Short Fiction Watch: Lavie Tidhar Has Been Quite Busy…


If you follow Lavie Tidhar on Twitter, you may have noticed his frequent announcements that he’s sold a short story. Well, many of these are now starting to see the light of day, and we wanted to take this opportunity to let you know where some of them have landed. So, without further ado…

Next month (November 11th, to be precise) Tor.com are due to publish JUDGE DEE AND THE LIMITS OF THE LAW. Aside from the cover (at top) and the release date, there’s not much information about the story, save for this Tweet from Lavie:

JUVENILIA appears in Uncanny Magazine’s September/October 2020 issue, which is out now. You can read the story online, too. Here’s a very short snippet…

In the winter of 19–, having newly arrived in England, and still recovering from the nervous indisposition which had afflicted me greatly ever since my circumstances during the war, I responded to an advertisement placed in the Yorkshire Post, for the position of caretaker in an old, near-abandoned Elizabethan mansion called Wildfell Hall.

Who in truth owned it, I did not know. I was met at the train station of the nearby village by a young London solicitor, who informed me cheerfully that I was the only applicant…

The story BLUE AND BLUE AND BLUE AND PINK is available now in Clarkesworld’s September 2020 issue, as well as on the magazine’s website as text and in an audio edition.

Purple clouds roiled on the horizon and the old Cessna Centurion came in low and fast, riding the tailwind. Giorgio, on the ground and looking up, took shelter behind a crude half-shed of corrugated iron and lit a cigarette with a Zippo he’d once bought in the Talat Sao back in Vientiane. It was supposedly owned by a downed Air America pilot during the Secret War.

He stared at the plane coming in from the border. Smoke was coming out of the engine and half a wing looked like it’d been strafed, and Giorgio wondered who it was flying it. One of the Israelis, maybe…

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue #314 (October 2020), you can find Lavie’s novelette THE DROWNED GOD’S HERESY — a new story featuring Gorel of Goliris, star of GOREL AND THE POT BELLIED GOD (published by PS Publishing). The issue is available as an eBook, and the story can also be read on BCS’s website.

Now, forever exiled, he sought his home, his birth right, his throne. He would not rest until he found it.

Finally, a new Israeli SF magazine — Speculation — has launched, and it recently published the Hebrew translation of Lavie’s story NEOM (ניאום). You can read that story here. One of the author’s ‘favourite recent stories’, it was first published in the January-February 2019 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.