Locus, August 2013
All that said, what about “The Oracle” (Analog, July-August) itself? It's one of Tidhar's excellent long sequence of “Central Station” stories, set in an around a spaceport straddling Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This piece is in a sense an origin story, telling in one thread of Matt Cohen, on the run from protesters of his “imprisonment” of potential nascent AIs in servers kept isolated from the net; and in another thread of Ruth Cohen, who became The Oracle, “Joined” with the AIs (“the Others”). There's a nice mix of Sfnal speculation – about AIs, mostly – and depiction of character (especially Ruth's life), and even action. Like many of Tidhar's stories in this series, it depends to an extent on its links with the rest of the series – so this is very strong work by itself, but perhaps even more as part of a greater whole.
Locus, December 2006
Lavie Tidhar’s “High Windows” gets points from me for the reference to one of my favorite poets (the brilliant grump Philip Larkin), and more points for its gritty depiction of a young person escaping from an oppressive habitat orbiting Saturn to an ambiguous life in a grungy future Solar System.
Locus, March 2007
And Lavie Tidhar’s “The Burial of the Dead” (Chiaroscure, January-March) concerns a man coming to play a high-stakes game who is evidently on some sort of assassination mission – strangeness suffuses the story, from the Eliot-derived character names (and title, of course) to the combined science fiction/horror motivating background.
Locus, September 2007
The tenth issue of Apex Digest may be its best yet. The best piece here is by Lavie Tidhar, “Daydreams”, in which people’s dreams can change the world to fit what they dream of. This can obviously be dangerous, and the hero seems to be trying to prevent or reverse the effects of a dangerous dreamers – though how much of this story is really just his dream?
Locus, December 2007
Fantasy Magazine has gone online. Perhaps the best story from the first online month (October) is “Elsbeth Rose” by Lavie Tidhar, which tells of two elderly people in what seems to be an infinite apartment building. Elsbeth Rose is a painter, who on the one hand has traveled no more than thirty floors from her apartment, but on the other hand seems to have come to the building from something like our world (though her husband was a character from a Wodehouse novel). Traveler Yud, as his name suggests, has gone a lot farther than 30 floors – but he claims to have been born “inside”. Their story – stories – are quiet, imaginative, sweet, romantic, a bit arch – very enjoyable.
Locus, April 2008
Other strong pieces in the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction include Lavie Tidhar’s “Shira”, about a Syrian university student coming to Haifa in a future Middle East which seems to have been shocked into peace by something called the Small Holocaust. She is studying an obscure Israeli poet – and she learns rather more, and more strangely, than she could have expected.
And by contrast Strange Horizons has a reputation, at least, of being slipstream-oriented – but of course they publish lots of straight fantasy and straight science-fiction. In January my favorite story is SF: “The Shangri-La Affair” by Lavie Tidhar. Sometime in the near future a man comes to Laos on a mysterious mission, as war continues to sweep through Asia. The familiar routines are enacted – the flight in on Nuevo Air Amerika, the rendezvous with an enchanting woman, the journey to a hidden city. And slowly we learn the man’s mission – he is trying to find and destroy the only samples of a dangerous plague. But is it dangerous? That turns out to be a good question, one Tidhar lets the reader try to answer. Making this a fine thought-provoking story.
Locus, June 2010
Lavie Tidhar's "The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String" (Fantasy, June) (an SF story, rare but not unheard of at Fantasy) is a nice brief examination of the effects of a memory erasure technique from the point of a view of an old woman who sells the memory erasure on the street - ostensibly the subject is the reason her latest customer buys her wares, but of course at heart the subject is the seller herself.
Locus, October 2010
Lavie Tidhar’s Cloud Permutations (PS Publishing) is an impressive science fiction tale set on a planet colonized by Pacific Islanders, appropriate as the planet is mostly water. The inhabitants live fairly traditional lives, though they are apparently aware of some of their history. The lives of two boys are intertwined by prophesies concerning a mysterious tower … and eventually of course they go searching. The secret behind the tower will surprise no experienced SF reader – indeed, the outline of the story is fundamentally familiar. It is Tidhar’s refreshing telling that makes it special: certainly in particular the Pacific Islander culture (enhanced by much use of the Pacific creole Bislama, just enough based on English to make it mostly comprehensible to this reader); but also the very well realized characters, and the complex shadings of the conclusion.
Another Tidhar SF story with Pacific Island roots appears in the October Fantasy Magazine: “Monsters”, a fine short piece about human space travel in the context of an alien ocean-based species’ experience with same.
Locus, December 2010
Let’s look at a few anthologies. The Immersion Book of SF, edited by Carmelo Rafala, comes from a small UK press (Immersion). And this is a nice collection. In particular I liked Lavie Tidhar’s “Lode Stars”, a strange SF story set in a society around a group of black holes. Michaela is a starship captain whose father has just died exploring the event horizon of one of the black holes. She is pushed to learn unexpected things about her society’s history, about the black holes, and the intelligences they may harbor, about alien Martian bioware that some people meddle with – a lot goes on in a short space, that seems potentially part of something much bigger.
Locus, August 2011
And my favorite story in Ellen Datlow's Naked City is “The Projected Girl”, by Lavie Tidhar. Danny is a ten year old boy, being raised by his widowed father. He’s intrigued by magic and by detective novels, and stumbles across a magician’s journal from the ‘40s, and thus into a mystery about a magician, and his assistant, who really disappeared one day, and about a strange image of a young woman on a wall – all tied up with the complexities of Palestine in the Second World War.
Locus, January 2013
Eclipse Online in December features another strong Lavie Tidhar story set what I'll call his “Central Station” future, though this piece, “The Memcordist”, is set all over the Solar System, at several times in the life of a man who grew up “on stage”, in a sense, implanted with some tech such that his every experience is broadcast for anyone who wants to to share. His life, shaped mostly by two women, his “stage-mother” and the one woman (another memcordist) he truly loved, is well portrayed, and we also get a neat look at the extent of this future. To me, Tidhar is one writer who is consistently engaged in fresh speculation on a Sfnally rigorous (and diverse) future, especially in these Central Station stories.
Locus, August 2013
All that said, what about “The Oracle” (Analog, July-August) itself? It's one of Tidhar's excellent long sequence of “Central Station” stories, set in an around a spaceport straddling Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This piece is in a sense an origin story, telling in one thread of Matt Cohen, on the run from protesters of his “imprisonment” of potential nascent AIs in servers kept isolated from the net; and in another thread of Ruth Cohen, who became The Oracle, “Joined” with the AIs (“the Others”). There's a nice mix of Sfnal speculation – about AIs, mostly – and depiction of character (especially Ruth's life), and even action. Like many of Tidhar's stories in this series, it depends to an extent on its links with the rest of the series – so this is very strong work by itself, but perhaps even more as part of a greater whole.
Locus, June 2016
Lavie Tidhar’s “Terminal” (Tor.com) is a moving piece about the people who take the desperate one-way trip to Mars on what are called “jalopies”, single person spaceships that take months to get there. The people have numerous motives, all valid in their own way. The story is told mostly through the conversations the travelers have with each other on the way, and especially on Mei, who is dying, and on Haziq, who has raised a family and now just wants to go to space. Then ending is quite powerful.
Locus, September 2016
Lavie Tidhar offers perhaps the best novella of the year in the July/August F&SF. “The Vanishing Kind” is set in London in the 1950s, but an alternate London: the Nazis won World War II, and they are in control in England. The narrative strategy is perfect: the tale is told by a shady figure in the British Nazi government, whose department keeps an eye on the protagonist, Gunther Sloam, a German screenwriter, who has come to London looking for Ulla, an actress who used to be his lover. He finds her trail hard and depressing to follow: she seems implicated in prostitution and drug-dealing, and along the way Gunther finds himself suspected of murder, and dealing with lowlifes and criminals and even Jews, who are supposed to have been eradicated. The twists mount, and his quest leads him to a very dark place … This is beautifully executed, capturing the noir style in pitch perfect fashion, telling an exciting story while revealing pointed details of occupied British life, and resolving with the perfect cynical note.
Locus, July 2017
Among an absolute hoard of short stories in the May-June Analog, pieces by Gord Sellar and Lavie Tidhar stand out. ... Tidhar’s “The Banffs” is a variant on the classic notion of the mysterious clique that has all the best stuff (think Bob Shaw’s “A Full Member of the Club”, or, in a different way, Avram Davidson’s “The Sources of the Nile”); and at the same time it’s variant of another old theme. A struggling novelist is introduced to a set of strange rich people, and somehow ends up housesitting in some of their fabulous remote houses – until they leave. We guess what they are from the start, of course, and the story isn’t earth-shakingly original, but it’s slickly and slyly told.
Locus, September 2017
Extrasolar is a new anthology from PS Publishing on the theme of extrasolar planets, concentrating mostly on planets discovered via our current (or near future) telescopes. One interesting story that doesn’t hew that closely to that theme is Lavie Tidhar’s “The Planet Woman by M. V. Crawford”, which presents three linked short-short stories supposedly written in the ‘70s by Crawford, a very obscure writer. Tidhar nails the period pretty well (the stories, for example, are said to be from The Alien Condition (a book I remember well!), the July 1974 Analog (last issue before I started buying it – that must be why I missed Crawford’s story!), and The Last Dangerous Visions). The pieces themselves are pretty effectively reminiscent of, say, Tiptree – set in a future where all men are forcibly given sex changes, then proceeding to a transcendent and somewhat mystical conclusion.
Locus, October 2017
The rest of The Book of Swords is also strong, of course. One more particular standout is “Waterfalling”, by Lavie Tidhar, in which the drug-addicted gunslinger Gorel of Gorilis has been engaged to “send a message”, i.e. to kill a man who stole something from Gorel’s client. Alas, what he stole was the Black Kiss, Gorel’s weakness, and the end result has Gorel visiting the title town, in which the local god sometimes “calls” its residents to climb a cliff to the top of a waterfall and dive to their death. The action is effective and brutal, the scheming interesting, the characters nicely hard-boiled, and the fantastical imagination -- the various races, the gods, the deep history – is absorbing.
Locus, July 2018
Lavie Tidhar’s “Yiwu” (Tor.com) is also about magic, in a way – Eshamuddin is a lottery ticket seller in a future Chinese city (in Tidhar’s ongoing Central Station future). The kick is that the lottery gives winners their true heart’s desire – which can be pretty magical, and pretty unexpected. But one day a woman who has been a regular at Eshamuddin’s shop wins – and nothing happens. Which brings trouble to him … this is fine, quiet, strange and subtle work.
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