INTRODUCTION
Lavie Tidhar
Nir Yaniv is that rare breed: an old-fashioned renaissance man. As a musician he released several albums, including Israel’s first styled “space rock album”, The Universe in a Pita. Indeed he has his own recording studio, built into his apartment in Tel Aviv. He composed the soundtrack for our mutual friend Guy Hasson’s indie feature-length movie, Heart of Stone (2008). He played a monster in Elar Rath’s 2006 short horror film Eaten and wrote, produced and directed his own short film, Conspiracy, in 2011, which showed in several festivals around the world, including Sci Fi London.
Then there’s Nir Yaniv, the editor. He created and edited Israel’s first online genre magazine, sf-f.org, then went on to edit several issues of the groundbreaking print magazine Chalomot Be’aspamia. As an editor in the field of short science fiction and fantasy in Hebrew his influence can scarcely be measured.
And then, of course, there is Nir Yaniv, the writer.
I wrote two novels with Nir, the supernatural apocalypse novel The Tel Aviv Dossier and the humorous murder mystery Retzach Bidyoni (A Fictional Murder), both published in 2009 (one in English, the other in Hebrew). We might one day complete a third. Yet Nir is first and foremost, it seems to me, a writer of short stories: stories that are in turn playful, ironic, self-aware, funny – and occasionally devastating.
Nir’s first short story collection was published in Israel in 2006. Ktov Ke’shed Mi’shachat (One Hell of a Writer) collects many of his early stories, only some of which are collected in this new volume, Nir’s first English-language collection. Almost inadvertently, it seems to me, I’ve translated – and in several cases first published – many of Nir’s short stories, six or seven of which are included in this present volume.
“Cinderers”, a story I had the chance to publish in my 2009 anthology The Apex Book of World SF, is a pop-art nightmarish vision, a commentary on art as much as on – just possibly – contemporary Israeli life. “The Word of God” is satire, while “Undercity” – a recent story – is lyrical and thoughtful, a love song to Nir’s city of Tel Aviv.
Indeed, Tel Aviv recurs again and again in Nir’s fiction. We (mostly) destroyed it in The Tel Aviv Dossier, and it reappears in “The Dream of the Blue Man” (first published in English in Weird Tales, making Nir the first Israeli writer ever published in that venerable magazine), in which dreams underwrite the city’s reality. Yet “Vegescan”, in contrast, is straight comedy, a homage to both Jerome K. Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat and a parody of classic hard SF. “My Uncle Gave Me A Time Machine” is a more serious form of parody – a commentary on Israeli political and historical narratives, a time travel story, a comedy hiding a complex, serious undertone. The short-short “A Painter, A Sheep, And A Boa Constrictor”, seamlessly meshing hard SF and The Little Prince, punches above its weight – it was included in Rich Horton’s The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy in 2010.
Were I asked what my favourite story in this collection is, I might opt for “Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys”, which I was lucky enough to publish when guest-editing Apex Magazine’s 2008 World SF issue. I plain adore this story, and hope you would too.
The following stories represent some of Nir Yaniv’s best work over the last decade or so. Never a prolific writer, he is nevertheless, at his best, a challenging, funny, deeply committed writer, always experimenting, always reinventing, always exploring. I hope you enjoy this collection as much as I did.
Lavie Tidhar, 2012