Current mood:	content
Current music:	I feel like the biggest geek in the world right now

Israeli Science Fiction is --- DEAD!
jspoons drew my attention recently to this post (in Hebrew) which is so wonderful I thought I'd share it. This is a post from a young (21, according to his userpage) writer who is complaining about the functioning (or rather, lack of) of the Israeli magazine Chalomot Be'aspamia. All par for the course (as the magazine has been going through some difficulties for a while), but it is this particular sentiment that makes me really happy:

Israeli science fiction has atrophied, in my opinion, and there is need for new blood.

Why is this so wonderful? Well, when I was growing up in Israel, particularly the period of 1985 to 1995, was a period where there was no such thing as Israeli science fiction. The magazine Fantasia 2000 was no longer publishing. There were no organised fans that I knew of. There were no magazines, no conventions, certainly no Israeli writers - there was nothing. If you liked SF, you borrowed books from the library, and that was that. As a school project once, I wanted to write about Israeli SF. I contacted Emmanuel Lotem, a long-standing fan, editor and translator, who said to me: "I'm happy to help you with your work but you have to change the topic. There is no such thing as Israeli science fiction."

I ended up writing about computers in SF, which was no fun at all.

Then, you know, stuff happened. I was busy, travelling, smoking too much d- I mean sunbathing, and work, and studies, and... at one point, I started noticing something very strange. Without my noticing, there was suddenly - wait for it - science fiction in Israel.

And not just any old SF! All of a sudden, bless the Internet, there were web sites; there were busy discussion forums; there were fans. There were magazines! There were huge conventions! There were even - shockingly - writers. New writers, Israeli writers, who wrote science fiction. Somehow, my generation, the silent generation that could revere SF only from afar, grew up and became editors, and translators, and critics, and, yes, writers.

It was a bit of a shock.

And so, the next time I was going to visit my granddad in Israel, I arranged it to overlap on one of the annual conventions, and I went along, and I met some people, and had a good time, and drunk too much coffee. And I wrote for those new magazines, and I even participated in a couple of panels, for my sins. Panels! There were no panels when I was growing up.

And, you know, this whole SF revival in Israel (and this corresponds to a large extent to what is happening in other countries, btw) is just amazing to me. And very cool. And I love being a small part of it.

And I think it's great that this kid can come along and say what he says - because he can say it. I couldn't have said it when I was twenty one. There was no Israeli science fiction then. But now there is! And it is very much in its infancy still, and it does need new blood. Every field does. In fact, it needs all the blood it can get. Or ink. Or whatever.

But isn't it cool?