venus in bloom Archives - Tachyon Publications

venus in bloom

October 10, 2019

With an atmosphere of menace, Lavie Tidhar’s THE VIOLENT CENTURY is admirably plotted and well paced

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized hagay hacohen, jack deighton, lavie tidar, masato hisa, review, sarah anne langton, silvia moreno-garcia, tel aviv review of books, the washington post, unholy land, venus in bloom, violent century

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

March 12, 2019

Interviews, short stories, CENTRAL STATION, and more with Lavie Tidhar

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized andrea viscusi, asimov's, best of 2018, central station, clarkesworld, dem bones, from earth to the stars, interview, italian, k chess, lavie tidhar, Locus, massimo luciani, michele chiappetta, neom, netmassio, osama, recursor, review, rich horton, sarah anne langton, stan lee, stay nerd, strange horizons, terminale terra, the buried giant, the memcordist, the violent century, tor.com, venus in bloom

It’s become abundantly obvious that this is Lavie Tidhar’s reality and we’re all just living it.

Tidhar was interviewed in FROM EARTH TO THE STARS, the ASIMOV’S author and editor blog, about his short story “Neom.”

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind “Neom”?

LT: I’ve been visiting the Red Sea for twenty years now (on the Egyptian side), and I was always struck by looking just across the water to the Arabian Peninsula, and that huge stretch of desert along the Red Sea coast is, of course, Saudi Arabia. Then I came across crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS)’s plan to build this sort of cyberpunk utopia called Neom there! I mean it has a promotional Youtube video and everything … And I’ve been recently very interested in the idea of future cities, and I knew I had to write about it. If only because I find the idea of a cyberpunk utopia so very terrifying …

And by Michele Chiappetta at RECURSOR.

Your novel CENTRAL STATION has received much acclaim. What inspired you to write it?

I was living in Tel Aviv back in 2010, and I became kind of obsessed with the old Central Bus Station area, as well as the new station itself, which is this crazy, enormous place with its own nuclear fallout shelter, if you can believe it. And, you know, most of my novels fall into this weird, political, alternate history, noir sort of thing, and I wanted to do something completely different — just write about these people and this place.

And I always loved mosaic novels, especially in science fiction. That’s where a lot of the classics are. But it always struck me as quite a difficult thing to do, from a technical point of view. So, that was the challenge.

I wrote it now and then over the next five years or so. Some of the stories got into various Year’s Best anthologies. A few got translated into various languages. And then one day it was done. I just didn’t expect anyone would actually read it.

On The Italian site STAY NERD, Andrea Viscusi views Tidhar’s work through the lens of CENTRAL STATION and the short story collection Terminale Terra.

The strength of Lavie Tidhar’s stories lies precisely in this: not originality, understood as the innovative power of ideas, but the work of unification with which the author drew the constituent elements of science fiction and made it a playground. in which a multiplicity of actors and situations collide. CENTRAL STATION and Terminale Terra are not to be read for the research of mindblowing ideas, but for the naturalness with which the ideas are treated. Those who follow and know science fiction (above all literary, but not only) will be able to recognize dozens of citations and references, but those who are more distant can still appreciate the constant unfolding of stories of normal people in exceptional contexts. The enthusiast and the neophyte can therefore be considered both satisfied, even if for different reasons.

Translation courtesy of Google

Massimo Luciani on the Italian site NETMASSIO reviews the short story "The Memcordist.“

"The Memcordist” is set in the same narrative universe as the novel CENTRAL STATION: the two works are autonomous but Pym is explicitly mentioned in the novel therefore among the stories of Lavie Tidhar is perhaps the one that most completes the novel. The various contrasts created by the author in my opinion give the story its emotional strength which is why I believe it is worth reading.

Translation courtesy of Google

Rich Horton’s “Memories of 2018″ for LOCUS includes Tidhar’s “The Buried Giant.”

“The Buried Giant”, by Lavie Tidhar (Robots vs Fairies) tells (literally – it’s an expertly framed story) of the dangerous adventures of a boy in a post-apocalyptic world who wants to be a “real boy” (i.e. robot), and in the process encounters a robot cat and a robot fox, and a dead girl and a manshonyagger. Powerful work.

Two new Tidhar stories appeared recently: “Venus in Bloom” (CLARKESWORLD ISSUE 148, JANUARY 2019) and “Dem Bones” (STRANGE HORIZONS 18 FEBRUARY 2019).

At TOR.COM, K Chess’ Five Fictional Books Inside of Real Books includes The Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante series.

The Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante series (from Osama by Lavie Tidhar)

Joe, a private investigator in an alternate reality, loves to read novels that detail the planning and execution of terrorist attacks—because global terrorism does not exist beyond their pages. A client who hires him to track down the series’ author sends Joe across the globe from Laos to Paris, London and New York, while shadowy operatives who want to keep the realities apart tail, assail, and finally imprison him. The Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante books are popular trade paperbacks with garish covers, released by an imprint that also publishes porn, but as Joe points out, they “read like the lab reports of a morgue, full of facts and figures all concerned with death.” The clinical excerpts Tidher includes from the books made me think about the chance casualties of these real attacks; it is Joe’s world that feels like a pulp.

And perhaps the most unexpected Tidhar sighting comes from the Stan Lee Wikipedia page under Fiction Portrayals.

In Lavie Tidhar’s 2013 THE VIOLENT CENTURY , Lee appears – as Stanley Martin Lieber – as a historian of superhumans.

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

For more info about THE VIOLENT CENTURY, visit the Tachyon page.

Covers by Sarah Anne Langton