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Osama now available for the Kindle!

The press release:

Lavie Tidhar’s new novel, Osama, is now available for the Kindle on both Amazon and Amazon UK.

Osama, published by PS Publishing in the UK, has been called “intensely moving” by Interzone, and a “powerful and disturbing political fantasy by a talent who deserves the attention of all serious readers” by Strange Horizons.

Osama tells the story of a private detective hired to locate the obscure writer of pulp novels featuring one Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. The detective’s quest takes him from Vientiane to Paris, London, New York and Kabul, across a subtly-changed world where nothing is quite as it seems – including himself.

Locus called the novel “a provocative and fast moving tale that raises good questions not only about the heritage of Al Qaeda, but about the slippage between reality and sensational fiction that sometimes seems to define our own confused and contorted experience of the last couple of decades.”

Tidhar is the author of the popular steampunk novels The Bookman and Camera Obscura, and is a current World Fantasy Award nominee for his work on the World SF Blog.

PS Publishing is the award-winning publisher of limited hardcover editions by the likes of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, China Mieville and Lawrence Block, among others.

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Osama e-book now available from PS Publishing!

The e-book edition of Osama is now available direct from PS Publishing, in non-DRM epub or mobi formats. It will be available on Amazon shortly.

And a new review of Osama from Boston Book Bums calls it “mind bending”, concluding:

This book will shake you. It left our reviewer in a hazy nightmare state, left in a waking dream that rattled him for hours. Literally, the complex construction ofOsama and rekindled intense collective PTSD of 9/11 woke our reviewer from his sleep.

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“The Last Osama” to be published in Interzone

Very glad to say my 7000 word story “The Last Osama” will be published soon in Interzone. “The Last Osama” is my own personal postscript to the novel and the two short stories, “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” and “Wrong Number”.

In other Osama news, Strange Horizons has a long, in-depth review of the novel by Michael Levy, concluding that:

Moving seamlessly between intense realism and equally intense surrealism, Osama is a powerful and disturbing political fantasy by a talent who deserves the attention of all serious readers.

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Pedro Marques on designing the OSAMA cover

Pedro Marques, the Portuguese artist responsible for the Osama cover, has a fascinating post on his blog detailing the process of creating the image used. I’m reproducing the English text below.

THE SPECTER OF A DECADE

Pedro Marques

In doing the cover for Lavie Tidhar‘s wonderfully complex novel Osama (very soon available through PS Publishing), I drew inspiration from a magnetic image created in 1951 by Gertrude Huston (the wife of New Direction’s publisher James Laughlin) for Julien Gracq’s A Dark Stranger, which I found on Will Schoffield’s blog.

I replaced the greco-roman classical silhouette with the more complex turban clad, bearded one of Osama Bin Laden, deciding later to add his eyes over the texture made up of debris (from a photo of one of the 1998 bombing sites in Africa) that fill this silhouette.

In Tidhar’s novel, Bin Laden is nothing but a fictional character in apulp paperback series, and the world hasn’t lived through 9/11, but what one reads in those pulp novels is pretty much what happened inour own dimension in the 1998 Dar es Salaam and Nairobi bombings. Maybe a pulp cover would have been more suitable, but I could not resist trying to assemble an iconic summary of the figure hiding behind the name: Osama.

Here’s what I believe to be the “dark” specter of our very sombre first decade of the new century and millenium, the very dark essence of our present days: not the late Bin Laden (a pathetic middle-aged sick man living in a well-to-do neighbourhood in a quiet town of Pakistan), nor even what may be known as Al Qaeda, but the fear, the willingness to accept brutality as a way of going forward in history, the loss of hope in the future.

 

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short stories

Audio: “The Insurance Agent” now at Escape Pod

Glad to say my latest story to be up at Escape Pod is The Insurance Agent, first published in Interzone. It is read by Christian Brady.

The bar was packed and everyone was watching the Nixon-Reagan match. The fighters were reflected off the bar’s grainy wood countertop and the tables’ gleaming surfaces and seemed to melt as they flickered down the legs of the scattered chairs. The bar was called the Godhead, which had a lot to do with why I was there. It was a bit of an unfair fight as Reagan was young, pre-presidency, circa-World War Two, while Nixon was heavy-set, older: people were exchanging odds and betting with the bar’s internal gaming system and the general opinion seemed to be that though Reagan was in better shape Nixon was meaner.

I wasn’t there for the match.

The Godhead was on Pulau Sepanggar, one of the satellite islands off Borneo, hence nominally under Malaysian federal authority but in practice in a free zone that had stronger ties to the Brunei Sultanate. It was a convenient place to meet, providing easy access to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and, of course, Singapore, which resented the island’s role as a growing business centre yet found it useful at the same time.

She wore a smart business suit and a smart communication system that looked like what it was, which was a custom-made gold bracelet on her left arm. She wore smart shades and I was taking a bet that she wasn’t watching the fight. She was drinking a generic Cola but there was nothing generic about her. I slid into a chair beside her and waited for her shades to turn transparent and notice me.

‘Drink, Mr. Turner?’

I liked the name Turner. It was Anglo-Saxon generic, a mid-level executive’s name, white as beige. ‘Call me James,’ I said. I liked James too. You could tell what a James Turner did just by hearing his name. The rest of me was tailor-made for the name, had been for some time: I had the kind of tan that suggested I had been East for just long enough to have acquired it, black hair that was short but not too short and had a decent but not overly-expensive cut, pale blue eyes behind shades that cost a lot of money to look like a knock-off.

There was a suggestion of a smile in the corners of her mouth and she said, ‘I don’t think I will.’

‘Mr. Turner, then,’ I said. ‘One name’s good as another.’ – continue reading, or listen in audio!

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short stories

The Immersion Book of Steampunk

Here’s the table of contents for the forthcoming anthology The Immersion Book of Steampunk, edited by Gareth D. Jones and Carmelo Rafala,  in which I have a story. Very cool cover and contributors!

Table of Contents:

  • “Follow That Cathedral!” by Gareth Owens
  • “The Machines of the Nehphilim” by James Targett
  • “The Siege of Dr. Vikare Blisset” by Jacques Barcia
  • “The Clockworks of Hanyang” by Gord Sellar
  • “Cinema U” by G.D. Falksen
  • “Kulterkampf” by Anatoly Belilovsky
  • “Rogue Mail” by Toby Frost
  • “Electrium” by Elizabeth Counihan
  • “Leaves of Glass” by Lavie Tidhar
  • “Memories in Bronze, Feathers, and Blood” by Aliette de Bodard
  • “Empire of Glass” by Tanith Lee
  • “Steam Horse” by Chris Butler
  • “Professor Fluvius’s Palace of Many Waters” by Paul Di Filippo

 

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short stories

New story: “Passage” at Daily Science Fiction

My latest short story, Passage, is now online at Daily Science Fiction.

“Ol Man Amerika oli gat sam problem naoia,” Verity said.
Brett said, “What do you mean the Americans are having problems now?”
Brett was tall and lanky and white. He was a teacher. Verity said, “Oli gat wan samting olsem sik. Mi harem long radio.”
After six months on the island Brett’s Bislama still wasn’t all that good, though he was trying. He said, “there’s a sickness in America, and you heard it on the radio?”
“Si.”
Yes.
Brett went in search of a radio.
#
“Awo,” said Moses, the engineer. He had studied in New Zealand. “Hemi no gud tumas.”
That is very bad.
They were sitting in the nakamal, discussing the news. It was very dark and everyone spoke in hushed voices. They were drinking kava. The bark had to be peeled off the root and the roots then had to be chopped and minced and mixed with water. The resultant drink was brown and made the mouth numb and made everyone sensitive to sound and light.
Hence the darkness and the hushed voices.
“I tried to phone home today,” Brett said. He was smoking a cigarette to try and counter the taste of the kava. “But I couldn’t get through.”
“Hemi wan nogud nakaimas,” Moses said.
“This is bad… this is bad magic?”
“Si.”
He had listened to the news, but the only radio station they could get was from the Solomon Islands. They had said some sort of virus had spread across America, and it was turning people into–it wasn’t clear what.
“Ol man I kakai man,” the Solomon Radio announcer said. Which meant cannibal…
It was hard to believe people back home were actually eating each other. But the news spoke of chaos, of mindless drones shuffling down main roads, biting and tearing flesh, infecting others in their turn.
A plague.
Wan sik I nogud.
“Do you want another round?” Moses said. – continue reading.
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book news

Black Gods Kiss

I don’t think we ever officially announced it, but I’ve just delivered the manuscript of Black Gods Kiss: A Guns & Sorcery Collection to PS Publishing. Black Gods Kiss is a companion volume to my recently-published PS Publishing novella Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, and is due to be published in late 2012.

Table of Contents:

1. Black Gods Kiss – 5600
2. Buried Eyes – 9400
3. Kur-a-len – 24000
4. The Dead Leaves – 5900
5. White Queen – 7500

So that’s two stories, two novelettes and a novella, all featuring Gorel of Goliris – and plenty of sex, drugs, guns and sorcery!

The first two stories (“Black Gods Kiss” and “Buried Eyes”) will be published in the next two issues of Postscripts; the others will be original to the collection.

Here’s a little fun extract – the opening paragraphs – from “The Dead Leaves”:

‘I would like you,’ the sorcerer said, ‘to kill a man.’

Gorel of Goliris stared at the sorcerer across the table. There are many questions one can ask in response to such a statement. The amateur might ask, for instance, why? or who? – good questions both, for certain. The amateur might ask, What has he done? or Is he a good man or a bad one? The professional has other, more urgent considerations.

‘How much?’ Gorel said, and the sorcerer smiled, revealing blackened, broken teeth. Gorel hated sorcerers, but this one was, so far, paying for the drinks.

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Camera Obscura nominated for an Airship Award

Very glad to report that Camera Obscura has been nominated for the Airship Award in the written category! The Airship Awards are given for a variety of steampunk categories at Steamcon, an annual steampunk convention.

The nominees in the written category are:

Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel, Tee Morris & Pip Ballantine (Harper Voyager)
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, Mark Hodder (Pyr)
Camera Obscura, Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot)
The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman (Tor)

Very nice company to be in! A full list of nominees can be found here.

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Jesus & The Eightfold Path cover and pre-orders!

I’m delighted to announce that Jesus & The Eightfold Path is now available for pre-orders! The book costs £10 for a limited edition hardcover of just 200 copies. While these are not signed, I should be at Fantasycon this year for the launch, and will make sure to sign copies there.

The awesome cover – and isn’t it an awesome cover? – is by Melissa Gay, who did the cover for HebrewPunk back in the day. Check it out!

THREE WISE MEN CAME FROM THE EAST for the infant Jesus in The New Testament. Three brave companions accompany the Buddha in the Chinese classic A Journey to the West. Could they have been the same three? Guided by a star, three strange companions arrive in the barbarous land of Judea to seek a newborn child–a possible messiah to some, and the reincarnation of the Budda to others.

When the child’s life is threatened, his family and new guardians escape to Egypt, returning years later, to a Jewish land on the cusp of annihilation by the Roman Empire.

Once a general in the Judean army, now a Roman agent, Josephus Flavius is sent by Caesar back to his home land to observe and report on the actions of the troubling young man now preaching sedition in the Galilee–a boy with the unsettling powers of kung-fu…

Their lives would collide in a cataclysmic confrontation between Romans and Jews, between empire and rebels–and change the world forever…

And here is Gardner Dozois reviewing the book in the latest issue of Locus:

Lavie Tidhar is one of the most interesting new writers to enter the genre in some time, and his chapbook novella “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” is another major work by him, although even harder to pin down by genre than is his usual work.  A vivid and gonzo reimagining of the life of Jesus, it’s less sacrilegious and more respectful than you would think a story whose working title was “Kung Fu Jesus” would be, although Jesus does indeed get to use his martial arts skills, learned under the tutelage of the Eastern Masters who taught him to follow the Eightfold Path, to beat up the moneylenders as he casts them from the Temple, defeat some attacking mummies, and so forth.  Although all this would probably have been enough to get Tidhar burnt at the stake during the Middle Ages, he actually treats Jesus with a fair degree of reverence, as a man who really has been touched by the Divine (although what Divine remains open to question) and possesses immense preternatural abilities.  Much of the gonzo humor, and much of the entertainment value, is carried by the Three Wise Men, here reimagined as former kings, wizards, and minor gods impressed into service by a superior supernatural force, and called Sandy, Monkey, and Pigsy; they get many of the best lines.  There’s also a supporting role for the slippery Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius.  Perhaps what this reminds me the most of is the movie Big Trouble in Little China, if the filmmakers had decided to tackle the Gospels as well as Chinese mythology.  Although some of the more pious may be offended, most readers will probably find this hugely entertaining.