Pixel Scroll 3/4/18 The Repeated Sentence And Trio Of Asterisks Were Both Actual Results.

Tonight, a ridiculously short Scroll while I’m away helping with my mother’s care. Please add your brilliance in the comments!

(1) ZION’S FICTION MAKES BOOK. Sheldon Teitelbaum announced, “It’s been a tough slog but we finally sold Zion’s Fiction, to Mandel-Vilar Press. The book will be published on Sept. 25, 2018.” It’s been a long road – Sheldon originally tried to fund it with a Kickstarter in 2014.
Pre-order copies from Amazon.

Showcases the best of Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy published or otherwise available in English translation since 1970. It features an introductory survey essay, author bios, story intros and an afterword. Award-winning SF/F illustrator Avi Katz provides the front and back covers as well as illustrations for each story. There is a foreword by Robert Silverberg, America’s most revered living SF/F writer and an introduction by Dr. Aharon Hauptman, the founding editor of Fantasia 2000, the first Israeli SF/F magazine (1978-1983). The stories come Hebrew, Russian and English language magazines, like the Israeli Fantasia 2000 and Halomot B’Aspamia, or The New Yorker and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Other sources include dedicated websites in Israel, or single-author collections. Several stories have not yet appeared anywhere

(2) CAT EXPOSE. Shocking but true….

(3) FREELANCE CATNAP. Can you believe it, some cats aren’t waiting for File 770 to come calling.

[Thanks to JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W. The title is almost longer than the Scroll.]

Zion’s Fiction Update

Sheldon Teitelbaum

Sheldon Teitelbaum has good news – Zion’s Fiction may have found a publisher.

I wanted you to know that Wesleyan University Press has told us they want to buy Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature. They are now dickering with our agent, Eddie Schneider at JABberwocky Literary Agency.

File 770 covered the attempt to crowdfund publication of the book in 2014. Zion’s Fiction co-editor Sheldon Teitelbaum teased the project with this attention-getting reminder –

Israel is the only country in the world directly inspired by a science fiction novel — Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland, or Old-New Land. “If you will it,” he famously declared, “it is no dream!” Millions took him up on his challenge, with results no science fiction writer ever could have imagined.

An image of the latest draft cover is shown below.

Meanwhile, Teitelbaum is now hard at work on a volume of academic essays on Israeli SF, a companion volume to With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature, with Dr. Elana Gomel of Tel Aviv University and Stanford.

Zion’s Fiction Kickstarter Starts Slow, Keeps Pitching

Zions FictionBy Sheldon Teitelbaum, Zion’s Fiction co-editor: So, if I were Chabad’s Rabbi Cunin, one look at the Telethon “Tote” ($1,548 and 25 days to go) and I’d start dancing like Kuni Lemel big time. I feel I can bring Reb Cunin into this because once, the only place I could interview him for the LA Times was on an airplane from L.A. to New York I had no other reason to visit. Every time he emphasized a point, which was often, he poked me in the shoulder. I carry around bursitis to this day, bless the fellow.

So, we’re not doing so hot. Course, it’s early in the game. My reckoning? The story samples are maybe a little weak for the weight they have to carry. That’s what happens when you raise money to buy and translate new work. You make do. But we don’t. We are going to try to swap them out ASAP with stronger material — in two cases by the same wonderfully talented authors.

Also, we have a big piece coming in the Jewish Journal’s monthly Tribe Magazine on Oct. 31 (when I shall be dressed, appropriately, as Doctor Who for our annual cul de sac Halloween Chile and White Russian shindig) and, simultaneously, in the San Francisco weekly Jewish paper.

Meanwhile, another day, another dozen story pitches. I even pitched Peres at his personal email. Said Mr. President, the only place you or I are going to see a New Middle East is in the pages of our book. He didn’t seem impressed. 

So, as Chekhov declared to Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV when he was arrested aboard a nuclear wessel, “Now vould be a good time to visit the Zion’s Fiction Project Kickstarter site and see what there is to see.” You don’t have to back us. You do have to tell your friends on the half chance they have a doddering great uncle in an attic somewhere who loves this kind of stuff.

As Scotty said in that same movie (speaking into a Mac Plus mouse, no less), “Hello Computer!”

Or, use this url: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1988485855/the-zions-fiction-project

A visit to www.zionsfiction.com (where you can check out our press so far) will also put you in front of a button you can click to take you to Kickstarter. Alas, it doesn’t respond to “Hello Button” either.

Zion’s Fiction Kickstarter Opens 10/12

Zions FictionZion’s Fiction co-editor Sheldon Teitelbaum begins his appeal with this attention-getting reminder –

Israel is the only country in the world directly inspired by a science fiction novel — Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland, or Old-New Land. “If you will it,” he famously declared, “it is no dream!” Millions took him up on his challenge, with results no science fiction writer ever could have imagined.

Science fiction is also a facet of today’s Israeli culture – and making the rest of the world aware is the purpose of Zion’s Fiction: An Anthology of Israeli Fantasy & Science Fiction, projected to be the first of a three-volume English language collection of Israeli speculative fiction, provided enough money can be raised.

Pledges will be taken on Kickstarter beginning October 12 at 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Many of the country’s finest authors, including Amos Oz, Meir Shalev, A.B. Yehoshua, Emile Habibi, Nava Semel, Gail Hareven, Michal Snunit, Orly Kastel-Bloom. Sayed Keshua, Etgar Keret and Shimon Adaf — Jews, Arabs, Russians — have written the stuff. It’s high time the rest of us got a chance to read it.

Free samples of four stories can be read at the main Zion’s Fiction website: “Mood” by Gail Hareven, translated by Emanuel Lottem; “Robotnik” by Lavie Tidhar, “My Lousy Autumn” by Nitai Peretz, translated by Jessica Cohen; and “The Stern-Gerlach Mice” by Mordechai Sasson, translated by Emanuel Lottem.

Zion’s Fiction has gathered an impressive set of endorsements, the most poetic being David Brin’s:

What a rate of mutation! That mystic shepherds should become a people of priests and sacrifices, then transform under hard pressure into enduring, argumentative teachers, then again into scientific pioneers… and now?  Zion’s Fiction explores the unlimited dreams of a people who have learned to stand on shifting ground. To face a future filled with danger and hope, forging into territory that can only be surveyed with the lamp of imagination on our brows.

Another by Jack Dann recalls his own groundbreaking 1974 collection Wandering Stars: an Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction — a book I remember reviewing when it came out.

Volume one of Zion’s Fiction will feature Israeli speculative fiction written since 1978, which Teitelbaum deems “the start of the golden age of Israeli SF.” If there are funds to produce the other two volumes, the second will showcase material published since 1948, “when hard-won independence gave rise to literary musings over alternate futures, presents and pasts.” The third will focus on material imagining different utopian versions of Jewish statehood, from the mid-19th Century and later.

Richard Lupoff hits the nail on the head when he says, “It is a land of scientific and human miracles. It makes perfect sense that Israel’s rich and tumultuous culture should produce a blossoming science fiction community.”