Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Rotem won three Geffen prizes for her short stories and is currently working on her first full-scale novel in a planned series, The Cities’ Guardians, which is based on the premise that every community has a “spirit of place” that manifests itself as a living entity—supernatural, eternal, and almost omnipotent. Some of her stories have been translated into English. Rotem has opened an account with the international website Patreon, which allows content creators to receive communal support for their work; she now has some one hundred regular supporters.

Rotem Baruchin is a regular participant in Israeli SF/F conventions and is also a member of a volunteer group dedicated to the prevention of sexual harassment at conventions. She lives in Ramat Gan with her two cats. Her favorite genre is urban fantasy, and she loves looking for magic in cafés and bars, in dazzling streetlights, in broken pavement stones, and in anyone alive in the city’s boulevards after three a.m. who is still drinking coffee.

Yael Furman,born in Ramat Gan, Israel, on October 7, 1973 (a day after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War), began publishing work of genre interest with “Hatzva’im haNechonim” (The right colors) in the online magazine Bli Panika in 2001. For the next few years she published several well-regarded short stories in Israeli genre publications such as Halomot beAspamia and the annual anthology series Once Upon a Future, for which she was nominated for the Geffen Prize a remarkable eight times.

Her novel Children of the Glass House (2011) is notable as a genuine example of Israeli young adult science fiction. Set in a future Israel, the novel concerns humans genetically modified to live in water, existing in conditions somewhat reminiscent of James Blish’s underwater inhabitants in “Surface Tension” (1952) or Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople (1968). A human child befriends a water child against the background of a civil rights battle, partly carried out by members of the “Human League,” who want the captive water people released. Although the theme of the book is not unusual in SF, the Israeli setting is uncommon, and, in a nice use of location, at the end of the novel the water people are transferred to the Sea of Galilee, where they are now free—or at least freer. The novel was illustrated by artist Yinon Zinger and was based on Furman’s earlier short story, “Empty Walls,” winner of a first prize in a 2009 Olamot Convention short story contest. Another novel, The Portal Diamond , was published just before this volume went to press.

Elana Gomel,born in Kiev, Ukraine, emigrated to Israel with her mother, noted writer and essayist Maya Kaganskaya, in 1978. She obtained her PhD in English literature from Tel Aviv University and went on to postdoctoral study at Princeton University as a Fulbright Scholar. She subsequently taught and researched at many world-class universities, including Stanford, the University of Hong Kong, and Venice International University. She served as chair of the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is currently an associate professor.

Gomel is the author of four academic books: Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Ohio State University Press, 2003), Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination (Continuum, 2010), Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge, 2014), and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014). In 2006 she published a book in Hebrew, Us and Them , about the experience of Russian emigrants in Israel—one of the first comprehensive treatments of the subject. It was subsequently published in the United States as The Pilgrim Soul: Being Russian in Israel (Cambria Press, 2009). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles.

Active in the science-fiction community in Israel since its inception, Gomel participated in the development of the annual science-fiction conventions ICon, Utopia, and Worlds. With her graduate students she has organized an international science-fiction symposium at Tel Aviv University, and she has striven to bring Israeli science fiction and fantasy onto the world stage by writing and lecturing about it and by coediting the groundbreaking collection of essays With Both Feet On the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2013).

Gomel has published more than twenty fantasy and science fiction stories in New Horizons, Aoife’s Kiss, Bewildering Stories, Timeless Tales, The Singularity, Dark Fire , and many other magazines and in several anthologies, including People of the Book and Apex Book of World Science Fiction . Her fantasy novel, A Tale of Three Cities , was published by Dark Quest Books in 2013.

Gail Harevenwas born in 1959 in Tel Aviv to celebrated author Shulamith Hareven and to Israeli intelligence and senior Mossad officer and, later, Foreign Ministry official Alouph Hareven. Dr. Yitzhak Epstein, her great-grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine in the 1880s, was one of the founders of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, to which Hareven’s mother and then Gail herself were subsequently inducted.

Hareven grew up in Jerusalem, where she now resides. After receiving a BA in behavioral sciences from Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, she spent five years at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, reading Judaic studies and Talmud.

Hareven made her mark in Israeli SF/F in 1999, when she published an unabashedly genre-infused short-story collection called The road to Heaven . “The Slows,” published here, was placed in The New Yorker through the efforts of translator and researcher David Stromberg, an editor at the cultural journal Zeek . The collection’s title is telling, as the loss of paradise recurs as a theme in much of her work. Her access to the fantastique , in contrast, is joyful, profuse, and infused with a sense of wonder.

A journalist and book reviewer, she has written for most of the major Israeli media outlets as well as for Tikkun, Lilith , and other progressive American publications. In 2006 she was a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois, teaching writing and feminist theory, and in 2012, a guest lecturer at Amherst College.

So far, Hareven has written seventeen books: short story collections, children’s stories, novels, a thriller, and some nonfiction. Major Israeli theater companies have staged five of her plays. The Confessions of Noah Weber: A Novel (2009) garnered the Sapir Prize in Israel as well as rave reviews in the United States and elsewhere. In 2015 she published Lies, First Person , earning similar accolades. Her work has been translated into English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Czech, and Chinese. She is also a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize.

Guy Hasson,born in 1971, is an author, playwright, and filmmaker who crafts plays in Hebrew and prose in English. His books were published in Israel ( Hatchling, Life: The Video Game, Secret Thoughts , and Tickling Butterflies ), the United Kingdom ( The Emoticon Generation ), and the United States ( Hope for Utopia and Secret Thoughts ). He has won the Israeli Geffen Award for Best Short Story of 2003 (“All-of-Me™”) and 2006 (“The Perfect Girl”). Since 2006 he has been focusing on the production of original films, including the feature-length A Stone-Cold Heart and the web series The Indestructibles.

Eschewing Hebrew in his SF/F has served him well in accessing a wider readership but has also caused a modicum of confusion at home, especially when some of his work found itself translated back into his native Hebrew. In either language, however, Hasson is a force to be reckoned with, and his work has been translated into seven languages. His stories can be found in the various Apex World SF anthologies and in Apex’s Horrorology . In 2013, Hasson created an independent comic book company, New Worlds Comics, and its flagship title Wynter , written by him, was hailed as one of the best SF comic book series in recent time. In 2015 Hasson created an online comic book store for the blind and the visually impaired called Comics Empower.