Apex Book Company

Interviews with Lavie Tidhar are just as weird as his fiction. Some of that falls on Lavie’s personality–he’s quirky with a touch of British intellectualism added for flavor. The rest has more to do with his many travels. Lavie has lived in numerous countries, and is currently visiting China.

Apex: You spent all of last year in Vanuatu (a small island-nation in the South Pacific) – what’s that been like? Was it good as it sounds?

Lavie Tidhar: I wish! I was on one of the remotest islands in the South Pacific – in the world, really – if you look on a map you just see specks of islands in the middle of the ocean – and it was quite challenging. We had no electricity, very little shipping and, surprisingly, little food. I lost about fifteen kilos… but it was beautiful – I could watch the volcano every morning when I got up, I got to go around in boats, really get to know some of the most remote places on Earth. I hiked to the southern hemisphere’s biggest volcanic lake, visited places even people in the rest of Vanuatu never went to. We also had to deal with earthquakes, hurricanes and there was at least one tsunami warning. No volcanic eruptions luckily! It’s an incredibly beautiful country. But it wasn’t easy! Now I’m just so, so grateful for things like hot showers and washing machines and light – I’m just grateful for electricity.

Apex: And you speak Bislama now, which I understand is a form of pidgin English?

Lavie: Yes, it’s the official language of Vanuatu. It’s the only thing I spoke most of the time. It’s quite lovely – it’s a language in its own right, and in fact it’s one of the things I miss the most about the country. Mi harem sad tumas se mi no gat janis blong toktok bislama naoia – I’m very sad I don’t get to speak Bislama these days.

Apex: We’re publishing your story “Blakenjel” alongside this interview, where the characters speak a form of pidgin English – is that Bislama in there?

Lavie: No. It’s a little bit of a simplified form, to make it easier for a non-speaker to understand. It’s a pidgin Bislama! With a little bit of Papua New Guinea pidgin (which is called Tok Pisin, but is quite similar) thrown in. I’ve incorporated proper Bislama into a few stories, most prominently in my novella Cloud Permutations which PS Publishing in the UK is bringing out next year. I suspect it’s the first time characters is what is essentially a science fiction story speak pidgin English. So that was fun to do!

Apex: You’ve been quite busy, haven’t you? We published your HebrewPunk collection last year, and you’ve got two more books coming out in 2009, is that right?

Lavie: Yes. There’s Cloud Permutations, like I said, which is a sort of a South Pacific-flavoured planetary romance, and I recently finished a short novel I co-wrote with my friend Nir Yaniv, called The Tel Aviv Dossier – this one will be out from Chizine Publications early next year.

Apex: What’s that about?

Lavie: It’s a good question! It’s sort of a weird apocalypse/post-apocalypse story told from several (or rather, many) points of view. We get to completely destroy Tel Aviv… it’s a weird book. I like it.

Apex: And you describe yourself as someone who “writes weird fiction.”

Lavie: Yes. I can’t really pinpoint it any more than that. I love all kinds of genres, both to read and to write – it seems silly to restrict myself to just one. Weird seems to sort of cover it though… you know, the kind of stuff that, if you describe it to people, they sort of go bug-eyed and say, ‘Ha, that’s a bit weird.’ One of my favourite stories to write was a clown western (“High Noon in Clown Town”, Postscripts 9). And Postscripts recently bought a new story from me called “The Love Craft”, which is essentially a Women-in-Prison / Alien Abduction story. Now that was fun!

Apex: That’s a bit weird…

Lavie: Ha!

Apex: And is it true we’re going to see a comic script from you soon?

Lavie: Yes! Murky Depths, which is a very cool indie comics/fiction magazine, is going to run my first comic script – it’s a stand-alone, 6-page script and – don’t ask me why – it’s a weird Christmas love story. I mean, why Christmas? I guess it’s living in London for eight years that did it! I’ve seen some preliminary drafts and it looks great. Right now it also looks like we have a green light for a bigger project – a 32-page comic book called Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants.

Apex: That’s a bit weird…

Lavie: Yeah… it’s like a 1940s sci-fi musical, if that makes sense. With, well, ants.

Apex: Moving on…

Lavie: I get that a lot!

Apex: I’m not entirely surprised. Now, let’s backtrack for a moment.

Lavie: Ok.

Apex: HebrewPunk.

Lavie: Yeah.

Apex: Everyone should have one.

Lavie: Absolutely!

Apex: It’s been out for a while now…

Lavie: Yes…

Apex: Any thoughts?

Lavie: Well, pretty much as soon as I started writing those stories I knew they should be together. So from the start they were envisioned as part of a package, you know – the history of a secret, fantastical Jewish underworld. So putting them together at last felt very right. And I love the Melissa Gay cover! It’s pure pulp, it’s exactly what I thought it should be (I also loved her cover for the Sara M. Harvey book you’re doing). And the nice thing is, while the stories are available as a package to whoever wants them, they keep having a life of their own too – Spanish, Hebrew and Polish translations, podcast audio adaptations, anthology reprints… so I’m happy.

Apex: “The Dope Fiend” (from HebrewPunk) was the last story on Sci Fiction –

Lavie: Yes! Ellen Datlow plucked me out of the slush pile – at the last moment, as it turned out.

Apex: But she did go on to buy other stories from you. There was “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” in Salon Fantastique (co-edited with Terry Windling), and the anthology won a World Fantasy Award –

Lavie: That’s right. That was pretty cool.

Apex: And more recently you had “Shira” in the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy –

Lavie: Yes. It’s a gorgeous looking book!

Apex: Anything else?

Lavie: Well, Ellen did buy a couple of new stories from me recently…

Apex: Do tell…

Lavie: There’s a novelette I’m really pleased with called “The Projected Girl” – it’s about a boy in Israel in the 1980s, who’s investigating the disappearance of a magician’s assistant in the 1940s - that’s coming out in an urban fantasy anthology called Naked City, from St. Martin’s. And also a story called “One Day, Soon,” which will be in Ellen’s Lovecraft Unbound anthology. I’m not sure when they come out though.

Apex: I shall wait with baited breath…

Lavie: You better!

Apex: Finally, in this issue we’re featuring your tenth “Confessions of a Book Junkie” column – how is that going?

Lavie: It’s fun. I think the nice thing about doing something like this is that I get the chance to talk about some of the books or writers I like that people might not know. I mean, I have the freedom to talk about whatever – collecting or writing or strange books – anything, really – but what I’d love to be able to do is if it convinced someone to pick up a book they wouldn’t have otherwise read. I talked about James McClure in #6, who was a wonderful South African crime writer, and I hope to talk about some other books and writers I like – George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, for instance, or Gerald Durrell’s novels. And it always ties back into collecting, because when I like a certain writer or even just a certain book I go into “the zone”, collecting-wise. Though I’m much better now – the medication is obviously working…

Apex: I didn’t realise you were an obsessive collector.

Lavie: Is there any other kind? Though I don’t really collect any more. Not having a permanent address – not to mention having to pay credit card bills – they’re obviously factors. So I’m more of a reader these days, but I still love the world of collecting – the obsessiveness of it, the oddity of it, but most of all the chase. It’s not much fun collecting books when you have all the money in the world. You know, a lot of the time, when people finally complete a collection they end up selling it? And then start a new collection from scratch. It’s the hunt that’s the fun part!

Apex: In a geeky sort of way…

Lavie: You want to take it outside?