Lavie Tidhar's work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama, and the forthcoming Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming, and World Fantasy Award winner Osama, as well as genre works like the Campbell and Neukom winner Central Station. He has also written comics (Adler), children's books such as Candy and A Child's Book of the Future and created the animated movie Loontown and webseries Mars Machines with Nir Yaniv.

The Apex Book of World SF 3 by Lavie Tidhar

In The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 3, editor Lavie Tidhar collects short stories by science fiction and fantasy authors from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe.

These stories run the gamut from science fiction, to fantasy, and to horror. Some are translations (from German, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Swedish), and some were written in English. The authors herein come from Asia and Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Their stories are all wondrous and wonderful and showcase the vitality and diversity that can be found in the field. They are a conversation, by voices that should be heard. And once again, editor Lavie Tidhar and Apex Publications are tremendously grateful for the opportunity to bring them to our readers.

CURATOR'S NOTE

My set of three anthologies of international speculative fiction was a labour of love to put together – if you were ever curious about fiction from around the world, give it a try! – Lavie Tidhar

 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Courtship in the Country of Machine–Gods

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

In the shadow of machine–gods I tell wayfarers of a time when my people were a nightmare the color of hemorrhage and glinting teeth.

There are other narratives, but this is the one they want to hear most, the one they pay with their adoration and bright–eyed want, for they've never known us for anything but peace. Conflict juts out from the skein of Pojama's history, broken glass–shard, rupturing and ruptured.

I smile; I oblige. Though the story is for me, there are parts that I share simply for the reality of speaking it out loud, for the virtue of being heard.

My mouth moves, output for one of my cranial chips. My fingers sketch, autopilot, the forms of our heroes and enemies from a continent whose name and life has now been lost. My voice murmurs the tragedies and sings the heroics of Kanrisa and Surada, rising for climax, falling soft for denouement. The visitors' district is machine–dead. What a thrill it must be to hear the thunderclap notes of my gloves, behold the psychedelic fires that pour from my nails.

Once, they interrupt. The figures of our enemies do not seem real. They are right: with sagging eyes the hues of cheap jades and faces like skulls, even for villains they are too fantastical, too unhuman.

"My great grandmother told of them so," I say and shrug. "Perhaps she was senile." With a motion, I turn the figures into shapes more familiar, shapes more like ours.

Inside the vessel of my thought — a garden of sliding intelligences who whisper to me, childhood mates grown to adults next to my ventricles and lungs — a different story unfolds.