Zion's Fiction

01/10/2024

‘Zion’s Fiction’ won the Kurd Lasswitz special prize in Leipzig last night.

30/09/2024

This just in from Leipzig, Germany:

10/09/2024

Check out this mammoth update to the Israel entry in ‘The Science Fiction Encyclopedia!’

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

26/06/2024

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26/06/2024

15/06/2024

From Hirnkost-Verlag:

“Today we once again looked at the page of the Kurd Laßwitz Prize and could hardly believe our eyes: Firstly, the winners for 2024 have already been determined. Secondly, we've found three projects in which we are directly involved! Congratulations to Thomas Thiemeyer His graphic for the "Distant Horizons" anthology, published by Exodus - Magazin made the race this year. In addition, we are happy about two special awards: Together with Fritz Heidorn, the Klimazukünfte 2050 and the German Climate Foundation, we will be honored for "a once-in-a-kind outstanding performance in terms of the literature competition Klimahaus Bremerhaven. It is particularly close to us that the book project "Zion's Fiction" is awarded the special prize "critical, engaged, intersectional" - an anthology with sci-fi stories by authors with Israeli backgrounds. Of course we congratulate all the other winners! Congratulations! Further information can also be found at https://www.hirnkost.de/hirnkost-raeumt-beim-kurd-lasswitz-preis-2024-ab/ .

11/06/2024

The German edition of ‘Zion's Fiction’ (Hirnkost Verlag, 2023), edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and the late Dr. Emanuel Lottem, is the inaugural winner of the Kurd Laßwitz Award in the category "Sonderpreis intersektional." The award honours a special commitment to critical and intersectional writing in the SF genre. The award ceremony will be held at ElsterCon at the end of September in Leipzig. The award, modeled after the Nebula Awards, is named after Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910), a pacifist, humanist, and author of speculative novels. The jurors are from within the trade, and the original idea was to promote German SF, including translations.

10/06/2024

The German edition of ‘Zion's Fiction’ (Hirnkost Verlag, 2023) is the inaugural winner of the Kurd Laßwitz Award in the category "Sonderpreis intersektional." The award honours a special commitment to critical and intersectional writing in the SF genre. The award ceremony will be held at ElsterCon at the end of September in Leipzig. The award, modeled after the Nebula Awards, is named after Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910), a pacifist, humanist, and author of speculative novels. The jurors are from within the trade, and the original idea was to promote German SF, including translations.

11/04/2024

Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction
April, 2024

In Memoriam: Emanuel Lottem (1944-2024)
Sheldon Teitelbaum

I met Emanuel Lottem in the early 1980s, when I took advantage of a visit to IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv to pop into the offices of the much lauded Israeli SF magazine Fantasia 2000. There I found Emanuel talking to Fantasia editor Aharon Hauptman and Viktor Ostrovsky, who later became infamous for revealing Mossad secrets and fleeing Israel (but at that time he was a naval officer and illustrator for the magazine). A little later I ran into him again, this time at thehome of Amos Geffen, SF/F maven, graphic designer, and publisher. I was there to give Amos the latest issue of New Outlook magazine, but instead the three of us found ourselves munching on Chinese food and chatting for hours about science fiction.

Many years later, I read a copy of Once Upon a Future, the Israeli Societyfor Science Fiction and Fantasy’s annual collection of stories, and it occurred to me that some of them deserved to be known to readers who don’t speak Hebrew. Thus, the idea to publish ‘Zion’s Fiction’ (2018) was born. But I knew I couldn’t do it alone, and Emanuel was the obvious partner, a translator of the highest order with an in-depth understanding of the genre. I would never have been able to get the project off the ground without him.

First, we collected possible stories and began discussing their merits. The first story on the list was ‘The Smell of Orange Groves’ by Lavie Tidhar, because it was both hard science fiction and entirely Israeli. Then I suggested Gail Hareven’s ‘The Slows’, which had already been published in The New Yorker. From thereon, we progressed using the incremental ‘another dunam, another goat’ method of digging through the available materials in search of worthy tales. We didn’t always agree on every story, but except for one case, we always came to an understanding in the end.

The real difficulty was writing the introduction. It really was a nightmare although Emanuel allowed himself a slight artistic freedom in describing things. In practice, we didn’t delete sentences for each other – we turned on Track Changes and reasoned at great length. In the end, we both had to agree on everything. Most of the time, we were both on the same wavelength, and I know we appreciated each other deeply. When two science fiction fans meet, they will always find themselves talking about their favourite stories and the ones they hate. So, in that sense we were simultaneously a couple of fans and a pair of professional editors. For me, our WhatsApp calls were the highlights of the entire week.

When the first book was published, we were both very proud of it. But on the way to the second, everything got complicated. Our agents weren’t happy with the sales, and left, but reappeared when the Germans and Japanese asked for translation rights. We also split with our publisher and realized that we would have to publish the second volume ourselves. And it was already a whole new Pandora’s box. The bottom line is that I’m proud of what we accomplished. The writers in these collections deserved to be published and English readers deserved to read them.

All along Emanuel was charming: always cordial, never anxious, always brimming with ideas, ready to change his mind. He was a wonderful friend, a source of inexhaustible wisdom, and now I miss him so much.

Note: This is a translation from the webzine, Bli Panika, with kind permission of the editor Rami Shalheveth.