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Jesus & The Eightfold Path cover and pre-orders!
I’m delighted to announce that Jesus & The Eightfold Path is now available for pre-orders! The book costs £10 for a limited edition hardcover of just 200 copies. While these are not signed, I should be at Fantasycon this year for the launch, and will make sure to sign copies there.
The awesome cover – and isn’t it an awesome cover? – is by Melissa Gay, who did the cover for HebrewPunk back in the day. Check it out!
THREE WISE MEN CAME FROM THE EAST for the infant Jesus in The New Testament. Three brave companions accompany the Buddha in the Chinese classic A Journey to the West. Could they have been the same three? Guided by a star, three strange companions arrive in the barbarous land of Judea to seek a newborn child–a possible messiah to some, and the reincarnation of the Budda to others.
When the child’s life is threatened, his family and new guardians escape to Egypt, returning years later, to a Jewish land on the cusp of annihilation by the Roman Empire.
Once a general in the Judean army, now a Roman agent, Josephus Flavius is sent by Caesar back to his home land to observe and report on the actions of the troubling young man now preaching sedition in the Galilee–a boy with the unsettling powers of kung-fu…
Their lives would collide in a cataclysmic confrontation between Romans and Jews, between empire and rebels–and change the world forever…
And here is Gardner Dozois reviewing the book in the latest issue of Locus:
Lavie Tidhar is one of the most interesting new writers to enter the genre in some time, and his chapbook novella “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” is another major work by him, although even harder to pin down by genre than is his usual work. A vivid and gonzo reimagining of the life of Jesus, it’s less sacrilegious and more respectful than you would think a story whose working title was “Kung Fu Jesus” would be, although Jesus does indeed get to use his martial arts skills, learned under the tutelage of the Eastern Masters who taught him to follow the Eightfold Path, to beat up the moneylenders as he casts them from the Temple, defeat some attacking mummies, and so forth. Although all this would probably have been enough to get Tidhar burnt at the stake during the Middle Ages, he actually treats Jesus with a fair degree of reverence, as a man who really has been touched by the Divine (although what Divine remains open to question) and possesses immense preternatural abilities. Much of the gonzo humor, and much of the entertainment value, is carried by the Three Wise Men, here reimagined as former kings, wizards, and minor gods impressed into service by a superior supernatural force, and called Sandy, Monkey, and Pigsy; they get many of the best lines. There’s also a supporting role for the slippery Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius. Perhaps what this reminds me the most of is the movie Big Trouble in Little China, if the filmmakers had decided to tackle the Gospels as well as Chinese mythology. Although some of the more pious may be offended, most readers will probably find this hugely entertaining.
Cloud Permutations reviewed in Locus – Again!
Gardner Dozois reviews Cloud Permutations in the February issue of Locus:
Lavie Tidhar’s Cloud Permutations, also from PS Publishing [Dozois previously reviews another PS novella], is another Vance-flavoured almost novel-length novella (although the writer specifically referenced in the text, in what TV fans would call a “shout out”, is Cordwainer Smith) – this is also an entertaining picaresque adventure, across the face of a largely aquatic planet whose culture has been shaped by immigrants from the South Sea islands of old Earth, although this one is somewhat more serious in tone and deeper in ambition, full of mystic elements drawn from island mythology, and concerning a young outcast fighting through desperate trials and against all odds to fulfill a destiny larger than himself.
In the same column, Dozois comments on two further stories:
Lavie Tidhar shows up again with perhaps the best story in the last few months of e-zine Strange Horizons, Aphrodisia, a post-cyberpunk story about spacers who have been altered by high-tech modifications on a spree in Vientiane while on vacation on Old Earth. . . new website Daily Science Fiction has the ambitious – perhaps too ambitious – goal of publishing a new SF or fantasy story every single day of the year. . . the best story there so far is by the ubiquitous Lavie Tidhar, who contributed Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World.
The Night Train
my short story, “The Night Train”, was published in June 2010 at Strange Horizons. It’s recently been picked up for two Year’s Bests anthologies: Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 5 (Nightshade Books) and Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty Eighth Annual Collection (St. Martin’s Press).
Gardner Dozois also picked a second story of mine, The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String, from Fantasy Magazine, for his year’s best anthology.
In addition, “The Night Train” has been picked up by SF audio podcast Escape Pod, and will be available there in the new year.
So it’s been a good year for The Night Train – but I wanted to talk a little about where the story came from – with pictures!
The Night Train
I wrote this story while living in Vientiane, Laos (The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String was both written and set in Vientiane). It’s a quiet town, though not without its charms, and so one of the highlights for us was an occasional trip abroad – to Thailand, which was just beyond the Mekong, on the other side of the river, but more specifically to Bangkok, which is quite a long distance away. To get to Bangkok, you could fly – or you could cross the border into Thailand, into the small town of Nong Khai, and catch the night train from there to Bangkok.
The thing is, I love trains. I travel by train whenever I can – whether it’s across the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, from Bucharest to Brasov (still one of the most beautiful train rides I’ve ever been on), or from Cape Town to Johannesburg (one of the most surreal train rides I ever had, for various reasons!), or, indeed, on the biggest ride of them all, the Trans-Siberian route from Moscow to Beijing (which took, on and off, about 2 months to complete).
And I loved the Nong Khai-Bangkok night train.
There are many things to love about that train ride. I sleep very well on trains, and this is a sleeper ride. There’s a proper dining car slash drinking car (as can be seen from the following picture!):
But, best of all, it starts and ends in Bangkok – specifically, in that wonderful old-world train station called Hua Lamphong, right by Bangkok’s China Town.
Couple of random backpackers there. Even better, for people flying into Bangkok, you get to see the hyper-modern airport and ride into town. But arriving by train, one goes through the tenements, the backs of houses, through mounds of garbage and rough sleepers and people waking up for the work day. And I can’t remember which trip it was but, as we were getting ready to go back, waiting for the train to pull out of the station, back to Nong Khai, I looked around at the station, a monk cadging a smoke from a passerby, the belch of steam and people milling about and the attendants getting ready to heat up food and open up beers, and I knew I had to write a story about it.
What I ended up with was The Night Train – a story of a special sort of body guard, an underworld boss, and an assassin – as well as artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, gender-reassignment surgery and a nice cup of tea. It’s a story that corresponds explicitly with American SF, while taking place in the same near-future South East Asia of some of my other stories (such as Spider’s Moon at Futurismic, The Shangri-La Affair and Aphrodisia at Strange Horizons). I’m glad it was well-received, so far – and glad I took that night ride…
