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THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD is an ambitious and ambiguous book showing Tidhar at top form, and all the more interesting for how it rejects easy resolutions.
Chicago Review of Books
Lavie Tidhar’s trippy, metafictional ode to the golden age of science fiction is a book within a book—Lode Stars, the novel that may or may not exist, as it disappears after being read.
Literary Hub
This pair from two excellent new books take on the biggest strike – and moments when you question: what exactly are will laugh so loudly you will wish we doing here? It is a question science fiction is uniquely placed to explore. Both Daniel, in Lavie Tidhar’s THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD, and Charlie, in John Scalzi’s Starter Villain, are stuck in the same existential misery. Their very different stories converge on the same truth.
New Scientist
Mr. Tidhar’s love of SF is real, ya’ll, and the total shift in styles and tone and voice just makes me want to clap with joy. Again, he shows me what a world-class talent he is.
Bradley Horner
I really enjoyed THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD. As a book, it is a thing of its own, not like anything I’d come across before, but a great read crammed with ideas and glorious writing: there is simply so much material here, I think some writers could and would make 3 or 4 books of it but we have all that concentrated in a short novel. Somehow that compression means that – like matter spiralling into a black hole – everything here simply lights up, bathing the reader with its intense radiation.
Shiny New Books
An amazing read, strongly recommended.
I’ve always been fascinated by the Golden Age of science fiction, when a group of young dreamers formed the genre as we know it today. I grew up far away from their world, on a small kibbutz in Israel, and the lives of those god-like beings seemed as remote and as impossible as the moon. I grew up to eventually write stories of my own, and even got to meet some of my childhood heroes, and eventually I thought it would be fun to write a book that was partially about them. I read every book I could get my hands on to try and better understand that time when science fiction was born.
Shepherd
In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954
By Isaac Asimov
The first part of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography provides a fascinating, clear-eyed glimpse into the emerging world of science fiction as the young Asimov grows up in New York, works in his immigrant parents’ candy store, and dreams of writing stories.
There’s a certain innocence in the pre-war world where young kids were dreaming up science fiction, and Asimov is at his best here, relying on extensive diary records to recall his first meetings with Campbell, Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard, to name a few. A window into a long-vanished world, it is never less than compelling.
[STARRED REVIEW] World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar (Neom) wows with a mind-bending existential adventure that seeks to answer the age-old question of why humanity exists. In 2001 London, four characters converge around the lost science fiction book Lode Stars, written decades earlier by Eugene Charles Hartley. It’s rumored that Hartley, who also founded the sketchy Church of God’s All-Seeing Eyes, discovered the ‘true nature of reality’ and encoded it into the novel, which follows heroine Delia as she searches for her father. The novel also posits that humans are reconstructed memories swirling inside black holes, which are the eyes of God, and that alien ‘eaters’ feed on these reconstituted humans. Only possession of Lode Stars itself can ward off this danger. Albino mathematician Delia Welegtabit, who happens to have the same name as Lode Star’s heroine, is drawn into the hunt for the book by her husband, obsessive mathematician Levi. When Levi disappears, Delia turns to Daniel Chase, a rare book collector, to investigate—but then Daniel is himself kidnapped by mobster Oskar Lens, who believes in the book’s power and wants it to protect him from the eaters. Toggling between perspectives and the ethereal text of Lode Stars, Tidhar’s slippery metafictional tale lyrically entangles scientific fact, mysticism, and mental illness. This is a knockout.
—Publishers Weekly
Tidhar wins it all with this magnificently original mind-bender of a novel about a missing husband and a mysterious book that disappears as soon as you read it. THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD is two parts Philip K. Dick, two parts Brothers Strugatsky, and six parts blow your f**king mind.
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Caught between realities, a mathematician, a book dealer, and a mobster desperately seek a notorious book that disappears upon being read. Only the author, a rakish sci-fi writer, knows whether his popular novel is truthful or a hoax. In a story that is cosmic, inventive, and sly, multi-award-winning author Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) travels from the emergence of life to the very ends of the universe.
Brilliant and bizarre, Lavie Tidhar’s THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD is many things—but fundamentally it is a love letter to the Golden Age of science fiction, whether or not it deserves it (it does), as well as a love letter to its writers, whether or not they deserve it.
—Molly Tanzer, author of Vermilion and Creatures of Will and Temper
Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn’t supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. Oskar Lens, a science fiction-obsessed mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, will stop at nothing to find the novel. After Delia’s husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer.
The infamous novel Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley’s novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system. But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe?
[STARRED REVIEW] Black holes, new religions, and powerful stories ensnare orbiting beings with their intrigue and potentiality in Lavie Tidhar’s science fiction marvel THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD…. Inquisitive, daring, and rich with possibilities, THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD is a speculative masterpiece.
—Foreword
Via Mysterious Galaxy, Lavie Tidhar, author of the John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION, celebrates his new book THE ESCAPEMENT with a conversation with New York Times bestselling Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Velvet Was the Night, on Saturday December 4 1PM PT.
The livestream is hosted by Crowdcast! To view and register for the event click here!
Jack Deighton is puzzled about the lack of award attention toward Lavie Tidhar’s THE VIOLENT CENTURY.
THE VIOLENT CENTURY is admirably plotted and well paced, with
an atmosphere of menace throughout, I’m puzzled as to why this wasn’t
on any award shortlist for its year.
In THE TEL AVIV REVIEW OF BOOKS, Hagay HaCohen mentions Lavie Tidhar’s UNHOLY LAND in their joint review of Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature and Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba.
An example of this is Lavie Tidhar, an award-winning Israeli sci-fi writer, who published UNHOLY LAND
in 2018—in which the Jewish State was created in Uganda, riffing on the
Uganda Scheme, a British proposal from the early 1900s to turn a
portion of East Africa into a Jewish state. Few readers in Israel,
though, seemed to take interest. Imagine the interest that might be
shown if the book is made into a Netflix series or an Amazon Studios
production!
Tidhar, featured in Zion’s Fiction
and mentioned in Professor Gary K. Wolfe’s course as an exemplar of the
genre’s expansion in recent years, is a multiple award winning writer
who is fairly unknown in Israel by people other than hard-core fans of
sci-fi—meaning most of the population.
Cover art by Masato Hisa
Lavie Tidhar announces his new Japanese short story collection 金星は花に満ちて (Venus in Bloom).
Venus In Bloom collects five of my stories,
including an introduction and story notes. It is available as a slim
paperback, illustrated by Masato Hisa, who was my fellow Guest of Honour
at Hal-Con this year, and who also designs the monsters for the
Japanese Power Rangers! Which is about as cool as it comes. (I also have
one of his original pieces at home now, which I got at a secret room
auction… err, don’t ask).The book includes:
Tidhar, alongside Silvia Moreno-Garcia, is the new science fiction book columnist for The Washington Post.
Even
10 years ago, the fields of science fiction and fantasy were still
overwhelmingly American and white. And, if you grew up speaking Spanish
in Mexico City, (as I, Silvia, did), or Hebrew on a small kibbutz in
Israel (as I, Lavie, did), it meant that the world of science fiction,
filtered through translation, was as remote and alien as the other side
of the moon. The very idea we could be writing novels like these seemed,
well, fantastical.Yet,
somehow, here we are. The past decade has seen the science-fiction
world change as more international voices enthusiastically jumped into
the fray. Now, wonderful writers including Malaysian Zen Cho can write
smart, funny fantasies such as “Sorcerer to the Crown”; after years of
struggle, Nigerian Tade Thompson’s ambitious Africa-set novel,
“Rosewater,” was published to wide acclaim and recently won the
prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Chinese author Liu Cixin’s “The
Three-Body Problem,” translated by Ken Liu, has become a bestseller and
even has a recommendation from former president Barack Obama.In
our new column, we hope to highlight some of the fresh, exciting, weird
and wacky science fiction and fantasy from around the world and also
look back at some underappreciated gems from the past.
For more info about THE VIOLENT CENTURY, visit the Tachyon page.
For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.
Covers by Sarah Anne Langton
