The Republic of Memory
By Mahmud El Sayed
Paperback/Ebook/Audio
ISBN: 978-1668207192
S&S/Saga Press, May 5, 2026, 480 pgs

To save humanity after years of unending war, an international group of humans boards the massive space station Sarafina and head for the planet Hurriya, a journey that will take 400 years. Generations will pass before the crew reaches their destination, but they take solace in two things. One is the hope of bringing their ancestors, preserved in cryosleep in a hidden and heavily fortified deck of the station, into a new future. The other is the Network, an AI-enabled mind link that connects all of the space station’s residents to each other and to the ruling intelligence of the Sarafina herself.

When a generational shift changes the crew’s attitude towards the Network, it’s shut down and forbidden, along with the Sarafina’s AI personification. Under the new analog rules, society changes entirely, leading to a political and cultural system based on language segregation. Administrative matters between communities are brokered by polyglot Translators in English, a language that isn’t native to any of the ship’s inhabitants. Two hundred years later, in the Arabek (once called Arabic) speaking section of the ship, siblings Iskander and Damietta Ezz somehow find themselves connected to a revolution that threatens to not only upend the Sarafina’s social order, but also to destroy its future as well.

This is a complicated book. It’s a highly political, culturally complex space odyssey for about the first hundred pages, which is when a really wild twist swoops in and turns it into a detective thriller, too. There are lots of characters, and as soon as you’ve gotten used to one of their points of view, a side character pops out of the narrative, snatches the plot, and speeds away with it, going in a totally different direction than what was expected. Some of those characters speak and think in a delightfully loopy conlang called Nupol, which may take readers a minute to wrap their eyeballs around properly. Space station culture across all of its different sectors is intricately constructed, augmented by the linguistic divisions that create Sarafinan society and the author’s real-world inspirations and references drawn from places as diverse as the Arab Spring and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

This is a complex, multi-layered book with some big thoughts and big meaning behind it, aided by watertight world-building, thoughtful cultural commentary, and very precise, deliberate Arabfuturism.

Somehow, it manages to do all of this while also being so much fun. Seriously, this book stays exciting from beginning to end. About 150 pages in, a very surprising character suddenly enters the story and made me sit up straight and say “oh, that’s so cool!” out loud. I did that about ten more times throughout the book. Big, deep, multi-faceted ideas don’t have to be boring, and El Sayed demonstrates this masterfully. The characters aren’t just political creatures; they’re fully fleshed out humans with families, romances, jobs, and deep relationships with each other that sometimes cross over the lines you’d expect language, politics, and class to create. The dialogue is funny, and the world being spoken about is really unique, full of familiar touchpoints and futuristic imagination at the same time.

While the book is Arabfuturism, it doesn’t make a key mistake that a lot of ethnofuturisms do by isolating the futuristic culture it imagines. There are lots of different groups of people on board the Sarafina, but the book is centered on the Arab-descended passengers. The story is viewed unapologetically through their cultural lens. This allows for a lot of nods to the real-world internal diversity of the Arab world, as well as a nuanced, affectionate look at a big Muslim family full of differing levels of devotion and belief. The fact that said family has been on a space station for two hundred years on their way to another planet somehow doesn’t make their moments of shared faith and culture any less genuine. In fact, every culture and belief system—both religious and political—is treated with a rare reverence and empathy in this book, making the characters and their relationships feel all the more real, and the actions they take to express themselves more impactful.

All of that grounds the book well enough to let the plot spin all over the place. The story is full of turns and twists and total surprises, most of which work really well. Everything leads towards a final surprise that made me wonder if the author has any more stories about this world under his belt to share.

This was great fun held up by a strong, complicated scaffolding of political and cultural world-building. If you enjoyed Andrea Hairston’s Mindscape or Neal Asher’s Polity Universe, you might like this, too.