Novelists have long been drawn to the aesthetics, cultures and traditions of the Middle East, spawning everything from thoughtful reimaginings and critiques of power to works shaped by outsider fantasy and inherited tropes. The most famous example is Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, yet there are many more which explore contemporary themes tying back to the region. The novels on this list span sci-fi subgenres, but all engage with Middle Eastern settings, themes or histories in their own way.
American fantasy author SA Chakraborty draws extensively on Islamic history, theology and folklore in The City of Brass, the opening novel of the Daevabad Trilogy. The story follows Nahri, a Cairo con artist who is drawn into a hidden world of djinn politics, ancient magic and sectarian conflict. The novel centres Middle Eastern myth and Islamic cosmology in an epic fantasy narrative.
American novelist Matt Ruff’s The Mirage presents a bold alternate history in which global power dynamics between the US and the Middle East are reversed. Through the eyes of intelligence agents, the novel explores how narratives of terrorism, control, empire and moral legitimacy shift depending on who holds power.
Arkady Martine, an American historian specialising in Byzantine studies, merges academic insight into empire and cultural assimilation with space opera antics. The novel follows Mahit Dzmare, a diplomat from a small space station navigating the vast Teixcalaanli Empire while carrying an inherited memory implant. Throughout its twists and turns, the story examines how language, ritual and bureaucracy function as tools of imperial power.
American science fiction writer George Alec Effinger’s Marîd Audran series is a foundational work of cyberpunk set in the Budayeen, a decadent, Middle Eastern-inspired future city. Following a hard-boiled private investigator navigating crime, body modification and shifting identities, the trilogy – and its companion stories in Budayeen Nights – blend noir conventions with speculative sociology. Effinger’s work should be interpreted in the context of its time (the first book was published in 1987), and while he has been criticised for playing into common tropes of Middle Eastern culture, his trilogy endures as a seminal early work in the cyberpunk genre.
American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a world in which the Black Death eradicates nearly all of Europe, leaving global history to unfold primarily through Islamic, Chinese and Indigenous civilisations. Spanning centuries and continents, the novel follows a group of souls repeatedly reincarnated across eras, offering a philosophical meditation on history itself and how things might have been under different circumstances.
British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid explores love and displacement in a country on the cusp of a civil war. When violence escalates, protagonists Nadia and Saeed discover doors that can transport them far away, for a price. They choose to leave their past behind and cross the threshold into an uncertain future. While the story is not strictly about the Middle East, it does call to mind the plight of refugees forced to leave the familiar behind and step into the unknown due to circumstances beyond their control.
