El Sayed has a clear theme in The Republic of Memory -- to recount the circumstances and steps in the Arab Spring political uprising and aftermath by putting them in a science-fiction setting. On that front, pretty much everyone at NUBClub agrees that the novel succeeded. The setting creating a complex and vivid set of political actors and conflicts, and El Sayed showed a great deal of sophistication in looking at how political conflicts get out of control and have unintended consequences. By reframing the struggle in an arc ship bringing humanity across the stars, El Sayed had a good fictional space to represent the self-contained nature of the struggles and we found a lot of the local discussion by different actors believable and compelling. The book is also grounded in an Arab futurism that was a bit confusing to us as non-Arab readers, but we appreciated the details that choice created. However, El Sayed is less interested in the storyworld that created the conditions for the arc ship, and this is where a lot of us were disappointed in the book. A central idea of this setting is that the colony ship, having revolted against AI leadership, decided to divide the colonists up by language rather than ethnicity or background, under the idea that language can be adopted. This makes no sense -- not just because language groups follow the kin structure that the ship was trying to avoid, but also that language has clearly historically been a point of major tension between groups. If you don't buy that setup, the whole book makes no sense. Similar issues plague other elements. The patois the young people speak isn't believable; it's almost all a combination of English and Spanish, which doesn't make sense given the prevalence of Arabic and the lack of Spanish cultures. On top of this, the AI backstory is just bad. The AI doesn't make sense technologically, the Earth they left is never adequately explained, and the one time we see the AI in action, it's a ridiculous sidekick that manifests as an avatar in the mind of one of the protagonists. Finally, there were plotting issues. Almost all of us felt that the first half of the book took too long and that El Sayed could have condensed it and gotten to the blackout (the inciting incident of the story) faster. That said, the blackout itself was one of the best parts of the novel. While there's a lot of criticism here, it remains that the author did truly terrific work showing how trust in government falls and setting up a deep and nuanced conflict that mirrored history. Whether you like this novel depends entirely on what you think it should accomplish. If seeing the futuristic reflection of Arab Spring is the target, it works really well, but if you want the whole storyworld to be strong, The Republic of Memory may fall short for you.
