The Guardian of the World’s Surface

Description

“This story takes place sometime in the future, in a place whose name makes no difference, because it resembles every other place.”

Buthaina Al-Essa’s novel, “The Guardian of the World’s Surface,” is a dystopian future set in a time after the fall of democracies, a revolution against the information revolution, the regulation of technology, and the banning of the internet.In that world, the government works tirelessly to make its citizens happy by ridding them of excess emotions, desires, dreams, and fantasies, keeping them within the confines of “positive realism” by stripping them of all their existential possibilities and “irrational desires.” There are only three legitimate human desires: “the desire to belong, the desire to work, and the desire to procreate.” The philosophy of the new state is based on the premise that “imagination is the root of all evil,” and thus, the government begins to suppress all manifestations of imagination, from childhood to literature. The protagonist of “The Guardian of the World’s Surface” is a book censor who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a voracious reader, ensnared in the web of meaning, embroiled in existential questions, and insatiably hungry for forbidden novels.