‘‘Little Fur really goes back to my storytelling roots, inventing a story for a child. A few years ago, there was a ‘400-year’ flood in Prague. I live half the year in Prague, and the other half in Australia. Prague is a very old city, with cobbled streets and a castle, moldering statuary and all that stuff. When they rebuild a road, they just put on another layer of cobblestones, and a cobblestone’s not a flat thing – it’s a great big round thing. So over the years, the level of the city was going up. A second basement underground was once the first level of a building, but now it’s a second basement – a receptacle for junk. And when the flood waters came, the subterranean parts of the city filled up.
‘‘It was an incredible time to be a writer because during natural or manmade disasters on that scale, all the rules of normality are broken. When the flood waters receded, it was summer, and the whole city had this pervasive scent – like rotten upholstery – it reeked! I took my little girl (she was six or so) for a walk across the city, to show her all the weird things the flood waters had done – a park where we used to go was a lake with trees in it. Streets were cracked open to reveal houses that had simply been paved over. She didn’t utter a word the whole time. Then, finally, she stopped. Right at ground level, there was a broken basement window and there was a shaft of sunlight going down several basement levels, to glimmer on a pool of dark water. She turned to me and whispered, ‘Mama, what lives down there?’ I couldn’t help myself: I said, ‘Trolls.’
‘‘Little Fur grew out of this story I told her, of seeing these cobbled streets cracked open to reveal the remnants of an older city. I was telling Adelaide, my daughter, this story about a little elf troll over a couple of years when she was growing up. Sitting in the kitchen one day, I suddenly realized that a day would come when she wouldn’t want those stories anymore. It just struck me to the core, with a piercing sadness, that I would have to let go of these characters. I didn’t want to. Then I thought, ‘Why don’t you just write them?’
‘‘When I wrote it, the story became just another way of looking at humanity from the outside. Little Fur begins by knowing nothing about humans, but all the evidence she has says they’re mad and terrifyingly dangerous, and should be avoided at all costs. But she’s forced out into their city and begins to realize (as the series progresses) that human beings are confused and very often frightened, that they’re out of touch with nature – distanced from it by their technology, by the magnificent things they build.
‘‘For me books, especially the series books, often have a much larger arc of story. Little Fur is no less for me than Elspeth, or any character I write. And she has the advantage of being centuries old, as well as being young. I love childlikeness, the way children see the world from a different angle. They’re no less complex than adults in their perceptions; they just aren’t able to articulate them in a way that we would call sophisticated. They use poetry and imagination to express their perceptions.
‘‘The latest thing to come out is the collection, Metro Winds. I’ve only got two collections of stories, Green Monkey Dreams and this one, each series taking years to write. I love short stories as a form, but I don’t write them easily. Metro Winds has six stories. Initially I was going to write about the four archetypal ages of woman (Child, Princess, Queen, and Crone). You can see traces of that earlier stage, but I couldn’t do Crone. Maybe I’m not ready to write that because I’m not quite at Crone. I want to understand what it is to be old. Is it horrible? I think there must be some rewards, some wisdoms, something you can only see from the inside.
‘‘And in the end, I didn’t just want to write about Woman. I have brothers, I have had partners, I’ve men friends, and they have something to say that’s maybe different from what a woman would say. So some of the stories ended up being about men. They are all set in different cities, but they’re not travel stories. They’re about the changes that happen when you go outside your comfort zone: those moments in life when we have those revelations. You’re a stranger in a strange land. That’s one of the things about science fiction and fantasy, speculative fiction, that I love – the way the characters are so often strangers in strange lands. Also, the stories have adults in them, not just children. In the end, I don’t think children will identify with them and knowing this gave me a freedom to engage in very adult matters. It was great, too, because that book allowed me to decisively stick my hand up and step into the adult world, as a published author!
‘‘I think I’d like to call myself, in future, a slipstream author. (I’ve recently started a blog, called ‘The Slipstream’.) It’s ‘the fiction of the strange.’ After I finish The Red Queen, I’ll be working on something much closer to reality, but with one weird streak – that’s how I think of slipstream as a genre – as something close to reality. It appears to be a murder, so in a way the book is also a murder mystery as well, and I love that genre, too, though I have never written anything that would fit into it before. I’m excited about trying something new. You have to, as a writer. You have to push yourself, and find new boundaries.’’
–Isobelle Carmody
Return to In This Issue listing.
Lavie Tidhar was born November 16, 1976 and raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.
Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Story ‘‘Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs’’ won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, and ‘‘The Night Train’’ (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist. Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.
He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).
Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie. Novels Martian Sands and The Violent Century are forthcoming.
Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).
Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012); he is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog
Tidhar lives with his wife in London.
•
‘‘I was born on a kibbutz in Israel. I was the last generation to really grow up in communal society. People think it’s like a socialist, agricultural commune. Well, that’s the way it used to be. My grandfather came from Transylvania in the 1930s, and they were literally living in tents and picking oranges – it was all very Wild West, very socialist and Zionist and all the rest. By the time I came along, things were slowly falling apart. Still, I grew up in communal housing, where you don’t live with your parents – you live with the other children. Even as babies, you’re kind of in a baby room. (The mothers come over and breast feed, and then they go home.) The thing was designed to liberate women, to allow them to work and not have to look after the children.
‘‘I grew up with the other kids, essentially. You went to see your parents for four hours, between 4 and 8 p.m., a
nd then you went back to the children’s house. After my time, that kind of finished. They had massive ideological battles about family housing and communal housing, and now the kibbutz doesn’t really exist the way it once did.
‘‘I don’t think it was a particularly bad way to grow up. It’s a strange sort of environment. I remember telling a friend of mine about it, and she was horrified! It seems science-fictional. One of the things that fascinates me is the concept of a kibbutz in space. Philip K. Dick had the kibbutz on Mars – it’s not a big thing in his books, but there’s reference to the Israelis building a kibbutz on Mars. That’s the only time I ever saw myself in American science fiction books (‘That’s me!’).
‘‘If you do go into space, if you have space colonization in any form, you’re looking at very compressed, small environments, so it’s going to have to be something like a kibbutz – or a Long House in Borneo. I went to Borneo years ago and stayed in a Long House, and it was like going home. All the members of a kibbutz meet to discuss and make decisions and so on. In Borneo, there are all these guys in loincloths and covered in tattoos, in the middle of the jungle, with a river, and pigs underneath the Long House. And then they all sat down and had tea and biscuits, and everyone took their turn talking. It was so familiar! I realized just how little difference there is in a lot of these things.
‘‘I was 16 when my dad got a job offer, and we went off to South Africa at the end of Apartheid. That was 1992, the transition year between the end of Apartheid and the first election Mandela won. I remember the way the AWB, the white supremacist organization, were marching. Their flags look a bit like a swastika, and obviously they didn’t like Jews any more than they liked Africans. My brother and I ended up in this Jewish school. On a kibbutz, jeans are about as smart as you get, and you call your teachers by their first names. Going to a school where we had to wear ties and blazers, and they still had caning (and other physical punishment, teachers who would rap your knuckles) – I thought I was in a Victorian novel. So after a couple of years, I actually went back to Israel on my own, and finished school on the kibbutz.
‘‘Then I had the problem that I was supposed to go into the army for three years. I wasn’t keen on that. I would love to say that I was against the oppression of the Palestinian people and I was making a political statement, but the truth is, I was 18 and couldn’t be bothered with going into the army to peel potatoes. (I didn’t realize I would be peeling so many potatoes anyway, afterwards – I might just as well have gone!) I managed to get out of that and went back to South Africa and started traveling around. Though I nearly ended up in Antarctica, where South Africa has a base, I’m not very good with the cold, so I went backpacking through Malawi instead. Nice and hot, and you can sit on the beaches!
‘‘I’ve always figured I would be a really boring person if I was left to my own devices, so my idea was, ‘Go out there and try to do something interesting, so you won’t be so boring.’ I wasn’t ready to write fiction back then. My first book was actually a Hebrew poetry collection (which no one’s ever read) in 1998. So I was just hanging out. I got malaria about five times. I managed to make it to Zanzibar twice, while I spent a couple of years mostly traveling; I worked for an Internet company in Johannesburg; and then I’d go off backpacking again.
‘‘I met my wife in a fishing village in Malawi. We finally got married in 2010, but couldn’t marry in Israel because we’re not the same religion, so we had a small ceremony in Cyprus and then flew back to Israel and had a big party: about 20 visitors from the UK (my wife’s British) and a big family thing in this villa on the Sea of Galilee. Absolutely great! Then there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and our visitors from the UK got stuck with us in this tiny one-bedroom cubicle in Jaffa. For the first two weeks post-wedding, my wife was living with her mother in the bedroom, and I was sleeping with a very snore-y British guy on a futon. It was like a little refugee camp. We had to keep them busy, and they’re all British, so we had to make sure they got drinks every night. We had an absolute blast until they managed to leave the country!
‘‘My wife and I moved to the UK in 1998. After that we did a big backpacking Trans-Siberian thing: flew to Moscow, took the train (slowly) down to Siberia, Mongolia, and got to China. That’s where I met up with all these Chinese science fiction writers. In Beijing, they took us out for meals and introduced us to everyone. Back then, they couldn’t do conventions in China but an academic conference was approved by the Party, so we went to Chengdu and hung out with all the science fiction writers and editors. I’ve been there, I’ve enjoyed the hospitality, and I don’t feel comfortable with just taking, so one of the things I have been trying to do is get Chinese science fiction published over here, or in English. Now two of the Apex anthologies have original stories in them, and I’ve been talking about doing a Chinese SF anthology for a long time. Maybe for 2013 or ’14.
‘‘After China we went to Borneo, then came back to the UK and just stayed for a long time. I started going to an American International University in the UK that subsidized about 50% of my tuition (which was still incredibly high). My second year at university, I got this job being the IT Lab supervisor in the summer. It’s really just sitting in front of the computer for eight hours and not doing anything – maybe checking if there’s paper in the printer. So I thought, ‘This is the time to start writing short fiction.’
‘‘Once you start, it’s quite easy to keep up the pace, so even though I was studying and working, I was still doing 500 words a day for a very long time: just writing, without really bothering to find a publisher or an editor or anything. When you start, you don’t know what to do with it. You write stories because you love doing them, and you’re lucky if you get them published. Writing stories is like casting stones into a big ocean, and they disappear. I do find it a bit frustrating. Even after a friend got me to start submitting things, the process involves a lot of rejection, along with low pay. I love the novella length. PS Publishing is really where I started, and I love those books, though financially they are such a disaster it’s really hard to justify doing them!
‘‘There’s also trying to step up your game and aim higher with each level that you reach. My brag was when Ellen Datlow bought a story for Sci Fiction. As soon as that happened, Sci Fiction shut down, so I was the last person published there. I felt like I killed the magazine! The other thing that happened, about a year after I started writing, was winning this European Space Agency competition, the Clarke/Bradbury Prize, with my story ‘Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs’. They flew me to France, which was nice.
‘‘My wife is in aid work and she wanted to go on with the job. Also, we were getting stuck in the UK, and both of us like to travel. So around 2007, we ended up going to Vanuatu, living on this remote desert island in the South Pacific for a year, in a bamboo shack in front of the volcano, with no electricity or running water. We traveled around between islands in canoes and climbed volcanoes. It’s a very conservative, male-dominated society, very secretive. They don’t want people exploiting them. But we got to see things that no one gets to see. We were very hungry, though. It was kind of awful and awesome at the same time.
‘‘When I write, a sense of place is really important to me. I really need to know a place; I don’t like making things up. I ended up going through what I think of as distinct phases of writing (particularly short stories) around the places I lived in. So I had my Vanuatu Period. There was a novel that sucked. I tried to do a WWII novel in which nothing happens – because nothing actually happened in Vanuatu! But I got that out of my system.
‘‘After Vanuatu, we lived in Laos for two years. Really nice food, drinking on the Mekong and living in a beautiful apartment: a complete opposite to that bamboo shack on the beach. (I put back on all of the weight I lost in Vanuatu.) So I went through a Laos Period as well. And my first sale to Asimov’s is kind of set in Vietnam. But now I’m getting uncomfortable, wondering if I’m exploiting or co-opting other countries.
I think writing is about being truthful, and I just don’t know how truthful you can be if you don’t really know the subject you’re writing about. I lived in Southeast Asia, and I can make it sound convincing, but is it really my place to be doing it? I’m becoming a lot more interested in doing the things that I know that matter to me, finding a need to write stuff that’s more honest. As terrible, as pulpy, as outlandish as things can be, reality is always stranger. The mad scientists with odd experiments – all the material from pulp fiction – are actually real, and they’re stranger than any pulp fiction you can have.
‘‘It’s an odd thing to be interested in pulp and yet not a pulp writer. Raymond Chandler said, ‘We’re writing formula stories, but we’re trying to do something more with the formula.’ Formula is great, because it promises a structure and then all you do is react against that structure. The mystery is there to move the story along, but it’s not the point of the story; it’s a different way of looking at the same story. But I love detectives and mysteries, because they’re just the perfect way of asking questions.
‘‘With The Bookman I was aiming for something that’s a bit literary: a book that knows it’s a book. It’s got all these resonances with Greek mythology, and no one notices any of that stuff! But it is meant to be a fun book, taking all the cool bits from different stories and putting them together and just having a lot of fun with them. I’d planned it as a standalone book, but I got a lot of reviews saying, ‘He’s just setting us up for a series.’ Now I’m three books into that series!
Locus, March 2013 Page 2