Zion's Fiction
Page 41
And of course, we owe a debt of gratitude to all the authors featured in this collection and an apology to the many left out for lack of space. We fervently hope to rectify this in future volumes.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
The Editors
Emanuel Lottem, born in Tel Aviv in 1944, has been a central figure in the Israeli SF/F scene since the mid-1970s: translator of some of the best SF/F books published in Hebrew and editor of others; advisor to beginning writers; a moving force in the creation of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy (ISSF&F) and its first chairman; and founder of its annual ICon convention and other activities.
Lottem’s first SF translation was Frank Herbert’s Dune, which has become a classic. According to Israeli literary historian Eli Eshed, “This translation is considered a masterpiece of SF translations.” More SF/F translations followed, and Lottem’s name became familiar to and respected by Hebrew-reading fans.
After a few career changes, Lottem became a freelance translator and editor. In addition to SF/F, he also specializes in popular science and military history. In 1983 Lottem became chairman of the editorial board of the Israeli SF/F magazine Fantasia 2000. A few years later, in 1996, he presided over the inaugural meeting of the ISSF&F, which he founded with a small group of devoted fans. Visiting author Brian Aldiss officially announced the ISSF&F open for business, and Lottem was unanimously elected its first chairman.
To date, Lottem’s SF/F translations include works by Douglas Adams, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lois M. Bujold, Jack Chalker, C. J. Cherryh, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick, Robert L. Forward, William Gibson, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula Le Guin, Ann Leckie, Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven, Mervyn Peake, Frederick Pohl, Christopher Priest, Robert Shea and Robert A. Wilson, Robert Silverberg, E. E. “Doc” Smith, James Tiptree Jr., J. R. R. Tolkien, Jack Vance, and Connie Willis, among many others. In 1994 Lottem won one of Israel’s highest translation awards, the Tchernichovsky Prize, for rendering into Hebrew Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. The ISSF&F gave him in 2016 a Life Achievement award on its twentieth anniversary.
Sheldon (Sheli) Teitelbaum was born in Montreal in 1955. He attended Concordia University, where he earned an honors degree in history. Upon graduation in 1977 he left Canada for Israel, where he joined the infantry, completed IDF officer training, and served as a staff officer for the Paratroops Brigade. During his compulsory military service in Israel he moonlighted as a member of the editorial board of the seminal Israeli magazine Fantasia 2000 and as in-house SF reviewer for the Jerusalem Post. Upon concluding a five-year military stint, Teitelbaum began a journalism career, working for the Jerusalem Post, which put him to use as a night desk subeditor and, on weekends, as a feature writer. During the days he worked as a writer for the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Teitelbaum moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1986, where he took up new duties as West Coast bureau chief for the acclaimed film magazine Cinefantastique, as founding reporter for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, and as a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report. Additionally, he held down a day job for three years at the University of Southern California as a science writer and, later, three more as a subcontractor to the US Department of Energy.
Teitelbaum has commented on SF/F-related themes in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Forward, Time-Digital, Wired, SF Eye, Midnight Graffiti, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and the Encyclopedia Judaica. He is the recipient of Canada’s first Northern Lights Award and three Brandeis University–based Jewish Press Association awards.
The Artist
Avi Katz, a veteran American-born Israeli illustrator, cartoonist, and painter, evinced interest in SF/F illustration early: while still a teenager in Philadelphia he sent a pack of his Lord of the Rings art to J. R. R. Tolkien and received an enthusiastic response from the author, who told him he was the first illustrator to portray the dwarves as he had intended.
At age twenty, while studying art at Berkeley, after being interviewed by John W. Campbell he decided to avoid the draft and Vietnam and complete his studies at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem; he has made his home in Israel since then. He has been the staff illustrator of Jerusalem Report magazine since its first issue in 1990, and is active in the international organization Cartooning for Peace as well as the Association of Caricaturists in Israel. He has illustrated some 170 books in Israel and the United States, which have won the National Jewish Book Award, Hans Christian Andersen honors, the Ze’ev Prize, and others; he was a nominee for the lifetime achievement Astrid Lindgren Award.
A founding member of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, Katz created many original book covers for SF/F published in Israel; his illustrations graced the covers of society posters and all the issues of The Tenth Dimension fanzine over the decade of its publication. He has exhibited at various SF/F conventions, including WorldCon 2003, and was guest of honor at ICon 2002. He is featured in the book Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art (Rockport Press). In 2000, Katz created for the Israeli Postal Service a three-stamp series on science fiction in Israel.
The Authors
Shimon Adaf, a well-known poet, prose writer, musician, TV writer, and university educator, was born in 1972 of Moroccan parentage in the town of Sderot, near the Gaza Strip. He attended a religious school as a child and later segued to an ultra-Orthodox Sephardic junior high school, which he left after six months. Adaf completed his studies at secular schools.
Adaf began to publish poetry during his military service. Moving to Tel Aviv in 1994, he published his first short-story collection, The Icarus Monologue, which won a Ministry of Education award. This and other poetry achieved widespread translation, earning Adaf a reputation as a literary wunderkind. From 2000 to 2004 he worked at the Keter Publishing House as the youngest editor of their original Israeli prose line, discovering such genre stalwarts as Ophir Touché Gafla and Nir Bar’am. In 2004 he wrote a murder mystery, One Kilometer and Two Days before Sunset, and a young adult fantasy, The Buried Heart, the latter steeped in Jewish mythology. In 2008 he published the fantasy novel Sunburnt Faces, Adaf’s biggest hit until his most recent one, Aviva-Lo, about the unexpected death of his sister. In 2006 he launched his Rose of Judah sequence, including the Delanyesque epic Kfor (Frost) in 2010. Adaf followed this in 2011 with Mox Nox (Latin for Soon the Light), an alternate-history Turn of the Screw–inspired tale, winning the prestigious Sapir Prize. This was followed by Earthly Cities, or Netherworld, in 2012.
Adaf’s literature and literary persona pose several problems to modern Hebrew literary gatekeepers. He is a polymath, and there is no gainsaying his place as one of the most erudite Israeli writers today. But his preoccupation with Talmudism, the powerful mythologies he derived from his Sephardic background, his shifting from Israel’s geographical periphery to its center and back again, from the biographical to the universalist, from the distant past to the present to the far future, as well as his sometimes hard to parse yet rich Hebrew, render his output challenging in the view of some non-genre-savvy critics.
Pesach (Pavel) Amnuel was born in 1944 in Baku, Azerbaijan (then part of the USSR), and is known as a brainstorming astrophysicist and SF writer. Amnuel, with O. Guseynov, predicted in 1968 the existence of X-ray pulsars, which were later confirmed by the American Uhuru satellite. Amnuel and Guseynov’s catalog of X-ray sources was considered for a time the world’s most complete.
Amnuel first began publishing SF/F in Russian in 1959, his first story appearing in Technology for Youth. His first collection of stories saw publication in Moscow in 1984. Since 1990 he has lived in Israel, where he has taught at Tel Aviv University and edited several Russian-language newspapers and magazines, including Time, Aleph, and Vremya. Since emigrating to Israel, he has published the novels Men of the Code (1997), Three-Universe (2000)—the latter involving social
satire and kabbalistic mystery, with events transpiring in a mid-twenty-first-century Moscow run by the Russian Mafia and Israeli rabbis—and Revenge in Dominoes (2007), as well as sundry SF/F collections, short stories, and detective novels.
His work appears regularly in Russia, where he continues to claim a large fan base. He has won multiple awards, including The Great Ring, for achieving the greatest popularity among contemporary Russian writers, the 2009 Bronze Icarus Award of Russian Science Fiction, and the Aelita (the Russian equivalent of the Hugo) in 2012. “White Curtain” is one of several stories and novellas in his Multiverse cycle. These include the yet-to-be translated novellas “Branches,” “Facets,” “What Is Behind This Door?” and “Seeing Eye.” Appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2014, “White Curtain” figured in Gardner Dozois’s 32nd Best SF of the Year anthology in 2015. It was Amnuel’s first publication in English translation.
Rotem Baruchin grew up in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Petach Tikva, and Giv’at Shmuel, all in Israel, as well as in Swiss suburbia. She began reading science fiction and fantasy at the tender age of eight and started writing it at about the same age. For years she has combined fanzine writing with original fiction, published in both printed and online magazines, and then went on to study screenwriting at Tel Aviv University’s School of Film and TV.
For the past ten years she has been writing plays for Israeli LGTB groups, such as the Gay Ensemble, produced on commercial stages. She was a dialogue writer and consultant for a children’s show, The Dreamers, broadcast by an Israeli TV channel, and has directed several plays and musicals for a number of theaters, festivals, and conventions, including an interactive production involving audience choices. Her Internet series, The Grey Matter, filmed in the United States, can be seen online. For the Israeli youth magazine Rosh 1 she wrote two story series, published over a couple of years.
Rotem won three Geffen prizes for her short stories and is currently working on her first full-scale novel in a planned series, The Cities’ Guardians, which is based on the premise that every community has a “spirit of place” that manifests itself as a living entity—supernatural, eternal, and almost omnipotent. Some of her stories have been translated into English. Rotem has opened an account with the international website Patreon, which allows content creators to receive communal support for their work; she now has some one hundred regular supporters.
Rotem Baruchin is a regular participant in Israeli SF/F conventions and is also a member of a volunteer group dedicated to the prevention of sexual harassment at conventions. She lives in Ramat Gan with her two cats. Her favorite genre is urban fantasy, and she loves looking for magic in cafés and bars, in dazzling streetlights, in broken pavement stones, and in anyone alive in the city’s boulevards after three a.m. who is still drinking coffee.
Yael Furman, born in Ramat Gan, Israel, on October 7, 1973 (a day after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War), began publishing work of genre interest with “Hatzva’im haNechonim” (The right colors) in the online magazine Bli Panika in 2001. For the next few years she published several well-regarded short stories in Israeli genre publications such as Halomot beAspamia and the annual anthology series Once Upon a Future, for which she was nominated for the Geffen Prize a remarkable eight times.
Her novel Children of the Glass House (2011) is notable as a genuine example of Israeli young adult science fiction. Set in a future Israel, the novel concerns humans genetically modified to live in water, existing in conditions somewhat reminiscent of James Blish’s underwater inhabitants in “Surface Tension” (1952) or Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople (1968). A human child befriends a water child against the background of a civil rights battle, partly carried out by members of the “Human League,” who want the captive water people released. Although the theme of the book is not unusual in SF, the Israeli setting is uncommon, and, in a nice use of location, at the end of the novel the water people are transferred to the Sea of Galilee, where they are now free—or at least freer. The novel was illustrated by artist Yinon Zinger and was based on Furman’s earlier short story, “Empty Walls,” winner of a first prize in a 2009 Olamot Convention short story contest. Another novel, The Portal Diamond, was published just before this volume went to press.
Elana Gomel, born in Kiev, Ukraine, emigrated to Israel with her mother, noted writer and essayist Maya Kaganskaya, in 1978. She obtained her PhD in English literature from Tel Aviv University and went on to postdoctoral study at Princeton University as a Fulbright Scholar. She subsequently taught and researched at many world-class universities, including Stanford, the University of Hong Kong, and Venice International University. She served as chair of the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is currently an associate professor.
Gomel is the author of four academic books: Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Ohio State University Press, 2003), Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination (Continuum, 2010), Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge, 2014), and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014). In 2006 she published a book in Hebrew, Us and Them, about the experience of Russian emigrants in Israel—one of the first comprehensive treatments of the subject. It was subsequently published in the United States as The Pilgrim Soul: Being Russian in Israel (Cambria Press, 2009). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles.
Active in the science-fiction community in Israel since its inception, Gomel participated in the development of the annual science-fiction conventions ICon, Utopia, and Worlds. With her graduate students she has organized an international science-fiction symposium at Tel Aviv University, and she has striven to bring Israeli science fiction and fantasy onto the world stage by writing and lecturing about it and by coediting the groundbreaking collection of essays With Both Feet On the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2013).
Gomel has published more than twenty fantasy and science fiction stories in New Horizons, Aoife’s Kiss, Bewildering Stories, Timeless Tales, The Singularity, Dark Fire, and many other magazines and in several anthologies, including People of the Book and Apex Book of World Science Fiction. Her fantasy novel, A Tale of Three Cities, was published by Dark Quest Books in 2013.
Gail Hareven was born in 1959 in Tel Aviv to celebrated author Shulamith Hareven and to Israeli intelligence and senior Mossad officer and, later, Foreign Ministry official Alouph Hareven. Dr. Yitzhak Epstein, her great-grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine in the 1880s, was one of the founders of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, to which Hareven’s mother and then Gail herself were subsequently inducted.
Hareven grew up in Jerusalem, where she now resides. After receiving a BA in behavioral sciences from Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, she spent five years at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, reading Judaic studies and Talmud.
Hareven made her mark in Israeli SF/F in 1999, when she published an unabashedly genre-infused short-story collection called The road to Heaven. “The Slows,” published here, was placed in The New Yorker through the efforts of translator and researcher David Stromberg, an editor at the cultural journal Zeek. The collection’s title is telling, as the loss of paradise recurs as a theme in much of her work. Her access to the fantastique, in contrast, is joyful, profuse, and infused with a sense of wonder.
A journalist and book reviewer, she has written for most of the major Israeli media outlets as well as for Tikkun, Lilith, and other progressive American publications. In 2006 she was a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois, teaching writing and feminist theory, and in 2012, a guest lecturer at Amherst College.
So far, Hareven has written seventeen books: short story collections, children’s stories, novels, a thriller, and some nonfiction. Major Israeli theater companies have staged five of her plays. The Confessions of Noah Weber: A Novel (2009) garnered the Sapir Prize in Israel as well as rave
reviews in the United States and elsewhere. In 2015 she published Lies, First Person, earning similar accolades. Her work has been translated into English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Czech, and Chinese. She is also a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize.
Guy Hasson, born in 1971, is an author, playwright, and filmmaker who crafts plays in Hebrew and prose in English. His books were published in Israel (Hatchling, Life: The Video Game, Secret Thoughts, and Tickling Butterflies), the United Kingdom (The Emoticon Generation), and the United States (Hope for Utopia and Secret Thoughts). He has won the Israeli Geffen Award for Best Short Story of 2003 (“All-of-Me™”) and 2006 (“The Perfect Girl”). Since 2006 he has been focusing on the production of original films, including the feature-length A Stone-Cold Heart and the web series The Indestructibles.
Eschewing Hebrew in his SF/F has served him well in accessing a wider readership but has also caused a modicum of confusion at home, especially when some of his work found itself translated back into his native Hebrew. In either language, however, Hasson is a force to be reckoned with, and his work has been translated into seven languages. His stories can be found in the various Apex World SF anthologies and in Apex’s Horrorology. In 2013, Hasson created an independent comic book company, New Worlds Comics, and its flagship title Wynter, written by him, was hailed as one of the best SF comic book series in recent time. In 2015 Hasson created an online comic book store for the blind and the visually impaired called Comics Empower.
SF/F writer Lavie Tidhar says of Hasson: “In his refusal to compromise on commercial principles, and in his ongoing experimentation with various forms of media, it has become clear that he is following an intensely personal vision; one to which his commitment is whole.”