sean guynes-vishniac Archives - Tachyon Publications

January 8, 2019

Lavie Tidhar’s gripping thriller UNHOLY LAND appears on even more Best of the Year lists

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized best of 2018, crime time, fantasy literature, howard freedman, lavie tidhar, maxim jakubowski, review, sean guynes-vishniac, the endless bookshelf, the jewish news of northern california, unholy land, world literature today

Further accolades for Lavie Tidhar’s damn good UNHOLY LAND.

Joining previous notices from NPR, LIBRARY JOURNAL, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, THE GUARDIAN, B&N SCI-FI & FANTASY BLOG, CRIME TIME, and THE SPECULATIVE SHELF, both FANTASY LITERATURE (without comment) and THE ENDLESS BOOKSHELF name the novel as one of the best of 2018.

THE ENDLESS BOOKSHELF:

Science fiction is that mode of literature in which the metaphor is to be taken literally. Lavie Tidhar’s gripping thriller follows writer Lior Tirosh on a return visit to his native land, Palestina, a Jewish state established in east Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. All the writings by Tidhar that I have read are deeply intertextual, playing with the ideas of literature, science fiction tropes, and the identity of the writer. Unholy Land is explicitly Clutean in its intertextuality, employing terms and conceits introduced by John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). It is great fun, very tricky : a smile painted upon a skull. Tidhar’s other characteristic is fearlessness and UNHOLY LAND is a look into the dark heart of a nation founded upon exclusions and barriers.

Maxim Jakubowski at CRIME TIME says the book is a must.

A novel which can be read on all sorts of levels, each as rewarding as each other, whether as sheer entertainment or serious speculation, making Tidhar a rather unique writer who seldom comes up with the expected and for whom each book is a challenge to the imagination. This is damn good (as was his A MAN LIES DREAMING, which flirted with the dangerous premise of an alternative reality Hitler as both sleuth and second class author…). A must.

In WORLD LITERATURE TODAY, Sean Guynes-Vishniac praises the story.

Like Tidhar’s other work, UNHOLY LAND is a complex and metatextual narrative, moving between first-, second-, and third-person narrators, that theorizes the work speculative fiction does—the possibilities and alternatives it imagines—and questions the worth of the “fantasy” writer in a world where nation-states maintain and legitimize their existence through the oppression of whole groups of people. It is, unsurprisingly, a powerful meditation on the ethics of history and the power of borders, an analogy, no doubt, to the border walls both on the West Bank and in Trump’s presidential promises as much as to the ideologized divides that drive military and state conflict. UNHOLY LAND is a call to imagine and fight for alternatives.

Howard Freedman for THE JEWISH NEWS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA enjoys the challenging UNHOLY LAND.

At one level, the novel functions as a sort of hard-boiled thriller, but Tidhar, raised on a kibbutz and now living in Britain and writing in English, is no run-of-the-mill novelist. Rather, he is a significant figure in today’s science fiction scene, and this dimension infuses the novel. The borders in question in Palestina turn out to be not only ones dividing territories, but ones separating different spheres of reality. It gets complicated, and the unconventional storytelling (the narrative is in the first, second and third person) can sometimes make it difficult to assess what’s happening. But the bumpy ride is quite worthwhile.

For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

October 31, 2018

Lavie Tidhar’s thought-provoking UNHOLY LAND is a powerful meditation on the ethics of history and the power of borders

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized best of 2018, central station, esquire, gary k wolfe, italian, lavie tidhar, Locus, michele bellone, Publishers Weekly, review, sarah anne langton, sean guynes-vishniac, terminale terra, thiersten.net, unholy land, world literature today

Lavie Tidhar’s new novel UNHOLY LAND continues to garner effusive praise.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY includes the title among their best of 2018.

In this head-spinning tale, a novelist is displaced between parallel universes—one like ours and another where Jews have founded an Israel-like nation on the Ugandan border—and also begins to think he’s a character in one of his detective stories. Tidhar has a gift for the details that make the setting feel entirely real even as reality itself is called into question.

Sean Guynes-Vishniac for WORLD LITERATURE TODAY enjoys the novel.

Like Tidhar’s other work, UNHOLY LAND is a complex and metatextual narrative, moving between first-, second-, and third-person narrators, that theorizes the work speculative fiction does—the possibilities and alternatives it imagines—and questions the worth of the “fantasy” writer in a world where nation-states maintain and legitimize their existence through the oppression of whole groups of people. It is, unsurprisingly, a powerful meditation on the ethics of history and the power of borders, an analogy, no doubt, to the border walls both on the West Bank and in Trump’s presidential promises as much as to the ideologized divides that drive military and state conflict. UNHOLY LAND is a call to imagine and fight for alternatives.

Photo: Kevin Nixon © Future Publishing 2013

THIERSTEIN.NET is fascinated with the book.

It’s not as light, not as dancingly sparkling with ideas and concepts as a lot of the former is, but at the same time it’s maybe heavier, worthier, loaded with thought-provoking takes on identity, the fluidity of reality, and weighty moral questions which are exhibited rather than discussed or preached.

It starts simple enough, though – we follow one Lior Tirosh (a thinly disguised alter ego, it appears), a moderately successful writer of ‘inconsequential fantasies’ in some personal crisis, as he is headed to Ararat City, Palestina. Which is set in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. And so we know we are in an alternative history – or, to be more precise, in a world where the Wilbush expedition to British East Africa returned a different report, had a different outcome, and a Jewish state, a Nachtasyl, was created instead of the country we are familiar with. At first this is, like all such conceits, mightily disorienting. We see Palestinians, who speak Judean, and a culture which inevitably has taken on parts of the area it has settled in and the people it displaced, whilst retaining a lot of the tensions and drivers that brought it here.

But back to Tirosh – he is here to visit his ailing father, a general and famous figure, we learn later on. But instead he gets, more or less from the go, caught up in strange happenings involving Border/Secret police, multiple agencies following him, murder (it’s actually an attempt on his life which catches an acquaintance), a disappeared niece who campaigned for the rights of the native population, a builder who builds the wall designed to keep the terrorists and suicide bombers out… it’s a fascinating and dizzying world, and you get absolutely no time to get used to it before the action kicks off.

“Then he asked you if you thought the world was real”

And just when you think you know where you are with the premise and the setting then the story takes a sharp turn into the leftfield. Tirosh is a damaged man – not just from the loss of his son and his wife, but there is something else. He comes from “Outside”. He has visions of other worlds, of concentration camps. We see several agencies who work across different worlds, across possibilities. We learn that the wall has other aims than simply keeping Suicide Bombers out. That time can run differently on the Outside. There is more, so much more, and most of it only gets hinted at, is never explained or barely shown. And boy would I have wanted to see, learn, read more.

In LOCUS (November 2018), Gary K. Wolfe reviews UNHOLY LAND.

By extending Tidhar’s exploration of multiple and metafictional realities in even more sophisticated and assured ways than his earlier novels, UNHOLY LAND is quite an irritated oyster.

Michele Bellone for the Italian ESQUIRE profiles Lavie Tidhar.

In Italy it is little known but, thanks to the commitment of two small but dynamic publishers, its name is circulating a lot in the field of science fiction fans, and not only. Between July and September, Acheron Books (which in March had already released Jews against Zombi , horror anthology curated by Tidhar) and Future Fiction have published CENTRAL STATION and Terminale Terra, two works of science fiction that well represent the particular style of a author decidedly not very mainstream.

“On an international level, Tidhar is perhaps more known as an editor than author, having edited some anthologies of the Apex series book of world science-fiction that gave him great visibility and for which he won several awards”, tells Esquire the writer Davide Mana, former translator of Hebrews against Zombi and curator of the Italian version of CENTRAL STATION. What has made it very popular abroad but hampers it in our country I think it is the huge variety of styles and literary genres that can handle. It is very difficult to pigeonhole it and this has probably displaced our local publishers. In CENTRAL STATION he writes scientifically credible science fiction stories using tones and formulas of fantasy, and this reminds me of equally refined and literary authors such as Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany, who have recovered the structures of ballads or folk tales, creating new mythologies also sci. Just like Tidhar does.”

Cover by Simone Ferraro

CENTRAL STATION and Terminal Terra are, in a sense, two complementary books, which represent two different approaches to the fantastic narrative of a very difficult author to frame within a given genre – to give an idea, his latest work is Candy, a book for kids that Mondadori will publish in 2019 – and that for this reason could make the purists of science fiction or fantasy turn up their nose, but that deserves to be explored for its engaging and creative originality.

Translation from Italian courtesy of Google

For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.

For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.

Covers by Sarah Anne Langton