Science fiction has played a variety of roles in the popular imagination since it began to emerge as a literary genre in the 19th century. Its own emergence being coterminous with the technological and colonial expansion of European imagination, it moves easily between the two poles of utopia and dystopia as its authors imagine the possibilities of the world around them. Recent efforts to expand Arabic literary studies beyond the traditional canon have moved to incorporate genres and literary categories traditionally ignored in writing the history of modern Arabic literature. Science fiction is among these ignored genres, though it made up a significant part of the literature that was translated from European languages during the nahdah. This presentation examines three distinct moments in the history of science fiction in Arabic literature. First, the wide popularity of science fiction stories translated into Arabic during the nahdah. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other popular European authors of science fiction were among the earliest works to be translated into Arabic in the 1880s and 1890s. These translations are carefully manipulated to capture the allure of modern technology and all the possibilities it promised to Arab society in the 19th century. In the post-independence period, we have another upswing in the amount of science fiction written in Arabic. I will take as an example of this period the work of Nihad Sharif, one of the few Arab authors to devote his entire career to science fiction. His work is much darker than nahdawi science fiction, introducing more clearlyh elements of social critique into Arabic science fiction. Recent years have seen a new interest surrounding Arabic science fiction. The science fiction novels Yutobia (2008), by Ahmad Khalid Tawfiq, and Nura Ahmad al-Numan’s young adult novels Ajwan (2012) and Mandaan (2014) describe dystopian futures characterized by a different set of social and political concerns than their predecessors in the field. These novels form an understudied thread running through modern Arabic literature. In bringing examples of Arabic science fiction from these three periods together, I hope to explore the ways in which science fiction is able to give voice to the vastly different political and social commentaries that these authors sought to express; from the utopian visions of the nahdah to the disillusionment of Egyptian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, to the slogans of the Arab Spring.