GUEST BLOGGER: Lavie Tidhar

[Hobbit]

SFFWorld is pleased and proud to announce that on the 12th January we will have a guest blogger: Lavie Tidhar.

Lavie is a writer and editor. He is the editor of The Apex Book of World SF which collects stories from around the globe. Lavie maintains a personal blog at cybermonklives.livejournal.com/. He also maintains a companion blog to The Apex Book of World SF at http://worldsf.wordpress.com.

As a writer his latest book is The Bookman, to be published by Angry Robot.

This thread is closed for now. However it might be worth thinking about some questions you want to ask, about Lavie's experiences in the trade, writing, The Bookman, etc etc. Feel free to PM them to me and I'll pass them on: the suitable ones, of course!

I've asked Lavie to tell us a little about himself before we start.

Mark

[Hobbit]

From Lavie:

Hi y’all!

It’s a great word, “y’all”, isn’t it? Almost worth becoming an American for...

Anyhow – thanks for having me! I should introduce myself – I grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, which I always thought was very science fictional of me – it’s a sort of strange utopian socialist commune type thing. We grew up in communal “children’s houses” (no kidding), and I still have the occasional nightmare about the food in the giant communal dining hall of the kibbutz...

Philip K. Dick was the first science fiction writer I ever read to include a kibbutz in his fiction. Only one of the things that made me a fan... There might be echoes of PKD in my new novel, The Bookman – my favourite novel of his is The Simulacra, and one thing The Bookman isn’t short of is simulacra!

And books.

My family moved to South Africa when I was 15-16 – right into the transitional period between Apartheid and black majority rule. Which made for interesting times! And was a bit of a shock to the system (not just for me, I imagine!). I had my first KFC meal the day we landed in Johannesburg. Just thought I’d share that.

Anyhow, I bounced between Israel and South Africa for a while, went backpacking for the first time – in just-post-communist Eastern Europe, then most of Western Europe – I even lived in the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris for a while, until they kicked me out!

Got the travel bug. Moved back to SA and travelled around Africa – Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya... followed David Livingstone all around the place, basically, from Victoria Falls to Zanzibar to Ujiji, deep in the interior, where he famously met Stanley (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) lived next door to Jane Goodall while I was there! Though I never got to meet her.

Got malaria, several times. Was in Dar-es-Salaam when the American embassy blew up. Worked for an Internet company in Johannesburg, travelled again, got sick again...

Moved to London, worked, bought far too many books... got restless and spent two months travelling on the Trans-Siberian across Russia, Mongolia and China... then another four months in South East Asia, ending up in the jungles of Borneo somewhere near the Kalimantan border.

Went back to England, went to university, and decided to start writing seriously.

I wrote The Bookman in the last months of my stay in London. It was freezing... three months later I was on the remote South Pacific island of Vanua Lava, in the Republic of Vanuatu. It was boiling...

Spent a year there, lost fifteen kilos, climbed a volcano, travelled around in boats, tried to write – no electricity, clean water or much of anything.

Moved to Laos, in South East Asia. Put back those fifteen kilos! Said thanks every day for hot showers and electricity.

Now I’m about to leave. Maybe settle down. Where would you go?

That’s about it. Sold 5 novels last year – incredibly. Just finished Camera Obscura, the book following The Bookman (but you don’t have to read them in order). Thinking about book 3 and having a feeling David Livingstone’s going to make an appearance...


Am going to head out in a minute – check the post office to see if my copy of the book arrived (unlikely) and then find a bar – maybe the Déjà vu, which is so secret hardly anyone knows it’s there. It’s also almost never open... but here’s hoping. It’s been a long week – guest-blogging, the book coming out – though living here you don’t really notice any difference. We don’t have bookshops...

It’s the time of the mango rains now – gentle showers acting as a divider between the cool dry season and the hot wet season. Means you actually need to wear a T-shirt. Cold!

So I’ll head off now. Hope to hear from you!

Lavie.

[Hobbit]

The thread's now open for questions.

Here's a couple to get started.

How much of your wide travel experiences have fed into your SF and Fantasy? Is it that 'meeting new people and seeing new places' factor that creates your interest in SF/Fantasy?

Apart from PKD, who else do you like?

What genre book (apart from your own!) would you take with you on your travels whenever you could? (I'm thinking of a battered old PKD at the bottom of the rucksack, for example.)

(Others please feel free to join in!)

Mark

[Lavie Tidhar]

Hi everyone,
Again, thanks for having me. Should have popped back sooner, but The Bookman just came out in the UK and they've been working me hard guest-blogging and, um, doing all sorts of things for the secret cabal that REALLY runs the world (you know, the one with the giant lizards in control).

And last night I ended up in a performance by three drag queens at this very dark bar, and I have to say, if you've never seen an Asian drag queen wearing an Afro wig and belting out Frank Sinatra's New York, New York, then, well... you really should.

Anyway. Let me see if I can be coherent enough after last night to answer the questions!

---

How much of your wide travel experiences have fed into your SF and Fantasy? Is it that 'meeting new people and seeing new places' factor that creates your interest in SF/Fantasy?

To answer the second part first, no. I like SF/F because, not to put to fine a point on it, I'm a geek. So there.

But travel does feed into my stories, sometimes obessively. What I really like doing is, after visiting a place, writing a story that is set there. A recent example includes "Spider's Moon" over at Futurismic, written after I visited Hoi An in Vietnam; and one of my favourite Vanuatu-set stories is "The Mystery of the Missing Puskat" over at Chizine. Most of my stories are online, so they're easy to access. It's also, I noticed - or had it pointed out to me - that my characters tend to travel themselves. Fiction - particularly genre fiction - is to a large extent about the movement, about going from one place to another anyway, so I'm not exactly unique in that regard -

Though I remember an editor once querying a detail in one of my stories, saying he looked it up on Wikipedia and it didn't seem to be correct. I had to e-mail back and point out I've actually been to the place, which seemed to take him aback - he wrote back about not being used to authors actually visiting these sorts of places - which is fair enough! I suspect I lack the imagination to make things up, when I can visit somewhere and get to know it a little. And with The Bookman, too, it's strange how little of the history you actually need to make up, because history is so weird - Edison's obsession with mechanical dolls, for instance. Who could possibly make that up? Or the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton who was almost a celebrity in the 19th century. I mean, seriously?

So yes, travel does inform a lot of what I write... which is the short answer!

[Lavie Tidhar]

Apart from PKD, who else do you like?

There are so many writers... right now I'm on a real James Ellroy fix. The guy is amazing. Probably the single best American writer living today.


What genre book (apart from your own!) would you take with you on your travels whenever you could? (I'm thinking of a battered old PKD at the bottom of the rucksack, for example.)

I actually, speaking as a "seasoned traveller" (ha!) prefer books as practical objects. Ahem... they're very useful, you know! Just some of the practical applications include:

1) starting a fire
2) replacing toilet paper in case of unavailability
3) rolling, um, cigarettes
4) reading.

Funny thing about rolling cigarettes, btw. When I was living in Vanuatu, manufuctred cigarettes are hard to get and expensive, so everyone on the islands grew their own tobacco (I actually had my own plant in the garden too!) Now, how do you roll a cigarette? You need paper! And where do you get paper from?

School excercise books, that's where. So you actually get a scene where the son comes home from school with the marked essay and gives it to his dad and his dad goes - great! And next thing you know that B+ gets rolled into flimsy cone packed with dried tobacco leaves...

When I was travelling in Europe years ago, though, I carried a copy of Samuel Delany's "The Einstein Intersection" with me for a couple of months. It's an SF novel interposed with the author's travel diary though Europe, writing the book as he went along. So that was a great book for the road (and, in a follow up to the question above, I'm also a huge Delany fan).

[KatG]

Alright, well someone has to ask this question and it might as well be me, even if you have already answered it 400 times in previous interviews:

How do you find science fiction and fantasy stories differing from around the globe? How are they the same?