Simon Ings’s Brave Jew World
In the alternate history of The Smoke, Simon Ings maps sci-fi horror onto the Jews. Read the full review at …
fantasy
Watching Game of Thrones, Waiting for Shavuot
On binge-watching and worlds without tradition. Read the full essay at the Jewish Review of Books.
The Last Unicorn as Post-Holocaust Fable
For six decades and counting, Peter S. Beagle has written fantasy literature with a Jewish-American sensibility. An overview of his …
Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of C. S. Lewis
Forty years ago, Harold Bloom published his bad fantasy novel The Flight to Lucifer. He claimed it was a product …
The 2,000-Year-Old Women
Two of the most highly praised novels of 2018, Dara Horn’s Eternal Life and Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, feature a Jewish woman born in …
Of Were-Owls and Wandering Jews
My fantasy reading this month included Jewish shape-shifters and “Pharisees,” Michael Moorcock and Rudyard Kipling, and a new Israeli novel …
Why Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver is Bad Jewish Fantasy
Sure, all this beats a pogrom. But given that Novik clearly intends the book to work as a commentary on …
The First-Ever Anthology of Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy
And how it compares with a Jewish American anthology. Read the full review at Mosaic.
Out-of-Body Experiences: Recent Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy
“Common themes exist among some if not all of these books: the fluidity of identity in our social media world, …
Brave New Golems
As pop culture monsters, golems may not have the cachet of zombies or vampires but they haunt us nevertheless, as shown …
The Inklings
Had you the good fortune of being present at a gathering of the Inklings, you might have witnessed J. …
What Does an Acclaimed Israeli Sci-Fi Writer Have to Tell Us about the Israel of Tomorrow?
“To this familiar Tel Aviv scene, however, with its characteristic mix of squalor and charm, Tidhar has added cyborgs, chip-implanted …
Why Are There No Great Israeli Superheroes?
Age of Ultron, this year’s Avengers film sequel, has generated $1.4 billion worldwide at the box office so far, a …
Jews of Dune
Frank Herbert’s Dune, often named as the greatest science fiction novel ever written, turns 50 this year. Set thousands of …
Meet the New Weird
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy of sci-fi / horror novels is contemporary, in some ways even trendy. The cast of …
The Once and Future Jews of Dan Simmons
Science fiction writer Dan Simmons is the author of more than two dozen novels. Not all of them are science …
Down the Israeli Rabbit Hole With Shimon Adaf
the matter of science fiction is the geography of reason; of horror, the geography of anxiety; of fantasy, the geography …
Riding Leviathan: A New Wave of Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy
“Rabbinic conspiracies, Leviathan-riding heroines, a top-secret Israel Defense Forces demon-hunting unit, ghosts and amnesiacs, a gay messiah—all these can be …
