Spotlight on The Best of World SF
Lavie Tidhar was born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.
Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009), The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012), and The Apex Book of World SF 3 (2014); he was editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog from 2001-13, and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there. He launched The Best of World SF anthology series in 2021; volume three is out this year.
You’ve just launched the latest volume of the Best of World SF Anthology series. Tell us about the series, why you started it, and your journey to publication.
It’s a passion project of mine, that I’ve spent many years trying – and failing! – to get going before publishers Head of Zeus (now Bloomsbury) threw their weight behind it. It’s a showcase of some of the best short science fiction stories from around the world, both stories that have made history as the first to win Hugos (for example) from their respective countries, and stories by brand-new writers, including quite a few originals scattered in between. Each volume has around 175,000 words of fiction, and I’m just incredibly proud of it. I wish I could get it into the hands of every science fiction reader out there!
What sparked your love for reading and editing SF in translation in the first place?
It’s more than a little self-serving! I grew up in Israel, English is my second language, and coming up in the field I often hoped for someone to champion that sort of outsider-to-SF writing that, at least back then, was very rare. I did find receptive editors – Ellen Datlow gave me my first big break, and Gardner Dozois became an important champion of my work later on – but a lot of it was just… hard! Many of my international writer friends can share similar stories, of trying to storm the Bastille, as it were.
And then, too, I travelled a lot, and always picked up genre works where I could – Malaysian horror here, Romanian science fiction there, and so on – so I had a fairly wide knowledge of some of the stuff out there. I even got to hang out with many of the SF writers and editors in China back in 2000 (when we were all so much younger!) so had some contacts there. Once I did my very first World SF anthology, with Apex in 2009, I was able to pull all that together.
Your interest in promoting international SF to a wider audience is longstanding. Tell us about your earlier volumes in the same vein, and the World SF Blog.
I kept hoping someone else would do it, but no one did! Eventually around 2008 I thought I might be able to pull it off. I pitched the idea to Jason Sizemore from Apex as something that ‘‘You won’t make any money on, but it’s a good thing to do!’’ I was right on both counts! And to his eternal credit Jason said yes. We did the first anthology on a hope and a prayer, and it was pretty radical back then, I think. We did five in total, the last three edited by Mahvesh Murad and Cristina Jurado, respectively. The World SF Blog was just meant as a promotional device for the series, but it quickly evolved into its own thing, and importantly created a small community around it, with people who went on to keep up the fight!
But I kept hoping a big publisher would pick up the anthology, and it was back to getting rejection after rejection (a certain large NY genre imprint took less than an hour to turn it down). I was lucky to finally find my match with Nicolas Cheetham at Head of Zeus, who gave me the budget and resources to turn the concept into a large, definitive hardback anthology. He then let me run with it even further, so the third volume is coming out now – it’s over half a million words on the series so far! And none of them overlap with the Apex books, apart from I think two stories I just really wanted to get people to read again.
You’ve always got a lot of projects going, including curating Storybundles. Tell us about those, and the latest one.
I love doing bundles! I think I got introduced to them when Cat Rambo kindly included a book of mine in an early one. I thought doing a World SF bundle would be cool, approached Jason Chen from Storybundle about it, and discovered I really enjoyed the whole thing. I love getting books into new readers’ hands (or digital devices in this case) while making some much needed money for the authors. The World SF Bundle has become an annual event, and always does well, and I’ve branched out into doing a few different ones now.
You’re also a fiction writer. What’s next for you in terms of your own books and stories? Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
I’m having a busy month – my latest science fiction novel, The Circumference of the World has just come out in the US, and my second literary novel, Adama, has just come out in the UK. Moving into general fiction has been interesting – I keep getting asked ‘‘Is this your first novel?’’ Which makes me laugh, but I always say yes! Just ignore all those other books with the more colourful covers on them….
What I’d love, though, is just to get the word out about The Best of World SF books. I’m desperate to get people to read this series, because there is so much wonderful fiction out there. Just give it a try!
Cover and interview art and design by Francesca Myman.
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