Thus a thread of speculative thinking, often mingled with a degree of mysticism, runs through the whole history of the Jewish people, from the visions and wonders of the Bible to Herzl’s prophetic work of utopian fantasy. It should be no surprise to find that elements of speculative fantasy and even science fiction appear in Jewish literature over the many centuries that separate the Book of Genesis from Altneuland. An episode in the Talmud has Moses traveling in time, making a brief visit to the future. The ninth-century Jewish merchant Eldad HaDani imagined an independent Jewish state in East Africa, perhaps Ethiopia. The medieval Jewish legend of the Golem foreshadowed the Frankenstein story and provided one of the first examples of the robot in literature. Medieval lore also gives us dybbuks, wandering ghosts who take possession of living bodies, a theme often used in modern science fiction. For good and proper reasons I hesitate to use any such broad generalizing term as “the Jewish mind,” but there does seem to be some affinity between Jews and speculative thinking, an affinity that has produced not only some great works of philosophy but also many works of fantasy and science fiction.
Science fiction in its specialized modern form, though it had its origins in the nineteenth-century works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, was largely a product of American creativity—and a significant number of Jews were involved in its development. Jacob Clark Henneberger, the publisher who in 1923 founded Weird Tales, the first all-fantasy magazine, was Jewish. So was Hugo Gernsback, who brought Amazing Stories, the pioneering science-fiction magazine, into being three years later. Such notable magazine and book editors as H. L. Gold, Donald A. Wollheim, David Lasser, Samuel Mines, and Mort Weisinger were Jews. The roster of Jewish-American science-fiction writers includes such illustrious names as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Avram Davidson (who completed a stint as an army medic during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence), Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Joanna Russ, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Cyril Kornbluth, Philip Klass, Robert Sheckley, and Barry N. Malzberg. Even the German-speaking novelist Franz Werfel, born in Prague, turned to science fiction for his last work, the magnificent imaginative fantasy Star of the Unborn, when he was living in exile in the United States in 1946. (It takes place a hundred thousand years in the future, but Werfel places a small congregation of Jews in that otherwise utterly transformed distant epoch, presided over by a leader called Saul, whose title is “the Jew of the Era.”)
But modern Israel, too, a country of which it could be said (without stretching things too far) that it owes its origin in part to a work of speculative fiction and which is compelled by external forces to live in a state of perpetual existential crisis, has been a center of the sort of intellectual inquiry that leads to the writing of fantasy and science fiction. The Jewish War II, by Reuven Rupin, sends its protagonist back to Roman times to provide the rebellious Jews of Palestine with sophisticated weapons with which to establish an independent Jewish state. Secrets of the Second World by Yosef Soyka puts the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, living in subterranean tunnels, in contact with alien species who watch over mankind. Yaakov Avisar’s People from a Different Planet shows Israeli spacefarers encountering Hebrew-speaking aliens, with whom they defeat a third species, a warlike one that threatens galactic peace. Other novels portray an Israel jeopardized by neo-Nazi plots or by the seizure of control by Orthodox Jews, strife between Israel and its Arab population, a postapocalyptic Israel that consists of little more than Tel Aviv, and many another possible futures.
Contemporary Israeli writers of speculative fiction have been active as well in the short-story form, which since the time of H. G. Wells has had a central position in science fiction. Such magazines as Fantasia 2000, which was published between 1978 and 1984, provided a venue for original Israeli science fiction as well as stories translated from English and other languages, and there also have been more than a few one-author collections of short science-fiction stories.
But nearly all of this work was written in Hebrew, and Hebrew is not a language widely spoken beyond the borders of Israel; and so this plethora of rich and stimulating Israeli science fiction might just as well have been published on some other planet, for all the impact it has had on science-fiction readers in the rest of the world. Hence this anthology, the first English-language collection of recent Israeli speculative literature. Some of the stories, like those by Lavie Tidhar, Nir Yaniv, and Eyal Teler, were written in English and even published originally in American science-fiction magazines, but the bulk of those included here, those by Gail Hareven, Gur Shomron, Nitay Peretz, Nava Semel, and others, have been translated from the Hebrew and thus brought back to Western readers from beyond the linguistic barrier, and there is one, by Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel, that is a translation from the Russian.
Messages from another world, indeed. Bulletins about a version of the future different from the one that most of us perceive, sent to us from a far-off place that happens to share this small planet with us.
Introduction
Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem
The State of Israel may be regarded as the quintessential science fiction (SF) nation—the only country on the planet inspired by not one, but two seminal works of wonder: the Hebrew Bible and Zionist ideologue Theodor Herzl’s early-twentieth-century utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land).
Only seventy years old, the Jewish state cranks out futuristic inventions with boundless aplomb: wondrous science-fictional products such as bio-embeddable Pill-Cams, wearable electronic diving gills, hummingbird spy drones, vat-grown chicken breasts, microcopter radiation detectors, texting fruit trees, billion-dollar computer and smartphone apps like Waze and Viber, and last but not least, those supermarket marvels, the cherry tomato and the seedless watermelon.
What Israel has yet to generate—and in this it stands virtually alone among the world’s developed nations—is an authoritative volume, in any language, of Israeli speculative fiction.[1] Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature is intended to remedy this oversight. The book will pry open the lid on a tiny, neglected, and seldom-viewed wellspring of Israeli literature, one we hope to be forgiven for referring to as “Zi-fi.”
Zi-fi: We define this term as the speculative literature written by citizens and permanent residents of Israel—Jewish, Arab, or otherwise, whether living in Israel proper or abroad, writing in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, or any other language spoken in the Holy Land.
In the main, however, this volume spotlights a small but growing pool of Israeli writers who have pursued deliberate vocations as purveyors of homegrown Hebrew-, English-, and Russian-language science fiction and fantasy (SF/F), and other brands of speculative fiction, aimed at both the local and international markets.
We showcase here a wide selection of stories whose authors range across the entire gamut of the modern Israeli SF/F scene: men and women, young and not-so-young, Israel-born and immigrants, professional writers as well as amateurs; some continuing to live in Israel and some expatriates. More than a few have already published stories overseas; for others this is their first foray into the international arena. Many are part and parcel of Israel’s SF/F fandom (more about which, see below); others are mainstream writers who at some point in their careers decided to use SF/F tropes as the best vehicles for their message and their whimsy. All of them, however, share one thing in common: by adopting the tropes of speculative fiction, they have all bucked, if not kicked in the teeth, a deeply rooted, widely held, and long-standing cultural aversion, shared by a preponderance of Israeli readers, writers, critics, and scholars, to most manifestations of indigenously produced as well as imported speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror.[2] It is the underlying contradiction between the aforementioned science-fictional roots and this primal aversion that, we believe, renders the very publication of this book a wondrous event.
1
First coined by M. F. Egan and subsequently espoused by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and Robert A. Heinlein, the term
2
Horror, currently referred to as dark or weird fantasy, is a rarity in Israeli speculative fiction, although a few, among them Asaf Ashery and Orly Castel-Bloom, have valiantly tried their hands at it. Many Israelis will argue that they live with enough daily horror to avoid subjecting themselves to additional, imaginary torments.