Zealot Script

Lavie Tidhar is author of Osama, The Violent Century, A Man Lies Dreaming, Central Station, Unholy Land, By Force Alone, The Hood, The Escapement, Neom, and Maror. His latest novels are Adama and The Circumference of the World. His awards include the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards, the John W. Campbell Award, the Neukom Prize and the Jerwood Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick Award.

What’s your favourite part of the lifestyle of an Author?

Getting up late, working in pyjamas, pretending it’s a real job! Also the occasional invites overseas to festivals where I get to sign books and eat nice food and read books on planes and stay in a nice hotel. But mostly, to be honest, I just like writing. Somehow I’ve managed to do it full-time for over a decade – go figure! Every year I keep thinking this has to be the last one before I have to get a real job but so far it’s been working out…

What made you start writing?

I always wanted to write but I started actually writing when I discovered you can send out short stories to magazines and get them rejected – I thought that was so cool. So I started writing them and sending them out and I NEVER STOPPED AND I AM STILL TRAPPED IN THIS NEVERENDING CYCLE WON’T SOMEBODY STOP ME–

Is there an Author that you consider your inspiration?

There’s a gazillion writers who inspired me! And I keep discovering new ones all the time. I mean you could go back to whoever wrote Gilgamesh, or The Song of Songs, and work up from there. But you know, authors are really just broken, dysfunctional human beings. You might as well seek inspiration in something like a fungus or a flower, both of which are pretty amazing.

What’s your number one tip for an aspiring Author?

Honestly, I always say “Just don’t do it”. Why would you do it to yourself? But if you absolutely have to, just remember to only ever use “said” for dialogue attribution and you won’t go too wrong.

What type of book do you like to read and does this differ from the genre that you prefer to write?

I read everything (and write nearly everything). I’m actually a big fan of picture books! There’s some amazing work in that format. For fun, I like light-hearted crime novels, and international noir, and I’ve been re-reading a lot of favourite classic sf/f novels. I read a lot of non-fiction, some of it for research, and old newspaper articles, and poetry, and recipes! I like weird, obscure books, the kind that fly under most people’s radar. Books that don’t do what you expect, that surprise you. Hmm, what’s the last one I read… Jean Echenoz’s CHEROKEE, I think. This absurdist noir French novel someone recommended on Twitter. Great stuff but, you know, you probably never heard of it, right?

Which one of your characters would you most like to spend time with?

I don’t even like spending that much time with real people so the idea of hanging out with fictional ones is a little off-putting! Also one of my characters is an Adolf Hitler who never came to power (in 2014’s A MAN LIES DREAMING) and I’m pretty sure that won’t be, like, a cool hang. I don’t necessarily get to write about super nice people!

Which book do you consider a must-read?

No book is a must-read – the Book Police aren’t going to come knocking on your door at 4am because you haven’t read something! Mostly because they don’t really exist, you know. Read everything! Read what you like! Who cares! There are certainly books that, having read them, were “must-read” for me, because they taught me something or moved me in some way and shaped the way I approach writing, but who is to say they’ll work that way for someone else? I really enjoyed Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s SILVER NITRATE recently, as a random recommendation. I personally think most of my books should be “must-reads”, though. CENTRAL STATION and A MAN LIES DREAMING for sure, and I’d love to make people read THE ESCAPEMENT. So maybe I could start a Book Police Force and send them out after people if they buy the wrong books and just make them read my books instead. That should work!

What’s been the hardest edit that you’ve had to make? Why did you want to keep the material in?

I had an early book that was going quite well until it hit the halfway mark. It took a wrong turn, I kept at it despite that, and eventually had to scrap the entire second half of the book and write it again from scratch. So that one hurt! I learned to plan a little bit more these days to avoid this kind of situation, and also to know when things go wrong so I can stop before I’m too far down the rabbit hole.

If you could live in a book, which one would it be?

Not sure I’d fit in a book unless it was the size of a house, and then there’d be the problem with mould and so on, and it would be a fire risk. No, I know what you mean, but you know, I spend so much time in imaginary worlds it’s really best if I stick to living in the real one!

If you could pick an Author to write your biography, who would it be?

I actually do have someone writing my literary biography right now and it’s a super weird thing to happen to you when you’re still alive. They have a publisher for it and everything! So, I guess… you don’t get to pick?

Is there any conflict between what you want to write and what you think your readers will like?

No, because I don’t write for any readers, I write for myself. If readers come along for the ride, great! Some certainly do, which is nice. And of course as long as there’s an editor happy to publish the stuff and pay you for it, then that’s the one reader you do need!

What effect can a review have on you, if you read them at all? Both the good and the bad.

I don’t care about them much one way or the other. I read them for fun, but they essentially boil down to “I liked it”, “I didn’t like it”, and “eh”. You just have to hope for more to fall on the first side of the scale than the second. From time to time there’s an interesting academic article about one of my books and that’s fun to read to see what they make of it. But people are always going to read at different levels, and with different approaches, and it’s perfectly valid to like or not like something, or be indifferent to it. My favourite ever review was on Amazon, though. It just said “Did the job.” I think about that one a lot!

Can you sum up your life story in ten words or less?

Not really, but I hope on my tombstone it just says “Finally some peace and quiet”. Does that qualify?

What’s exciting you about your next project?

Your next project is always the most exciting thing in the world and your last one is always the least exciting! I’m not actually sure what my next project IS. I’m finishing my third literary fiction novel right now, which will be out in 2024. So I’m mostly looking forward to writing THE END sometime soon! That will be fun and exciting. My most recent books are THE CIRUMFERENCE OF THE WORLD, which is a very cool book about the meaning of life, the origin of the universe, a mysterious lost novel and Golden Age science fiction, which is out from Tachyon, and ADAMA, which is a dark family saga set over four generations of a single family, which is out from Head of Zeus. They couldn’t be any more different! I also have the third volume of my anthology series, THE BEST OF WORLD SF, coming out around the same time. And my real love is really short stories – I have about ten scheduled to come out during 2023 so far, and more on the way. And a pretty cool new children’s book that’s coming out next summer.

And finally, you have one quote to be remembered by, what is it?

I’m quite fond of “he wasn’t a bad guy, as far as bad guys go”. It’s from 2022’s MAROR. The strange thing is I have a couple of fairly random quotes from a couple of my books that HAVE made it into those Internet quote things and people keep sharing on social media and so on and it’s just WEIRD. I’m still waiting for them to be made into fridge magnets or something though!

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You can find Lavie on most social media sites as @lavietidhar (Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, whatever) or at his website