Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

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THE STATE OF ISRAEL may be regarded as the quintessential Sci-Fi 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 20th-Century utopian novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land).Only mid-way through its seventh decade, the Jewish State cranks out futuristic inventions with boundless aplomb, wondrous science-fictional products like bio-embeddable Pillcams, wearable electronic diving gills, hummingbird spy drones, vat-grown chicken breasts, micro-copter 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. 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 are living in Israel, some are 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 science fiction, fantasy and horror. 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.