Guard of the surface of the world

Ars Surface of the World is a distinctly dystopian Arabic novel, set in an unspecified time and place, in which Buthaina Al Essa discusses in a unique and humorous style the issue of censorship, whether it is censorship of works or of ideas themselves. The novel "The Keeper of the Surface of the World" was published by Takween Publications as part of a series of Arabic novels. About the book "The Keeper of the Surface of the World": "The events of this story take place in some future time, in a place whose mention makes no difference, because it resembles every other place." The novel "The Keeper of the Surface of the World" by Buthaina Al Essa is a future dystopia, set after the fall of democracies, the 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 freeing them from excess feelings, desires, dreams, and fantasies, keeping them on the path of "positive realism" by draining them of all their "existential potentials" and "unreasonable desires"; where there are three legitimate desires in humans: "the desire to belong, the desire to work, and the desire to reproduce." The philosophy of the new state is based on the idea that "imagination is the root of all evil," and accordingly, the government begins to confront manifestations of imagination in all its forms, from childhood to literature! The protagonist of "The Keeper of the Surface of the World" is a book inspector who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a reader, a hobbyist caught in the trap of meaning, entangled in questions of existence, and starving for forbidden novels in an irreparable way. In this work, Buthaina Al Essa mischievously borrowed from many classics and blended them to build her own narrative line, starting with Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," passing through "Alice in Wonderland," "Pinocchio," George Orwell's "1984," "Fahrenheit 451," and others.