zeno literary agency

August 17, 2020

In his usual excellent form, Lavie Tidhar’s thought-provoking UNHOLY LAND is a tale that you won’t forget

Rick Klaw blog baltimore jewish times, baltimore science fiction convention, carolyn conte, central station, d. h. aire, lavie tidhar, lydia schoch, r/printsf, reddit, review, sarah anne langton, the violent century, twitter, unholy land, zeno literary agency 0

Unholy Land; cover by Sarah Anne Langton — Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

At REDDIT in r/printsf, user pick_a_random_name praises Lavie Tidhar’s UNHOLY LAND.

Tidhar is on his usual excellent form here. This is a thought-provoking book with so many layers that I certainly haven’t unpacked them all.

[…]

It’s an intensely political book on an inherently controversial subject, but a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.

ZENO LITERARY AGENCY reveals the forthcoming French edition of UNHOLY LAND.

Lavie Tidhar‘s acclaimed novel UNHOLY LAND is due out in France next year! To be published by Editions Mu as AUCUNE TERRE N’EST PROMISE, we wanted to take this opportunity to share the stunning cover.

The Violent Century; cover by Sarah Anne Langton — Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

Carolyn Conte for BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES recounts D. H. Aire’s discussion on science fiction and Judaism at the Baltimore Science Fiction Convention, where he recommended Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION.

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper. When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed.

Via Twitter, Lydia Schoch shared a quote from Tidhar’s THE VIOLENT CENTURY.

“Perhaps it is always summer, in the place where we are young.”
― Lavie Tidhar, The Violent Century pic.twitter.com/VIgLV0BWZb
— Lydia Schoch (@TorontoLydia) August 10, 2020

THE VIOLENT CENTURY cover artist Sarah Anne Langton showcases a series of posters based on the book.

March 16, 2018

Tachyon tidbits featuring Peter Watts, Joe R. Lansdale, Kameron Hurley, and Lavie Tidhar

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized apocalypse nyx, bradley horner, central station, elizabeth story, estación central, hap and leonard: the two bear mambo, Joe R. Lansdale, kameron hurley, lavie tidhsr, melanie mcfarland, pat's fantasy hotlist, Peter Watts, salon, sarah anne langton, the freeze frame revolution, wadim kashin, zeno literary agency

The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.

Peter Watts, Joe R. Lansdale (photo: Karen Lansdale), Kameron Hurley, and Lavie Tidhar (Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013)

Bradley Horner on his eponymous site delivers the first review for Peter Watts’ forthcoming THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is some classy hard-hard SF. 🙂 Black hole/worm hole drive using new and real theories? Hell yeah.

But beyond that, I love the whole idea of short periods of wakefulness during a single trip that takes 65 million years.

Add a rebellion against IBM… I mean HAL… I mean CHIMP, without expecting anything to go quite the way that 2001 went, or even remotely like it, and we’ve got a really fascinating story.

Watts knows how to build really fascinating locations and situations… maybe better than almost any other writer. He never rests on a single awesome idea but adds to it and introduces even more interesting wrinkles such as watching an AI dance, or truly alien intelligences, or maybe just freaking out because the rest of humanity must necessarily be dead during the scope of your mission.

But add a complicated revolution among sleepers using old D&D manuals? Adding jarring notes during a musical composition?

Oh yeah, the devil is in the details. 🙂

At SALON, Melanie McFarland discusses HAP AND LEONARD: THE TWO BEAR MAMBO and racism.

But its stories wade into territory Americans still would rather
refrain from confronting, and its status as a period piece only
sharpens the discomfort of knowing that bigotry is still as alive now
as it was in the late ‘80s, when Hap and Leonard’s adventures
take place.

With each new round of episodes, showrunner John Wirth and his
fellow executive producers and writers display our fractured race
relations more plainly. In its first season we could take comfort in
the notion that the
epithet-spewing antagonists were psychotic outsiders. Season
2 moved it closer to center stage, as Hap and Leonard
contended with the racism of a local justice system rigged by a
corrupt judge and local sheriff content to allow a plague of
disappeared black boys to go unchecked.

In these six new episodes pit the duo against the Ku Klux Klan, a
hate group that only a couple of years ago naively was presumed to be
a relic of the pre-Civil Rights era. Reports indicate that they’re
openly recruiting again, and shortly after Donald Trump was
elected president, we came close to getting an
unscripted series about the KKK. This season of “Hap and
Leonard” takes place in a version of a 1989 that feels very much
like the present, and this is a coincidence… to a degree.

Grovetown’s racist reputation is renowned enough that friends
warn Hap to go it alone this time, which longtime viewers know is
impossible. Depicting small towns as breeding grounds for evil is a
go-to for TV series and movies, a fact the writers acknowledge by
having the characters name-check “The Twilight Zone” as they
drive into the center of town. “Two-Bear Mambo” takes place at
Christmas time, leading the heroes to observe straightaway how
much the place resembles a Hallmark card, right down to its blinding
whiteness. They also notice that everybody is staring at them, and
not a one is smiling.

Any person of color that’s taken a road trip has likely
experienced such a moment, and knows that the best course of action
is to fill the tank and keep driving. Hap, however, presumes his
whiteness will protect Leonard in Grovetown. It did before to a
certain extent. The peril they face this time around is much more
extreme.

“Hap and Leonard” has a knack for nodding in increasingly
unsubtle ways to our society’s lack of evolution in matters of race
and sexual orientation. The nature of this season’s conflict means
that we spend less time witnessing Leonard’s tribulations as a gay
man and much more about his crisis of confidence in America itself.
One moment in an upcoming episode leads him to question whether his
service in Vietnam, a life chapter in which he takes intense pride, means anything if he can’t safely walk down a street in his own country. Hap went to jail instead of going to Vietnam and draws a similar sense of esteem in his participation in the anti-war movement. The violence of this enemy tries those beliefs as well.ce in Vietnam, a life chapter in which he takes intense pride,
means anything if he can’t safely walk down a street in his own
country. Hap went to jail instead of going to Vietnam and draws a
similar sense of esteem in his participation in the anti-war
movement. The violence of this enemy tries those beliefs as well.

PAT’S FANTASY HOTLIST quote of the day comes from Kameron Hurley’s forthcoming APOCALYPSE NYX.

Someone had to be imperfect, or there was nothing to strive for in that big worshipful love letter to God.

Nyx didn’t mind being the broken piece.

Cover image by Sarah Anne Langton

On March 6, ZENO LITERACY AGENCY reported that Estación Central, the Spanish language edition of Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winning CENTRAL STATION, is now available.

The global conquest of Lavie Tidhar‘s latest novel, CENTRAL STATION continues next week! ESTACIÓN CENTRAL is to be published by Alethé.

For more info on THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

For more info on APOCALYPSE NYX, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Wadim Kashin

Design by Elizabeth Story

December 28, 2016

Amazing CENTRAL STATION is the future of SF, not the other way round

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized 067, b&n sci-fi & fantasy blog, best of 2016, book depository, bulgaria, central station, china mieville, lavie tidhar, petr koubsky, review, sarah anne langton, science fiction, the des lewis gestalt real-time reviews, this census-taker, zeno literary agency, Бард, Централна станция

Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013

THE DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS finished the real time review of Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION.

The politics ans today’s history seep for me into this wondrous text of the future, as we explore, trough Boris, the Jaffa part of the installation…

<snip>

It is a strange fascinating world we are visiting, paradoxically accessible and inaccessible at the same time. A sort of intertextual, interpersonal, multi-nemonymous ablution by Lavie?

<snip>

This book is the future of SF, not the other way round.

<snip>

This book, despite its paper and it non-visual, non-illuminated real-time words of today, somehow becomes a miracle of tomorrow’s nodal virtual-reality in itself.

For STRANGE HORIZONS, Christina Scholz reviews the complex book.

Apart from the amazing world-building, it’s all about the meeting, intermingling, and interacting of many cultures (human and non-human is a purely science-fictional distinction). And in chronicling the place, Tidhar acknowledges that the concept of culture, especially seen over time, is really fluid and diverse: “[Zhong Weiwei] knew his children would be different, and their children different in their turn” (p. 45). Via the Weiwei family’s shared virtual family history we get to watch generations increasingly grow up in a blend of physical and virtual spaces: migrating, changing the spelling of their surname, adopting new languages and religions.

<snip>

However, lots of isolated passages and sentences can be read totally decontextualized from both the genre Tidhar is writing in and from fiction itself. They illustrate what science fiction does best—give a vivid impression of actual people’s lives in places and/or situations that often leave them at a loss for words. The writer’s task, to paraphrase Ursula K. Le Guin, is to say in words what cannot be said in words. Tidhar is giving us glimpses into the lives of people between cultures—people who sometimes feel lost, who sometimes find each other before they lose each other again. Everything is transient, and “[t]he only rule of the universe, child, is change” (p. 224).

<snip>

From story to story, the perspective shifts between various characters of various genders, nationalities, and religions, but we keep encountering the same places and characters, whose lives in and around Central Station are interwoven. And recognising them from a new position adds layers to them, sometimes criticising them, and/but always rendering them more complex, more human. CENTRAL STATION moves all the way from soap opera to mythology (visiting other genres in between), but it is still most enjoyable when a clear plotline has yet to develop, and it’s just people’s daily lives and routines and chance encounters, meandering and briefly touching and then separating again for a while, until they touch again.

At the Czech 067, Petr Koubský discusses the novel in his yearly recap.

Israeli author Lavie
Tidhar from letoška also known Czech readers with his novel THE MAN
LIES DREAMING, which is also the story of an alternate world – and
unfortunately the worst thing I’ve read from him. I invite you
something else from him, almost sci-fi purebred CENTRAL STATION set
in the future in Tel Aviv, the bus station you Tidhar remade the
space. Sterling is clearly inspired SCHISMATRIX but Tidhar this
burden done better than most. In addition, the originality of his
ideas passed much local color. If you were to Tidhara was reading, I
recommend still HEBREWPUNK and other alt-real opus OSAMA (in
chandlerovském style!).

BOOK DEPOSITORY names the novel as one of the best books of the year.

Since his CENTRAL STATION was named as one of their best books of the year, Tidhar participated in The Authors of the Year’s Best SF&F Share Their Favorite Books of 2016 at B&N SCI-FI & FANTASY BLOG

This Census-Taker, by China Miéville
“I’ve not read a whole lot this year, but by far my favourite has to be China Miéville’s
THIS
CENSUS-TAKER, which I suspect might be the best thing he’s yet done. It isn’t exactly pleasant—I’d be tempted to describe it as a misery memoir set in fantasyland—but this is also where much of its power lies. It is subtle, unsettling and mysterious, and elevates Mieville’s writing to a whole new level. I know it’s divided readers, but it gets a whole-hearted recommendation from me.”

The Zeno Literary Agency is reporting that CENTRAL STATION is now available in Bulgaria as Централна станция from Бард.

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

July 6, 2015

World Fantasy Award Winner Lavie Tidhar set to explore CENTRAL STATION

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized 2016, central station, collection, lavie tidhar, mars, niall alexander, science fiction, tel aviv, tor.com, zeno literary agency

Last week the Zeno Literacy Agency announced the acclaimed Lavie Tidhar’s new book CENTRAL STATION.

On March 15th, 2016, Tachyon Publications will publish Lavie Tidhar‘s CENTRAL STATION. An anthology of connected stories, this is the first time they will be collected in a single volume. Here’s the synopsis…

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. But his vast, extended family continues to pull him back home.

Boris’s ex-lover Miriam is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the data stream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin Isobel is infatuated with a robotnik — a cyborg ex-Israeli soldier who might well be begging for parts. Even his old flame Carmel — a hunted data-vampire — has followed him back to a planet where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above all is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful entities who, through the Conversation — a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness — are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

On his own site, Tidar had this to say about the forthcoming book.

I began CS in 2010 while living in Tel Aviv, and continued it over the next few years. The first CS story was published in 2011, and the stories were published in a variety of places, with several appearing consecutively in Interzone. They have also kept cropping up in the various Year’s Bests anthologies. I finished the last one at the end of 2014. In a way, CS both represents everything I have to say about the shape of science fiction – and a large part of it is a sort of dialogue with older (mostly, admittedly, quite obscure) SF – and a way of talking about the present. It is set in the old central bus station area in south Tel Aviv, currently home to a quarter of a million poor economic migrants from Asia, and African refugees, and I wanted to explore that area through the lens of science fiction (one of the weird things I found recently is that the fictional sort of “federal” political vision of Israel/Palestine I have in the book is now being touted as a real solution by a group of political activists). My other ambition was to write a book which was mostly about character interaction: about extended families, about relationships, in which the “shiny” science fiction future serves as a sort of background rather than taking centre stage. My other inspiration was that I always wanted to write a novel in short stories. Science fiction has a long tradition of doing this – from The Martian Chronicles to Lord of Light – but my inspiration was also partly V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street.

Tachyon have been amazing to work with so far. I’ve got to spend this month on some heavy editing, but the result of this will be that CENTRAL STATION will be, essentially, an actual novel, I think – the way I intended it from the start.

The forthcoming CENTRAL STATION excites Niall Alexander at TOR.COM.

Tidhar went into a bit more detail about the project, and its origins, on his blog. Begun in 2010, when he was still living in Tel Aviv, and finished—excepting “some heavy editing”—in 2014,Central Station “represents everything I have to say about the shape of science fiction.”

“A large part of it is a sort of dialogue with older (mostly, admittedly, quite obscure) SF.” The remainder? Why, “a way of talking about the present,” because if we’re honest, for all its speculative bells and whistles, that’s what science fiction is for.

<snip>

The result of this commingling of ambitions, CENTRAL STATION , will be published by Tachyon Publications in the States in the spring of 2016. There’s been no news of a UK deal to date, but it’s difficult to picture a world in which Tidhar’s publishing partner on The Violent Century and A Man Lies Dreaming, namely Hodder & Stoughton, doesn’t pick up the project shortly.

Tachyon is publishing the ONLY English language edition and the book will be available in the UK.

More details to come…