, Movlana(Rumi), Nezami and others…
I think the main problem is
that our writers do not read the classical works of our great poets. Another
problem is that they don’t know anything about science. If you ask them about
what Einstein's philosophical points of his theory of relativity is or what
quantum mechanic really is, they don’t know what to say. And don't try to ask
them about the theory of change of paradigms and such
stuff.
They haven't really studied
philosophy, religion (not political religion), mysticisms, myth and they don't have any
kind of theoretical scientific understanding. And they don't really know what
research is before they write their novels, actually there are just reducing
themself to their own countries limitations.
Writing a good sci fi
novel, the writer has to learn all these matters and much more. The problem is
that our youngest countrymen know much more about science than our writers do!
That is funny. And therefore as a young Iranian novel reader it is very boring
to read I think any work of modern Iranian writers as long we are talking about
THE FANTASY GENRE.
Without this deepest
understanding of our own culture true literature and the magnificent about all
other cultures and worldview(s) in our great and fantastic word(s) we will never
become a nation whose literature are read amongst other
nations.
The novel writing in
But don't forget that this
sci fi or mystical sci fi which I think could be a better name for the Iranian
sci fi works in the future, can't happen with the work
of one man. It takes time, as it did with the first really novel Don Juan in
The novel as literar work
as well as sci fi as genre is here to stay…
See you in my books, if
they get licence to be printed and published in
Find also this conversation
in the forum of this website.
Arash