عطارد

Author's name: Mohamed Ruba'idar Publisher: Dar Al-Tanweer for Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2014 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: The nightmare that frightens you will not come; it has already come! Just lower your gaze a little and you will see it beneath the skin of daily life, hiding with all its features behind its trivial details. Those details which go into your willful acceptance of them to endure that other apocalyptic vision. As if we live life on two levels; a level of dormant awareness at the zero deviation factor, and another level from which you look through the wounds of awareness and see hell standing. This is what Mercury tells us... and Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, and the hottest. It is a piece of hell by our earthly standards. It is also an officer who witnessed the police's defeat on January 28, 2011. After a decade and several years since those events, Egypt under a mysterious occupation and remnants of the old police taking the lead in the popular resistance among the broken ruins of Cairo. A daily hell of random killings, intensifying what we saw of scattered massacres following the famous January events. It is illusions and fears of the "counter-revolution" that have become a reality in a nightmare future. After "Amber Planet" and "Year of the Dragon," Mohamed Ruba'idar continues in "Mercury" what he started in his second novel, specifically a political fantasy approaching the inverted utopia "dystopia" this time, in a breathless narration that moves between dark future worlds and a past always haunted by that hell.