A trippy, metafictional ode to the golden age of science fiction, THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD is Lavie Tidhar at top form
The World Fantasy, Campbell, Xingyun, and Neukom Award winning-author Lavie Tidhar’s new science fiction novel THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD continues to garner praise from Jake Casella Brookins in Chicago Review of Books, Natalie Zutter for Literary Hub, Sally Adee in New Scientist, Bradley Horner, David Harris at Shiny New Books, and the BookTuber Sound & Fury Books Reviews. Tidhar himself contributed “The best books on science fiction’s Golden Age” to Shepherd. He is interviewed on the Pen to Print podcast and featured on their magazine WriteON.
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.
