Egyptians like humour in all works of art and walks of life. For Egyptians, it’s a necessity of life, like air to breathe and bread to eat. Our most successful movies and plays are comedies, and our most successful actors are comedians, from the era of black and white cinema and television onwards. Writing and literature may be a more serious affair in Egypt, but humour nonetheless is there, along with its second cousin, satire. And so the subject of this article is humour in Egyptian science fiction and fantasy, which can range from biting political criticism and social commentary to the more general topic of comedy and jokes. The emphasis here will be on the younger generation of authors, in part because of my direct knowledge of them (friends and colleagues) but also because much has already been written about the larger names in satire when it comes to Egyptian science fiction – Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s Utopia and Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue (Bakker, 2021). One particular case in point is 2063 and Other Stories (2025), a collection of satirical and darkly humorous stories by struggling author Moataz Hassanein...