Rachelle Atalla writes like a truth the genre has been trying to sanitise for years. She is a Scottish-Egyptian novelist and screenwriter based in Glasgow whose debut The Pharmacist announced her refusal to spare readers the real grain beneath speculative fiction’s glossy veneer. Her follow-ups Thirsty Animals and The Salt Flats confirm that she is not interested in comforting nightmares. She wants your unease, and she wants it unsoftened.
Most dystopias and near-future fantasies function like rehearsals for disaster: we get to imagine the apocalypse, feel clever about spotting the parallels to our world, and close the book relieved that it’s just fiction. Atalla does not grant that luxury. Her speculative realism is a scalpel, not a security blanket. She writes catastrophe as an intensification of present systems, not as a rupture from them. This is the dangerous clarity she brings: the collapse she depicts feels inevitable because it is already underway.
Take The Pharmacist, Atalla’s first novel. A catastrophic event has pushed society back toward fortification and rationing, but the story is not driven by explosions. It is driven by administration, by the way power calcifies when fear becomes policy and compliance becomes survival. The protagonist dispenses medication inside a bunker whose logic is control, not care. The horror is not the event that destroyed the old world, but the way authority rebrands itself to justify its own permanence. Atalla’s fiction does not glamourise resistance. It dissects how people get used to the cages that claim to protect them.
Then comes Thirsty Animals, a world where water scarcity has stripped away illusion. In Atalla’s hands scarcity is not symbolic. It’s logistics, politics, borders, and brutality. Here, drought functions not as atmosphere but as a machine, grinding relationships, class resentments, and nationalism into dust. Aida, caught between survival and compassion, is forced to reckon with migration, exclusion, and the arbitrary cruelty of resource allocation. The novel does not future-shock. It future-reflects. It says: watch how society behaves when you refuse to watch.
Atalla is not interested in snapping the reader back to safety with a narratively neat moral. She knows that certainty is a luxury of the stable world. Her people do not gain insight because the apocalypse happens. They gain clarity because the veneer falls away and reveals everything that was already ugly. Readers who want dystopia as a difference engine get unsettled because Atalla’s worlds are recognisable first, speculative second.
And then there is The Salt Flats, which pushes this logic into psychological terrain. A divorced-at-heart couple seek renewal at a mysterious Bolivian retreat amid a world unhinged by climate crisis. If this sounds like another mystical reset story, it isn’t. Atalla turns the search for spiritual clarity into a confrontation with human incapacity: charisma does not cure fear, ceremony does not steady identity, and healing is a demand without guarantee. Here the uncanny is not in the desert setting, but in the refusal to let characters or readers escape into easy symbolism. In Atalla’s work, seeking meaning often reveals how hollow certainty actually was.
Atalla’s speculative realism is dangerous precisely because it refuses separation. It collects what the present has trained us to ignore — institutional ossification, resource politics, spiritual commodification — and pushes it into the foreground without apology or aesthetic cushioning. She does not write parables dressed up as futures. She writes futures that already feel like today, entire with inequality, anxiety, political thuggery, and human self-delusion baked in.
This is why her work irritates readers who want genre boundaries. Science fiction that doesn’t threaten the status quo becomes a festival book club favourite; speculative fiction that refuses reassurance becomes a challenge. Atalla wants to unsettle complacency, not entertain it. She sidesteps the genre’s usual escape routes — post-apocalyptic heroism, moral redemption, lessons learned — and instead presents survival as negotiation. Her characters do not triumph because they are exceptional. They endure because they make incremental choices inside systems that reward obedience and punish curiosity.
Atalla’s “speculation” does not invent alien horrors. It exposes the familiar mechanics of fear, power, and scarcity already in motion.
There is a political edge here that many critics will shy away from naming because it forces the reader below the waterline. Climate disaster in her fiction is not a metaphor for emotional fragility. It is a test case for class division, exclusion, and the moral bankruptcy of borders. Wellness culture under strain is not whimsy. It is displacement disguised as self-help. Authority is not prophetic. It is administrative and uninteresting and terrifying because it feels inevitable.
Atalla’s clarity is dangerous because it doesn’t allow the reader to sit outside the systems she depicts. The horror is not “if this happens.” The horror is “look at how this already works.” Her fiction is not an imaginative detour. It is a mirror turned too close, and it burns.
If you want speculative fiction that reinsures you that everything collapses in a satisfying narrative arc, Atalla will make you angry. If you want novels that treat future trauma as tools for self-examination rather than playgrounds for escapism, then Atalla’s work will land like a punch — and stay there.
Reading Rachelle Atalla, you don’t watch a future unfold. You recognise the present fully, and it refuses to look away.
