by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
In the afternoon, when No’am returned from his wanderings to eat, she interrogated him. But he looked at her as if she had a few screws loose. Maybe he’s right, she thought. All the same, there is something weird about those woods. I must look into it. And in the evening, while she was insistently entreating their mother to eat, with Tehila looking at her in silence and No’am restlessly leafing through Fantasia 2000, she asked No’am again if anything unusual had happened in the woods. And No’am said, “What’s all this about the woods? First that broomstick Aviel accusing me of roughing him up; now you too? I never go anywhere near those woods.”
Tehila asked, “Why are you asking about the woods?”
“No reason,” said Aviva.
“Okay, then help me pick a story,”
No’am said. “I can’t find any by myself.” “No’am,” she said, “you must learn to find stories you like on your own.”
“But you find them so easily. You’ve already picked two, and I couldn’t find any.”
She looked at Tehila, who seemed to be grinning to herself. Her cracked lacquer shoes were clicking on the floor. Their mother started coughing. “What’s the matter, Mommy?” Aviva asked. “Are you ill?” She laid a hand on her forehead. And their mother said, as if she was speaking with someone far away, “What could happen to me anyway? What could happen? The one who took care of me is gone. There’s no one to take care of me anymore.”
The locket was waiting for her hand. She grasped it. She mustn’t cry.
“Come on,” said No’am. He picked up one of the magazines and shoved it into her hands.
“Enough, No’am,” she said angrily. “I picked those stories without even thinking. It was sheer luck.” And to prove her point she opened the magazine and pointed at a page. “There, this one looks good to me.” Truth to tell, it didn’t look good at all. It had a surprising title, “5,271,009.”
No’am snatched the magazine away from her and started reading. And she turned her attention back to their mother.
Going to her room, exhausted after this evening, she thought she must do something about No’am. Early next week they’ll both have to go to school, and she’ll have to look after him. Something is happening to him, she thought. And it has to do with this Fantasia 2000 magazine and with Tehila. She’s involved, too, with those cracked-up shoes of hers. And who was this Shim’on who knew their father, anyway? She went into No’am’s room. He was lying in his bed. The light was on and his head was pushed into the pillow. He was snoring a little. The Fantasia 2000—issue number 5, she saw now—fell onto the carpet. On his desk there was a sheet of paper. No’am had written one line on it: “Dear Mr. Solon Aquila.”
She picked up the magazine and went into her room.
The story, “5,271,009,” was fascinating. It was written by an author named Alfred Bester. She seemed to recall that her father had read one of his books, something about a man with a tiger’s face or suchlike, and her hand tightened around the locket. This one was a story about an artist gone mad and a character called Solon Aquila, who was some kind of witch doctor or angel or Satan and had a power to make people live their dreams, or their nightmares. Dear Mr. Solon Aquila, she thought. Her eyes were already heavy, but before shutting them she could hear Tehila’s footsteps coming closer to her room: tak, tak, tak.
When No’am left the house in the morning, she followed him. He seemed deep in thought, holding a letter in his hand, unaware that she was not far behind him. He made for the woods, and she followed. For a moment he disappeared among the trees, but then she saw his back on her right-hand side, beyond a trunk. Like he was giving a wide berth to the place where she dreamt of the flying kids. She hurried to close the gap and didn’t notice how near she was before she realized she could hear No’am murmuring to himself, “Now I’ll show ’em….”
She stopped for a moment, to let him get farther, then kept following him. No’am took a path that only he could see; otherwise she couldn’t explain how they went around in circles part of the time or went straight ahead into the woods at other times.
No’am stopped. He stopped beside a mailbox, bright red, shining as if it was just recently painted. He glanced down at the letter he was holding, then dropped it into the box.
“No’am,” Aviva said, coming towards him among the trees. No’am stared at her. “A … Aviva,” he stammered, “What are you doing here?”
“What did you do with that letter?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s nothin’, just a game.”
“A game? What kind of game?”
“Nothin’.”
“No’am, you told me you never go anywhere near these woods. Aren’t you afraid they’ll ambush you here? Aviel and his pals?”
“No, not really.”
“I’m surprised. What are you hiding?”
“Nothin’, I told you. Don’t be such a bore.”
“So what’s the game?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Okay. Can I guess who you sent the letter to?”
His eyes narrowed. He looked at her suspiciously. “I have to go,” he said. He took a few steps, and suddenly disappeared.
“No’am,” she called.
He returned. “We have a problem,” he said. “If I leave you here you won’t find your way back.”
“What’s going on, No’am? Does it have anything to do with Tehila?”
“Tehila? Why should it? Tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
“You sent this letter to Solon Aquila, didn’t you?”
No’am started. “How did you guess?”
“Why would you send a letter to a character out of a story?”
“’Cause sometimes they come.”
“They?”
“Those I send letters to through this mailbox.”
“That boy that Aviel claimed you brought in for help?”
“His name’s Bobby. He can…. Well, in the story his stepmom is abusing him and he can make silhouettes with his hands, live ones, and then he calls a creature out of the shadows to come take her. I wrote to him to come out and help me. After I’d read the story I went for a walk in the woods, and suddenly I got here, to this mailbox, and I thought, why don’t I send this Bobby a letter to come help me. And that’s what I did, and he did come. But … but he was more wicked than in the story. He brought creatures out of the shadows, scary creatures, and they attacked Aviel and his pals.”
Aviva looked at him, shocked. He’s pulling a fast one on me, she thought. His inventions are getting more sophisticated. Like Father’s.
“Then I wrote to those kids from this story, ‘Ararat,’ the ones who came from another planet and were afraid to show their powers, and their teacher, too. They looked nice. Only they weren’t so nice. They made fun of me and spat at me.”
“The … flying kids? They were for real? And their teacher? The one who makes hail?”
No’am nodded. His face seemed sad. “They didn’t go away as fast as Bobby. They shouted that next time I call ’em, they’d have enough power to get me as well.”
“I knew it, I knew it all has to do with those magazines Tehila gave you. What is she up to, Tehila?” said Aviva.
“At least some of the magazines,” said No’am. “I don’t know why, but it doesn’t always work.”
“You tried some more?”
“Yeah. I sent a couple of letters to people from other stories, but nothing happened. And somehow I knew nothing would happen. Those stories, they weren’t….” he fell silent.
“They weren’t what, No’am?”
He looked at her in horror. He was terrified. “They weren’t alive, like the ones that you picked.”
“That I picked?”
Now Aviva felt as alarmed as he was. Her hand went to the locket. The woods started closing in on her. She tightened her fist around the silver egg. No’am kept looking at her, waiting for an explanation.
“Do you know what Solon Aquila does?” she asked
.
“Yes,” said No’am. “I asked him to come over here and make Aviel’s worst nightmares come true.”
“You didn’t get the point, No’am,” she said. “Solon empties people of their childhood, after letting them live their fantasies. He takes away their inner world, all their dreams. He leaves them with nothing.”
“Here he comes,” said No’am. His voice was trembling.
In the air, beside a eucalypt standing not far from them, a block of air lit up like a flame. The woods shook. Aviva squeezed her left hand around the locket. She whispered, “The locket, Daddy’s locket….” With her right hand she held on to No’am.
She shuddered, thinking of flying kids.
Afterword
Aharon Hauptman
It was in 1996, during the first annual convention of our newly founded Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. I proudly strolled, with Emanuel Lottem and other friends, through the corridors of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, crowded with enthusiastic young fans. One of them stared at me, and I could hear him whispering in a friend’s ear: “I think this is Aharon Hauptman, he was the editor of Fantasia 2000.” And his astonished friend replied: “What? Is he still alive?!”
Well, here I am, twenty years later, alive and kicking (or at least trying to), and what is more important, the Israeli SF scene is alive, kicking more than ever. Yes, there are no regular printed magazines anymore (the time of printed magazines is over anyway). But the online activity is flourishing: three or four sites, rich in contents. Conventions attract thousands of visitors each year (amazingly, sometimes two parallel events competing with each other), an annual collection of original stories is regularly published, several local publishers specialize in SF, Hebrew SF is being translated, Israeli writers win awards, films are produced, academic theses are being written. Who would have dreamed about this back in 1978, when we conceived the late Fantasia 2000, the first Israeli SF magazine that besides translations encouraged submission of original Hebrew stories? (Funny, once upon a time the year 2000 sounded futuristic).
Well, we dreamt. Science fiction is the stuff of dreams, isn’t it? SF dreams (and nightmares) are products of imagination, but they are inspired by reality, and they shape reality by inspiring and enriching human knowledge and actions. I write these words just after attending an academic meeting about artificial intelligence. The chairman reminded the audience that the origins of AI and robotics are rooted deep in SF. They will soon be an integral part of our lives. The same with space travel, of course, as well as with human-machine interface, cyberspace, cyborgs, nanotechnology, you name it. And, as every SF fan knows (or should know), the point is not the technology (real or fictional), not even speculative science, but their interaction with humans, with us. Good SF can help us to better understand how we are (or will be) shaped by science and technology and how science and technology are (or will be) shaped by us. For me, an SF story at its best is a thought experiment about alternative realities, with plausible technoscience ingredients, in a way that makes you think differently and perhaps better understand our world, other worlds.
If humans fail to understand our potential futures, our alternative realities, it is mostly due to the failure of imagination, something that the SF community is not short of. Arthur C. Clarke wrote (in Profiles of the Future) that although only a very small fraction of SF readers would count as “reliable prophets,” “almost a hundred percent of reliable prophets will be SF readers—or writers.” Today, we should better replace the word “prophets” with “futurists” or “foresight practitioners,” as foresight and futures studies are finally (but yet not sufficiently) taking their place in research and policy making.
What’s more, in these fields (which don’t deal with prophecy but with analyzing alternative futures) there is growing interest in the contribution of SF and SF thinking. We constantly face unforeseen surprises in economy, politics, climate, and technology that challenge conventional thinking and methods. In order to enrich the outcomes of foresight studies and to strengthen their effectiveness, it is important to encourage nonconsensual views about potential wild cards: future events with (currently perceived) low likelihood but high impact. And there is no better source of wild ideas for wild cards (including their possible implications) than science fiction. Yes, you may think about teleportation.
Indeed, in recent research activities, such as some projects in the research program of the European Union (in which yours truly was privileged to participate), imagining wild cards played an important role, and the projects’ work plans explicitly encouraged the researchers to explore the SF literature for inspiration. And that’s what they did. In one of those projects many imaginative wild cards were analyzed in order to point at possible new (currently overlooked) research directions for technology-society interaction. Some of them had distinctive “SF flavor”—for example, the one about a society in which people are becoming addicted to dream manipulation enabled by brain-computer interfaces. Another project dealt with wild-card scenarios about potential abuse of new technologies. One of them described future everyday gadgets (enabled by nanotechnology or 4D printing combined with the Internet of Things) that are capable of (remotely activated) self-healing, upgrade, or recycling, thus being vulnerable to a malicious signal that triggers their self-destruction (and thereby making flea markets the most attractive places to buy reliable products). The project even sketched the outlines of so-called narrative scenarios—we may call them SF stories—with the help of an SF writer (my good friend Karlheinz Steinmüller) who also happens to be, not coincidentally, a professional futurist.
With the accelerating pace of advances in science and technology, and of social changes in general, it is becoming a cliché to say that “we witness SF coming true” or that “we live in the future” (although some current societal phenomena should make one wonder if we are not going backwards to live in the past, which in turn has also to do with SF: the alternative history branch of the so rich SF tree). But as the only constant thing is change, and the future will always surprise us, the role of SF is not over. SF is the future; the future is SF, long live SF!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Tribes of Israel wandered in the Sinai Desert for forty years before they could enter the Promised Land. This book took nearly the same amount of time to gestate. Many people helped us navigate the often treacherous wadis, passes, dry holes, false turns, and dead ends we traversed during this otherwise interminable slog. These included Robert Silverberg, who introduced us to our agent, Eddie Schneider, of the JABberwocky Literary Agency, who ran with this effort long after any other front-ranking agent would have shown it—and us—the door.
Sheldon Teitelbaum would like to offer thanks to our legal Godzilla Guy Mizrachi; Aharon Hauptman, who volunteered for the odious task of translating his words into Hebrew during the heyday of Fantasia 2000; Hanan Sher, who ran his book reviews (he used to refer to them as “Yids in Spaaace!”) in the Jerusalem Post, the first Israeli daily ever to publish a monthly column on SF/F; and Ian Watson, John Clute, and the good folks at Foundation, who at various times offered up much-needed erudition, insight, and other assistance
Emanuel Lottem wishes pay respect to the late Amos Geffen and Aharon Sheer, as well as Dorit Landes and Adi Zemach, the trailblazers, and to add thanks also to Liat Shahar-Kashtan and other members of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy who offered help and advice, in particular Nadav Almog and Ehud Maimon; to Danny Manor and Gabi Peleg, who got me involved with Fantasia 2000; to the many readers who gave me feedback on my SF/F translations (good ones or bad, they were always helpful); to Larry Niven, Brian Stableford, and Ian Watson for their encouragement; and finally, to my good friend Aharon Hauptman.
We both thank Avi Katz, our illustrious illustrator and good friend; Alex Epstein, Elana Gomel, Danielle Gurevitch, Gail Hareven, Eli Herstein, and Noah Mannheim, who helped comprise our editorial board; Adam Rovner and Jessica Cohen-Rovner, who provided
early and timely counsel regarding research and translation-related issues; Bill Gough, who went over the manuscript and made some cogent remarks; Adam Teitelbaum, Lance Cody, Adam Roth, and Eric Menyuk, the intrepid gang behind our Kickstarter promo, and Lionel Brown, who supported it wholeheartedly; John Robert Colombo, who first showed us how it was done; and Robert Mandel, who made it his business to ensure that Israel, despite the trepidations of every other publisher we encountered, got a fair shake. Other staff at Mandel-Vilar Press, as well as Noel Parsons and Barbara Werden, were ever helpful. Without their stalwart contributions, and those of so many others, Zion’s Fiction would likely never have emerged from the desert. To them, and everyone else who helped light our way, we remain profoundly grateful.