“Testing, Testing – Is This Thing On?” Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv interviewed
Books, Interviews | BSCreview Guest | May 28, 2009 at 2:18 pmIf you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself. Taking that thought to the extreme, today we have an interview with Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv conducted by . . . Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv. Who else better to give you the lowdown on their latest project The Tel Aviv Dossier? Sure, you can just read the first 3 chapters for yourself but then you’d miss a single reply that includes a fireman, a psychopath, biblical illusions, and head.
Nir: So, do you remember how it all started?
Lavie: Well, Ellen Datlow was editing an anthology of Lovecraftian stories (Lovecraft Unbound) and I remember thinking very vaguely about this story set in Tel Aviv. . .
Nir: As I reckon, some time after we finished our previous novel you said “Let’s write something else, but not a novel this time. Something short.” Well, here we are, then.
Lavie: Right. I really didn’t want to write another novel—the first one we did was traumatic enough!
Nir: I think it was about 7,000 words into the text that we realised that this isn’t going to be a short story, though you insisted it’ll be a novelette—a bit longer. Then ChiZine Publications came along.
Lavie: Well, what happened was, it was definitely going to be longer than what Ellen wanted, and I thought it would be a novella by then, when Brett from ChiZine Publications dropped me a message. I’d sold a few stories to ChiZine over time and I knew they were opening up a small press, but I was pretty surprised to be asked if I had any books available . . . and I said no.
Nir: Then you told me about this and asked me whether I had anything, and I said, well, no. Then, through a deduction whose logic I fail to understand to this very day, we sent them a synopsis of the novel, which wasn’t a novel yet, which we didn’t know was going to be a novel, and also those 7,000 words that we already had, and they said yes. That was a first for me, I must say.
Lavie: Me, too. They sort of said, well, we like it, we think there’s a novel in it, here’s a contract—now go and write it. They tricked me!
Nir: Yeah, I remember you whining about it. “I don’t want to write another book with you! How come this always happens to me?”
Lavie: Well, the first book—the Hebrew book we did—we wrote when I was living in London and you were in Tel Aviv, so that was fairly easy. But then I moved to Vanuatu, where I had no Internet access for a year, and then to Asia, so with The Tel Aviv Dossier we had to deal with the time difference—we couldn’t really Skype the book like we did with the first one. So that was a bit tricky. But it was fun, too—do you have any particular bits you like in the book
Nir: I like the crazy fireman, who’s fulfilling a longtime dream of mine, to drive a firetruck along Ibn-Gvirol street in Tel Aviv—which is where I live—going through everything in my way. And of course I like the bodyless head, mostly because you wanted to behead me when I first introduced it.
Lavie: I think I only agreed because I liked the joke about giving head . . . sigh. But ChiZine really loved the fireman, didn’t they? Everyone likes a psycopath. I wonder how many people are going to get the Biblical allusions, on the other hand.
Nir: It was a bit weird for me, writing in English a story which relates so much to the Bible and the New Testament. As opposed to you, I’m used to writing in Hebrew, and using Biblical expressions and allusions in that language is quite natural to me. So, in this novel, I left most of that stuff to you.
Lavie: That’s a good point—you mainly write in Hebrew, I mainly write in English, so it was the opposite process for when we wrote the Hebrew book. In the first one you were acting as the sort of overall editor on the book, while in this one the roles were reversed—but I agree with you about using the Bible; it’s very natural in the Hebrew and the English translation always feels very cumbersome. Even the names are all different! But I think we both knew that, as much as we began with this idea of Lovecraft, this was going to be an essentially—I wouldn’t say Jewish (because we play with the Christian imagery a bit, too), exactly—but playing with certain concepts embedded in Judaism, and messianism in particular. And I enjoyed working in a small Adam and Eve scene, and then of course, in the final section it just became irresistible to use the New Testament a little—those two opposing versions of the Sermon on the Mount were, I think, the most fun to write.
Funny story—as you know, I grew up on a kibbutz, which is essentially a very atheistic/socialist sort of society, but of course we had to study the Bible—it’s part of the curriculum in Israel all through high school—but the kibbutz school didn’t want to spend a lot of money on Bibles (a natural enough inclination, I suppose) so they ended up accepting a bunch of Bibles from the Bible Society, which is a Christian organisation, and these included the New Testament as well. Which wouldn’t have been a problem, but a few years later a journalist discovered this and there were big articles in the papers about it—you can imagine the headlines: CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY OUTREACH TO GODLESS KIBBUTZ CHILDREN! or something to that effect. There were protests to the Education Ministry.
Nir: I grew up in the suburbs, and, while knowing of the existence of the New Testament, I never laid eyes on a copy until I left home after serving in the army. Anyway, leaving most of this part of the novel to you, I spent a jolly good time blowing things up and tearing them apart. Most of the last part of the book is, in fact, you working on the holy scripture and me demolishing anything in sight. To each his own.
Lavie: Heh. Yes, there isn’t much left standing by that time. Speaking of the army, in that stranger-than-fiction kind of way, didn’t you have quite a close call during the first Gulf War?
Nir: Oh, yeah! I was in basic training a the time—was recruited exactly a week before the US ultimatum expired. There were some people there who were, how shall we say it, a bit too religious for their own good. One of those shining personalities had a huge beard, and he declared in front of everyone that even if the Iraqis bomb us with chemical weapons, he wouldn’t shave that beard in order to be able to wear a gas mask. Why? Because he trusted the lord. Then came the day of the first siren alarm, and about 20 seconds into it we all saw this love-beard emerging out of the toilets, with a gas mask on, beard-less. I loved this. I loved every moment of this until ex-beard, noticing that I was somewhat slacking behind as far as praying to the lord was concerned (there was a sort of group prayer thing going on, which I didn’t take part in), tried to shoot me with his M16 rifle. Had he only known how to use a rifle, I probably wouldn’t be here today. But I am—so I guess somebody up there likes me!
Lavie: He would have done the world of letters a great favour . . . just kidding. So it’s a strange book—we’ve basically got this unexplained force beginning to destroy Tel Aviv bit by bloodied bit, told through multiple accounts—letters, transcripts, even chat logs—but following three main characters throughout the whole thing, as they try to make sense of what is happening—and that’s just the first part.
Nir: Then, as violence continues, a mountain emerges in the middle of the city. This idea came to me when I remembered reading about a farmer in Mexico who saw, one morning, a thin whisp of smoke coming out of the centre of his field. By lunchtime this was no longer a whisp, and by evening—or maybe it was several days later—the field had turned into a full-blown volcano. We basically did the same thing—only with a shopping mall.
Lavie: I thought we were doing Mount Sinai! Well, sort of. Anyway, so the book continues a year later—most of Tel Aviv is gone, no one can get out—and we have two strangers who come into the city from the outside, each for his own reasons. So we got to show a bit of what was happening outside Tel Aviv all this time—how it’s affected the rest of the country. You know, we used something that is very common in Israeli dystopian fiction (such as it is), which is that of Orthodox Judaism taking over the secular state. And you know, with Tel Aviv being this sort of secular, hedonistic city, it seemed quite fitting. We only see a little of this, but it’s very much in a tradition (if a young one!). Anyway, the fun part here was to show the city after the event—how people survive, how they live in the shadow of this awful miracle that took place. We basically almost did a string of short, self-contained “pictures” of different sides of it—some of them quite surreal, when I think back—but they add a little weight, I think. And then we have the two strangers—I really liked Mordechai, what do we call him in the book, a pseudo-historian? He’s like a Da Vinci Code character, who fervently believes in conspiracy theories and ancient astronauts and the Loch Ness monster, only to be confronted with the first “genuine” supernatural event—and he’s not there! He’s missed it!
Nir: Not to mention the issues he has with his mother . . . and then there’s Sam, the ex-Mossad agent, who’s called in to investigate what’s really going on in Tel Aviv. Trained as he is, the first thing that happens to him there is an ambush, which also serves nicely to show how the social order within the city has completely deteriorated. There are gangs and cults and all sorts of organizations, which, in western society as we know it, are mostly underground and not too common, which in this broken city become the mainstream. And, since such groups can’t really get along, they start fighting.
Lavie: Yeah, Sam was fun to write because, a bit like the detective in our first book, he thinks of himself as the character he’s supposed to be, but isn’t. His view of himself and the way the world views him clash. It’s strange, isn’t it: we wrote two books together—one in Hebrew, one in English—a year apart, yet they’re both coming out at virtually the same time. The first one, Retzach Bidyoni (A Fictional Murder) is a mystery set in an Israeli science fiction convention. I think that’s the first and only example of that kind of book in Israel?
Nir: Yep. We actually got that idea when visiting ICon, the annual Israeli SF&F convention. You gave a lecture and complained about the fans interrupting you; I gave a lecture and the fans complained about me shutting their mouths. We should do that again some time.
Lavie: I know. I remember this Orthodox guy with double-glasses—you know when you have like windshield shades over normal glasses—and he had them raised so they looked like big weird eyebrows. And he kept interrupting, and I saw later he wrote about it, that he went but didn’t hear anything he didn’t already know . . . wish we’d have written him in. Anyway, strangely enough they’re coming out at the same time (an ocean apart), so after that we don’t have any more books! Want to write one about mutant ninja turtles? That’d be cool.
Nir: What a cool and original idea! I’m on it. I’ll send you a first chapter tomorrow. Hmm . . . I think there should be four of them.
Lavie: I think we might be on to something!
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The Tel Aviv Dossier is set to ship on July 1st from Chizine and is available for pre-order now.
Book Synopsis:
The wind picks up even more, pushing me, as if it’s trying to jerk the camera away from my hands. I spin around and the camera pans across the old bus terminal and someone screams…
Into the city of Tel Aviv the whirlwinds come, and nothing will ever be the same.
Through a city torn apart by a violence they cannot comprehend, three disparate people—a documentary film-maker, a yeshiva student, and a psychotic fireman—must try to survive, and try to find meaning: even if it means being lost themselves. As Tel Aviv is consumed, a strange mountain rises at the heart of the city, and shows the outline of what may be another, alien world beyond. Can there be redemption there? Can the fevered rumours of a coming messiah be true?
As the city loses contact with the outside world and closes in on itself, as the few surviving children play and scavenge in the ruins, can innocence survive, and is it possible for hope to spring amid such chaos?
A potent mixture of biblical allusions, Lovecraftian echoes, and contemporary culture, The Tel Aviv Dossier is part supernatural thriller, part meditation on the nature of belief—an original and involving novel painted on a vast canvas in which, beneath the despair, humour is never absent.
Experience the last days of Tel Aviv…
About the Authors:
Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer until recently resident in the United Kingdom. In 2007, it was reported that he moved to Vanuatu. He also lived for a long period in South Africa. He was the winner, in 2003, of the first Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition sponsored by the European Space Agency and, in 2005, was a Writers of the Future finalist. He was nominated for an Israeli Geffen Award in 2006. His novelette The Dope Fiend was the last ever story published on Sci Fiction.
Nir Yaniv is an Israeli musician, author, and editor. In 2000, he founded the webzine of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and was its chief editor for seven years. In 2007, he became chief editor of Chalomot Be’aspamia, Israel’s only professional printed SF&F magazine. His short stories were collected (along with three poems/songs) in the 2006 collection Ktov Ke’shed Mi’shachat (One Hell of a Writer). His personal columns, articles, and book reviews were published in various Israeli magazines.
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