We heard last night that Lavie Tidhar has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel with his superb Osama. This is such brilliant news, not just for Lavie himself (I forget exactly how many publishers turned this book down originally, or wanted Lavie to change the title – bet they’re kicking themselves now… ) but also for SFF. Osama was so clearly the right choice – and what a wonderful way to end this year’s awards season.
At his recent gig at Foyles to launch the Solaris paperback edition of Osama, Lavie talked passionately about speculative fiction and the European tradition, why genre is irrelevant, and some of the difficulties he experienced in getting Osama out to us. The man lives and breathes ideas, which for some might be explanation enough as to why he’s so readily found a home within the SFF community. But the other thing about Lavie – the most important thing – is that he’s a bloody good writer. Read Osama and you won’t just find one of the most daring and original alternate histories of recent years – you’ll also find muscular, evocative prose, a resonant sense of place, a revelling in detail and criss-crossing everything the acknowledgement that our existence here is above all a human story, not just an ongoing historical and technological experiment.
I’ve just been reading ‘Strigoi’, a short story by Lavie recently published in Interzone. It’s set in an Israel of the future, the ‘Central Station’ which is now Earth’s chief space port. But what we have here is not the bright, shiny, impossible and rather tedious future we’re already tired of (the way SF has so often been misrepresented in and by the mainstream). We don’t have a doomsday scenario either. What we have is pragmatism, a kind of positive uncertainty. Above all we have detail:
The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is the smell of the sea, of salt water and tar, coming from the west. It is the smell of orange groves, of citrus trees in bloom, coming from the distant plantations of the Sharon region. It is the smell of the resin or sap that sometimes drips from a cut in the eternally renewing adapto-plant neighbourhoods surrounding Central Station, sprouting like weeds high above the more permanent structures of the old neighbourhood; it is the smell of ancient asphalt heating in the sun, of shawarma cooking slowly, drenched in spices, on a spit, close to a fire; it is the smell of Humanity Prime, that richest and most concentrated of smells. There is nothing like it in the Outer Worlds.
The old collides with the new here in a form we can recognise and thus feel a part of. Here is a world that is still in the future and yet all around us, a world we have a stake in, even as it arrives. It is the fine detail, the minutiae, that make this world real to us, as much as any overarching concept. Tidhar’s world is a world we feel as well as imagine.
We sense its reality.
This is the kind of SF I want to be reading.
Congratulations to Lavie Tidhar, and to all this year’s World Fantasy Award winners. This has been a good one.
Oh, and you can read another of Lavie’s Central Station stories, ‘The Lord of Discarded Things’, right here at Strange Horizons. I recommend it.