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:

• Venus in Bloom
• Earthrise
• Talking To Ghosts At The Edge of the World
• Neom
• Terminal

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