The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 1

The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar, features award-winning science fiction and fantasy short stories from Asia, Eastern Europe, and around the world.

The world of speculative fiction is expansive; it covers more than one country, one continent, one culture. Collected here are sixteen stories penned by authors from Thailand, the Philippines, China, Israel, Pakistan, Serbia, Croatia, Malaysia, and other countries across the globe. Each one tells a tale breathtakingly vast and varied, whether caught in the ghosts of the past or entangled in a postmodern age.

Among the spirits, technology, and deep recesses of the human mind, stories abound. Kites sail to the stars, technology transcends physics, and wheels cry out in the night. Memories come and go like fading echoes and a train carries its passengers through more than simple space and time. Dark and bright, beautiful and haunting, the stories herein represent speculative fiction from a sampling of the finest authors from around the world.

Table of Contents

S.P. Somtow (Thailand) — “The Bird Catcher”
Jetse de Vries (Netherlands) — “Transcendence Express”
Guy Hasson (Israel) — “The Levantine Experiments”
Han Song (China) — “The Wheel of Samsara”
Kaaron Warren (Australia/Fiji) —“Ghost Jail”
Yang Ping (China) — “Wizard World”
Dean Francis Alfar (Philippines) — “L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)”
Nir Yaniv (Israel) — “Cinderers”
Jamil Nasir (Palestine) — “The Allah Stairs”
Tunku Halim (Malaysia) — “Biggest Baddest Bomoh”
Aliette de Bodard (France) — “The Lost Xuyan Bride”
Kristin Mandigma (Philippines) — “Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang”
Aleksandar Žiljak (Croatia) — “An Evening in the City Coffehouse, With Lydia on My Mind” (Read for free in Apex Magazine issue 5)
Anil Menon (India) — “Into the Night”
Mélanie Fazi (France, translated by Christopher Priest) — “Elegy”
Zoran Živković (Serbia, translated by Alice Copple-Tošić) — “Compartments”

About the Editor

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, the World Fantasy Award-winning Osama and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century. His other works include the Bookman Histories trilogy, several novellas, two collections, and a forthcoming comics mini-series, Adler. He currently lives in London.