Cover Unveiled for Lavie Tidhar's Osama

Lavie Tidhar is never one to shy away from the controversial. In fact I think he courts it somewhat. I try to invite him to be part of things here quite often because I know he'll give me an answer usually miles away from everyone else. Tidhar's mind is a strange one and I've always wondered if he was born that way or if it was through experiences.  He has certainly lived a interesting life having traveled and stayed in many different countries, which clearly influenced his latest work.  When I first heard the title of his next limited edition book Osama I was immediately put-off. Why would I want to read about that guy? But upon learning more about the story and Lavie's reason's for writing it Osama does sound quite interesting. It was born out of Tidhar's many close calls with Al-Qaeda over the years while traveling and living aboard. Here is the synopsis for Osama:

In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante...

Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books is fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul – nor for the choice he will at last have to make...

In Osama, Lavie Tidhar brilliantly delves into the post-9/11 global subconscious, mixing together elements of film noir, non-fiction, alternative history and international thriller to create an unsettling – yet utterly compelling – portrayal of our times.

Osama will be out in the Fall from PS Publishing as a limited edition hardcover. Also, Tidhar's lighter fair includes the just released Camera Obscura in his Bookman Histories series of Steampunk adventures.

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Exclusive | Cover Unveiled for Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar

Art by David Frankland

In honor of Steampunk Month Angry Robot was very kind enough to allow me to be the first to show off the cover to Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar, which is the second Bookman novel.  The art follows its predecessor The Bookman both in style and art which effuse a sense of adventure and a comedic side that is very Lavie.  I quite like the coloring and the ferris wheel of doom.  The Bookman is now available in the US and UK while Camera Obscura will be releases in the US next May.

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Writing Steamy Punk – Sex and Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century by Lavie Tidhar

Writing Steamy Punk – Sex and Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century

By Lavie Tidhar,

author of The Bookman

One of the cool things that came through on Twitter this week was a link to Little Death Ray, a place selling nothing less than steampunk vibrators.

I suspect people have the idea sex toys, or sex aids, are a new thing. In fact, they’re as old as sex itself. When I write, my research tends to sprawl, snatching up curious tidbits from this place and that. And one of my favourite reads had been The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500-1800, edited by Lynn Hunt.

Take dildos, for instance. “In the 1660s, imported Italian dildos, as well as condoms, first became available in London,” says Hunt. Much of Covent Garden – indeed, much of London itself – was built on the money made from prostitution (of both a male and female kind), with the Garden itself serving for a long time as London’s premier red light district. Moreover, the interaction between sex and science goes back a long way. Another book that has acted as inspiration for my own modest attempts at Steampunk literature had been Gaby Wood’s wonderful Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. I want to quote, well, myself, from an earlier article on the subject:

“From the beginning,” as Hunt notes, “pornography had close ties to the new science as well as to political criticism.” (Hunt 30). Furthermore, both Hunt and Wood draw links between sexuality and science: Hunt notes that “one sign of this new experience of sex was the use of what are now called sex aids,” (1) while Wood describes the fetishism that seems to have affected not only the inventors of mechanical beings (from Vaucanson to Edison, of whom more later) but also created two unique forms of sexual “perversions”: Pygmalionism and Venus Statuaria.

Venus Statuaria, as described by German sexologist Iwan Bloch, is, simply put, “the love for and sexual intercourse with status and other representations of a human person.” (Bloch in Wood 132). Pygmalionism, on the other hand, “involved women pretending to be statues”. (Wood 132). Bloch then concludes by discussing the links between the early sex toys, (also mentioned by Hunt), to the android makers of the Enlightenment. “There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology [who] prepare entire male or female bodies [...] such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale.” (Bloch in Wood, 133)

So science is not only intimately (ha!) linked to sex, but it even creates its own unique fetishes with it. How wonderful! Imagine these robot-makers of the past, creating the very first sex dolls, perhaps mechanical, perhaps imbued, if you will, with a Babbage engine for a mind. That last, short sentence above conjures, to me, an entire fantastical world of desire and artifice – and how can a steampunk writer fail to write about exactly such things?

I can’t, of course. And while I see my books – The Bookman, just released in the states, and Camera Obscura, which is coming out in May – as targeted at what my publishers called “post-YA”, they are not devoid of – and, to an extent, shaped by – this view of the past-future.

In Camera Obscura, my heroine, Milady de Winter (who is modelled, rather, on Cleopatra Jones) has to find a murderer stalking the streets of Paris. In the course of her investigation she arrives at a place called The Clockwork Room:

Picture a place of gleaming chrome and burnished leather. A place of polished brass, mute carpets, the smell of pipe tobacco and expensive cologne, the tinkling of a piano player. Picture men in smart evening wear, congregating in their masks. Imagine champagne flutes, the bubbles twinkling in the glass, the hum of machinery, cries – of pleasure, or pain, it’s hard to say – echoing, sometimes, from the upstairs rooms. Hosts and hostesses move throughout the room mechanically, touching a hand here, a shoulder there, refilling glasses – sexless creatures, as beautiful and perfect as a blueprint made flesh.

[...]

Every now and then one masked member of a party might break from it, ascend upstairs, up the wide curving staircase, and disappear into one of the private rooms, where love is enacted, perfected, a clean and sterile thing, a union, however temporary, between human and machine.

If humans are themselves machines – which is what Julien Offroy de La Mettrie says as early as 1747, in his seminal L’Homme Machine – then what happens when we make machines? How would they think? How would they act? How would they love?

With steampunk, I am able to discuss some of these things. Just as I can talk about colonialism, or race, or what it means to be human – just so long as the story I tell is also (hopefully) exciting, in the way those old stories – from Sherlock Holmes to The Three Musketeers or Around the World in 80 Days were exciting when I read them as a kid. Victorian fiction, famously, shied away from sex, and that is one reason, paradoxically, for why it was so prevalent in it – Dracula is, first and foremost, a tale of repressed sexuality, after all (and as successive generations of vampires, up to and including Twilight, clearly show). By taking on the 19th century we actually talk about our own 21st, a century that was shaped – politically, morally, geographically, technologically and – yes – sexually – by that earlier age. Edison’s quest to create a perfect mechanical doll, Lucy Westerna’s desire in Dracula, the fetishization of South Pacific islanders in the art of Paul Gauguin, all join together to form a narrative of sexuality still relevant to us today.

And not to mention, they are great fun to write about!


1 “In the 1660s, imported Italian dildos, as well as condoms, first became available in London.” (Hunt 30)

References

Hunt, Lynn (Ed.) The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500-1800. Zone Books, 1996.
Wood, Gaby. Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. Faber & Faber, 2002.
Tidhar, Lavie. “Androids and Other Undead: The Vampire as a Product of the Enlightenment”. Apex Digest, Vol. 1. Issue 7, 2006.
Tidhar, Lavie. Camera Obscura. Angry Robot Books, forthcoming, 2011.

---------------------

Israeli-born writer Lavie Tidhar has been called an “emerging master” by Locus magazine, and has quickly established a name for himself as a short fiction writer of some note. He has travelled widely, living variously in South Africa, the UK, Asia and the remote island-nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Lavie's Steampunk work includes the just released The Bookman and Camera Obscura, which will be releaed in May 2011.


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REVIEW | The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot)

Lavie Tidhar has been making quite a name for himself the last few years as one of the most original voices in the short story game garnering placements in many anthologies including a couples year's best collections. The Bookman is a bit of a departure for Tidhar as he generally goes for something a bit edgier and weirder than Steampunk. Don't get me wrong there is still plenty of weird going on and The Bookman is probably the most out there Steampunk novel I've yet read. Tidhar has thrown in everything from dissident robots, Karl Marx, a Lizard ruling class, Jules Verne, giant mushrooms, whale songs, and exploding books into the fray. Even amidst the strangeness, The Bookman feels like Tidhar's love letter to K.W. Jeter, Alan Moore, and all those who came before him.

One of the fascinating aspects of Steampunk is how authors alter the timeline and introduce historical characters, which The Bookman has in spades. The story starts off a bit sedately, but quickly moves into something all action oriented with nary a slow spot. The world building is immense as Tidhar has warped history into something altogether wonderful and exciting, which also shows the authors great love for the written word and the power it can convey.

This is a world that veered off course hundreds of years ago with the discovery of a race sentient Lizards called Les Lézards, who upon learning of humanity's great empires summarily took over the biggest, which was of course Britain. Orphan is the all too aptly named protagonist who I immediately fell in love with despite his total lack of forethought and insight into his situation and personal history. So many things are foreshadowed yet Orphan never seems to realize any of it or even try to figure it out on his own. Still Orphan is an affable fellow who is surrounded by a very intriguing cast of people. All of whom are not necessarily human.  After losing someone close Orphan makes it his goal to get to the bottom of who the Bookman is, what he is after, and if he can returned his beloved to him.  The answers to all of these leads Orphan deeper and deeper into the world's political center stage.

The Bookman is very much a setup novel, but what a fun setup it is. Dozens of twists, turns, and revelations await that you that kept me turning the pages. I give The Bookman 7 out of 10 hats. Tidhar only gives you glimpses of most characters and with so much hinted at the next book in this trilogy will be must.  The second book in the trilogy is titled Camera Obscura which will released in November in the UK with the US date still to be determined.


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GUEST POST | Lavie Tidhar author of The Bookman

Recently I've been mulling over a few new features for Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and one thing kept coming to mind. Everyone always asks what is your favorite book? Or the book that made you love reading? But what about all those books that were just plain strange? Basically, what is weirdest thing you've ever read?

So with that in mind I sent this question on to a few authors and one of the first to respond was Lavie Tidhar author of the recently released Steampunk adventure The Bookman from Angry Robot. Most of the responses were a paragraph or two, but Lavie had so much to say I thought it best to give him his own spot. Look for further posts on this question in the near future. Some incredible responses are in store from a wide swath of authors.

What is the weirdest book you've ever read?

by Lavie Tidhar

Luna: Gan He’eden Ha’geneti (Luna: The Genetic Paradise) by Ram Moav (1985)

I first came across Luna in the school library, and to my horror that must have been almost twenty years ago. It stood out, being one of the only—if not the only—titles on the science fiction shelf not to be a translation from the English. It was—almost miraculously, it seemed—written by an Israeli writer.

And what a writer!

Luna is, to a large extent, the last will and testament of its author, the Israeli geneticist Ram Moav. Like the unnamed narrator of his novel, he was dying of a terminal illness—he passed away shortly after completing the novel. His illness, and the narrator’s, inform the novel on a deep level—

But what is it about?

Luna’s narrator is a disillusioned scientist who, while slowly dying, is granted visions of the future by means of “The Camera”, a device that allows him (and us) to explore a future colony on the moon, a utopian place founded on extreme ideas of eugenics. Luna’s story is split in two: one follows the life story of the narrator, while the other follows a group of new immigrants to the lunar colony. They stand in marked contrast to one another. The scientist’s life is that of a modern Candide. Having survived the Holocaust as a child, he arrives in Israel only to be shunned and tormented by the “Sabras”, the native-born children. Growing up, he continues to suffer. His wife leaves him (after telling him he had never sexually satisfied her), his boss steals credit in his life’s work—until he is forced to conclude that:

my entire sorry life-story in one chart of disappointments and hurts caused by the bad acts of people. All those coalesced to an understanding, that there is no hope for the current state of man. He is bad at the core and must be replaced. This is the sum of my personal experience, and it is but a small example of the general state.

In one of the most powerful moments in the book, the narrator describes arriving in Israel as a child, after the Holocaust:

My first trauma was the Nazi Holocaust. It filled my entire being as a small child. Bad people, very bad people. An entire nation of bad people united to kill my father, to chase my mother and me, with nothing, to a terrible country where all the children are bad, and all they do, all the days, was to pick on me and hurt me, the little Yekke. [...]

Understand, Barnie, to the Sabras, to the children of the Israel of then, the European Holocaust was something distant, not a great wound of the psyche. Their childhood memories are of nostalgia to the beautiful days of the small Eretz Israel, beautiful, good, pioneering, idealistic. My childhood, in that same Eretz Israel, was one of suffering. A second soul-destroying trauma. A second proof for the evil of man. Adult Nazis in Germany, Jewish children in Israel—they were the same.

Then comes the Camera. With the aid of this mysterious device the narrator is able to glimpse a better, future world. Luna. A multi-cultural, multi-ethnic moon colony founded on a quest to create a Homo Moralis, a moral human. Exploring that new world forms the core of the novel.

And what a strange world it is!

It would be pointless to going into too many details of the new society. In brief, what Moav proposes is the establishment of a society along the lines of selective breeding, a complex structure dictating how many children—and with whom—anyone can have, based on their “humanity index”, a combination of IQ, artistic talent, and social-moral behaviour, with the focus on moral quality. Inherent in this scheme is Moav’s conviction that moral behaviour has a genetic basis, and can be passed on from parent to child. Computers help the selection process. There is a deep conviction behind Moav’s “genetic utopia” that humanity as it stands is inherently bad, but Luna is nevertheless deeply ambiguous in its promotion of eugenics, not dissimilar in nature to the scientific theories of the Nazis. The group of new immigrants, led by Luna-born Vasil as their guide, is composed of an Indian Woman, an Afro-American [sic] Man, a Pygmy family, a Chinese Man, a Russian Woman, and Gil and Cynthia Goldman—an Israeli professor and his Hawaiian wife, the only two of the group to actually have names, and whose quest to find relatives on Luna leads to the discovery of a wide family also related to Moav’s first novel,Zirmat Chachamim (“Genes for Geniuses, Inc.”, 1982). Genes for Geniuses—another deeply troubling novel—concerns the plan of an Israeli geneticist and an African dictator to create a new breed of Jewish-African “supermen”—combining, if I recall correctly, the African “physical prowess” with Jewish “brains.” I wish I was making that up!

In fact, here is another one of the strange, uncomfortable moments of the novel:

“New Africa was founded eight years ago. The majority of founders are what is called “Afro-Americans.” Amongst them there are also Africans, racially-pure blacks, who came straight from Africa, but they are few. We still don’t have many Africans in Luna. You...” his smiling gaze centres on the Pygmies: “you’re an important addition... the purpose of the founders was to preserve in a living way the positive components of Africa’s original culture.”

When the [female] Pygmy raises the problem of talking about “an African culture in the singular, when hundreds of different cultures developed in Africa?” Vasil confidently explains that “you have to start somewhere. The city’s founders decided to concentrate on Africa of the equatorial jungle, and we all hope that in the future more cities will be built, specialising each one in a different African culture.” On this level, Luna functions as a kind of Noah’s Ark (it aims to preserve not only human types but wildlife) but Moav is aware of the difficulties (practical if not ethical) of such an approach, and in fact advocates the creation of a truly multicultural society, in which all peoples and types of people play an important part. When the [female] Pygmy points out to Vasil that her and her husband’s “humanity index” is lower than the minimum entry requirement, Vasil makes a case for the need of an intercultural society. When the [male] Pygmy points out that, without Apartheid, intermarriages would lead to the loss of a clearly-defined racial type, Vasil offers Luna’s solution: cloning. The [female] Pygmy then points out that this would be a form of evolutionary dead-end Vasil admits the problem: clearly, even Luna does not have answers for everything.

This is such a bizarre novel, that I find myself going back to it, again and again—I have even managed to acquire my own copy of what is by now an incredibly rare volume (it has never been reprinted). It is not a particularly good novel, but it is disturbing on so many levels... and thought-provoking. And it does that rare thing—it offers a searing critique of Israeli identity, of the mythos of Israel itself.

I could go on—and on... another fascinating aspect of the book is its use of what is probably the only uniquely Israeli sub-genre of science fiction: the dystopia in which Orthodox Judaism takes over Israel, establishing the Jewish equivalent of a Sharia state (we learn of this in the course of the novel). This is, to my mind, the only genuine form of Israeli science fiction to date. In The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, Sheldon Teitelbaum mentions a couple of the others:

[A] significant dystopia was written by the established novelist Binyamin Tammuz (d1990): Pundako shel Yermiyahu [“Jeremiah’s Inn”] (1984) is a broad comic satire about an Israel taken over by religious zealots. A grimmer version of the future is Yitzhak Ben-Ner’s Ha’malachim Ba’im [“Angels are Coming”](1987), in which [a] world atomic apocalypse has spared Israel, but by the 21st century life within the theocratic state is characterized by street violence, persecution of the secular minority and widespread alienation.

While the best known of all is probably Amos Keinan’s The Road to Ein Harod, which not only won a Palestinian Peace Prize but was also made—in one of those strange confluences of fate— into a (rather dreadful) English-language film starring none other than Alessandra Mussolini (granddaughter of Il Duce), in a full-frontal nudity scene.

Life really is stranger than fiction... though perhaps not as strange as Luna. Incidentally, in my own The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv), we got to pay homage to this sub-genre (albeit tongue-in-cheek), while in my forthcoming novel Martian Sands (from Apex Books) a place called The Ram Moav Institute plays a significant role... two other very strange books, I think.

And so... Luna. It’s been with me for years—a deeply disturbing, odd, irritating, impossible book – that very few people have ever read. The last vision of a dying mind? a Fascist utopia? A study of the Israeli psyche? All of these, and more?

Those questions will keep me guessing for a long time to come.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lavie Tidhar is the author of The Bookman and forthcoming sequel Camera Obscura. Other books include linked-story collection HebrewPunk, novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv), novella An Occupation of Angels and a host of to-be-released novels and novellas including Cloud Permutations , Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, and Martian Sands. He also edited The Apex Book of World SF and runs the World SF News Blog.


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