Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar:
Well, I grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, and moved to South Africa when I was about 16. Since then I've been travelling a fair bit, and lived in London for a long time. I started writing seriously around 2003 but I think it's fair to say I've always wanted to "be a writer". I didn't realise quite what was actually involved!

Lavie Tidhar:
Well, at the moment I'm back living in London. I suppose my main identity is still as an Israeli - Hebrew is my first language and it's still an important part of me. Sometimes I pretend to be British, or South African, but it's never more than pretence, I think!

Lavie Tidhar:
A lot, I think. I'm very influenced by location, by setting. The Bookman is very much my London novel - while I went through a Vanuatu period and a South East Asia period - but now I return more and more to Israel as a setting and my current project, Central Station, is set in a future Tel Aviv.

Lavie Tidhar:
At the moment, a 300 year old armaments factory! When I was living in Vanuatu I could look out of my hut and see the volcano. Otherwise it's been a mix - sometimes a car park, sometimes no window at all!

Lavie Tidhar:
I've always been a fan of steampunk, in the sense that I loved Tim Powers' books for a long time, James Blaylock and so on. So I sat down to write a book - The Bookman - that I would enjoy reading, and throwing in all the cool bits from Powers or Blaylock or Kim Newman's Anno Dracula books and so on - pirates! Literary references! Adventure! and so on - the German writer Karl May even makes an appearance in the third book, The Great Game. I think a lot of it is affection for the sort of books we grew up on - from The Three Musketeers to Old Shatterhand to Sherlock Holmes to Jules Verne.

It's about trying to capture that sense of fun, of innocence - while at the same time being very aware of the problems of the period those stories came from, and addressing that, too.

Lavie Tidhar:
Sure! Try Tim Powers (On Stranger Tides, The Anubis Gates), James P. Blaylock (Homunculus), Kim Newman (Anno Dracula), Paul di Filippo in The Steampunk Trilogy... all the classics!

Lavie Tidhar:
I have to confess I'm a little bemused by the recent rise in steampunk's popularity. I'm not sure what it is. I think our 21st century world has been shaped so decisively by the Victorian era that we still feel it - and react to it - today. And of course our own time is suffering through much of the same things - poverty, industrialisation, global inequality - even our wars reflect that earlier era, Dr. Watson returns from the war in Aghanistan in the Sherlock Holmes stories and you could be forgiven to mistake it for today!

I think steampunk has the potential to say some very interesting things - my worry is when it defaults to just telling adventure stories with zeppelins or whatever. But you could say that about any book, and particularly in science fiction - there must always - for me - be an added value beyond the mere story.

Lavie Tidhar:
Sure! Camera Obscura takes place about 3 years after the events of The Bookman, and concerns a French secret agent - Milady de Winter - as she deals with a mysterious missing artefact of Lizardine technology. It's sort of a mix between kung fu and blaxploitation films and noir - it's more of a weird murder mystery than an adventure novel. And we learn more about where the lizards came from. In contrast, The Great Game - set in the turn of the century - is more of a spy novel, following Harry Houdini amongst others, and bringing the series to a sort of conclusion - I think it leads on naturally from what happened in The Bookman - it was always clear to me what the end result would be, anyhow!

Lavie Tidhar:
To me that's a lot of the fun - working in all these (sometimes terribly obscure!) references, like Easter eggs. If people recognise them it can be fun, if they don't they're just part of the book. Like I said earlier, the German writer Karl May, who I grew up reading, makes an appearance in The Great Game, but the references can be to anything from Hong Kong kung fu movies to Alexander Dumas.

Lavie Tidhar:
Well, I'm glad to say that Osama (which is currently nominated for the World Fantasy Award for best novel) will be published in Germany soon. It's a very different novel to the steampunk books - a sort of weird noir detective novel about the War on Terror and pulp fiction.

Hebrewpunk was my early attempt to sort of re-write traditional fantasy (vampires, werewolves and so on) into Jewish fantasy, which was a lot of fun. Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (which is currently nominated for a British Fantasy Award for best novella) is my take on sort of classic sword and sorcery fantasy - only my version is guns and sorcery, and there's as much sex and violence as I could possibly cram into it. It's fun!

Lavie Tidhar:
I'm currently doing the final revision on a new novel that's about to go off to my agent. It's a pretty cool book, I think - it's to do with World War 2, and the Cold War, and it's a love story, and it's kind of weird... Then I hope to finish my Central Station project, which is a cycle of linked stories set in a far-future Tel Aviv - the individual stories have been published in various magazines and in a couple of Year's Bests anthologies. I hope to finish that soon. I'm also working on various comics/graphic novels projects. And then maybe I could work on making a movie!