Hunting the Elephant in the Airlock: The Problematics of Israeli Speculative Literature Emanuel Lottem and Sheldon Teitelbaum

Are there any characteristics common to Israeli science fiction and fantasy (sf/f) that unite them in some way, while at the same time appear to set them apart from their counterparts elsewhere? Needless to say, there is the common denominator of writing speculative rather than ‘realistic’ fiction, difficult as it may sometimes be to tell the difference between them. There may also be the background – Israeli place-names, Hebrew personal names, etc. But these, too, are almost always trivial. In many cases, they could be substituted by, say, American names without making any significant difference to whatever the story is about. Our response is that the majority of Israeli sf/f stories – and we are speaking of short stories and novellas, because genre novels are still few and far between in this country – are indeed localized in several significant ways. The first, and by far the most important among them, is that they reflect the contemporary mood of the nation. As we explained in our introduction to Zion’s Fiction (2018), during the 1980s – at about the same time, coincidentally or not, that original sf/f began to be written in Hebrew – a sea change took place in Israeli society. Once exceptionally equitable (at least among the western nations), with strong socialist tendencies, it turned almost overnight into a fiercely individualistic society, with a capitalistic, consumer-oriented economy and ever-widening socio-economic disparities. Politics became highly divisive, as the right wing pitted itself against the left, with nationalistic messianism swiftly making inroads into the body politic, and ultra Orthodox political parties gaining intoxicating levels of power and influence such as they had never before attained. These trends are still continuing, splitting Israeli society right down the middle. At the time of writing, Israel has gone through its fourth general elections in two years, ending in a parliamentary near deadlock. The one thing that has remained constant is Israel’s geopolitical situation, referred to locally as ‘the Situation’, or more specifically, ‘the Conflict’. True, the danger of war with neighbouring countries has diminished due to peace agreements with Egypt and then Jordan, and more recently, thanks to normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco and Bahrain. But Iran has emerged meanwhile as a new existential threat, what with its nuclear weapons and long-range missile development programmes, and its support for international terrorism. Palestinian territories, moreover, remain under occupation or siege. There is constant friction between their Arab inhabitants and, in the case of the West Bank, Jewish settlers. Missiles periodically fly from the Gaza Strip into Israeli towns and villages. Suicide bombers and other terrorists are an ever-present danger. Worst of all, the Conflict between Israel and the Palestinians seems irresolvable. And even inside Israel, Muslim and Arab-Christian citizens remain marginalized, and occasionally resort to riots. All these necessarily impact what Israeli authors write about, and, more importantly, how they go about it. This is true not only of those with speculative proclivities. Noa Menhaim, the original fiction editor at a major publishing house in Israel, notes in personal correspondence: Broadly speaking, there is a sense of listlessness that arises from the hyperactivity of news cycles in Israeli reality. The invasive presence of the political Situation in individuals’ lives and personal experiences in this land deters Israeli writers from dealing with it. […] It may be an oversimplification, but if we want horror, we watch the evening news.

And this, she explains, applies to mainstream literature as it does to speculative fiction. There seems to be a general reluctance among Israeli sf/f writers, unlike their mainstream counterparts, to deal with any of the Situation’s multiple facets. They tend to fixate on other, more personal concerns. As Rami Shalheveth, editor for more than two decades now of the Bli Panika (Don’t Panic!) online sf/f magazine, confirmed to us: Genre writing in this country… [is] highly non-political, which is true not only with regard to The Conflict and the settlements but also for social critique, the Rabin assassination, poverty, violence, parliamentary politics, corruption, […] even ordinary crime is beyond the pale. There is much engagement with local culture, LGTB rights (the nearest to politics original genre literature ever gets), and day-to-day experiences like school, childbirth, etc. It seems that our [sf/f] writers shy away, generally speaking, from controversial issues.

As Shalheveth has written elsewhere: In face-to-face conversations, writers told me that they felt besieged by politics – The Conflict is ever-present in our lives through news broadcasts, social media discussions, memes, and so on. We live in an unceasing buzz of current affairs. ‘How can I have anything new to say on this subject?’, a well-known writer complained to me. ‘Everything has already been said, again and again and again.’ (Shalheveth 2020)

A consequence of this oversaturation is that writers tend to withdraw into private worlds. It seems no coincidence that first-person narratives, where (according to David Brin in a private email) writers have the greatest degree of control over their characters, tend to be more prevalent in Israeli sf/f than elsewhere. And even third-person stories written here tend to deal with private lives. There are hardly any Israeli space operas. You will be hard put to find Israeli science-fictional spies (in marked contrast with the worldwide reputation of real-life ones) who resourcefully infiltrate the headquarters of imagined evil-mongers. Nor are there ordinary individuals who accidentally find themselves in circumstances that require them to save the Galaxy, such as Isaac Asimov’s nebbish Jewish tailor, Joseph Schwartz, in his debut novel, Pebble in the Sky (1950). No. The protagonists of Israeli sf/f, by and large, are ordinary people who lead ordinary lives, albeit twisted by the props and memes of speculative fiction. And even in the few stories that provide the inevitable exception to this rule, the protagonists’ most outstanding quality is their run-of-the-mill ordinariness. Israeli sf writers, on the whole, do not sustain themselves by their literary output. Still, some pine for commercial breakout. Consider Yoav Blum, whose bestselling The Coincidence Makers (2011) has been optioned for film adaptation abroad, or Sayed Kashua’s ‘Let it be Morning’ (2005), which was adapted in 2021, and caused some controversy at its Cannes Film Festival debut when its Arab cast refused to appear on stage with its Israeli director because the movie had been presented as an Israeli product. It is true that the current crop of print and online newspaper and magazine critics of sf/f grew up within this milieu, if only in terms of popular culture. But there is still a reluctance, even among writers, to engage unabashedly in what back in the (American) day used to be dismissed as ‘that Buck Rogers stuff’. This arguably adds another layer to the general absence of hard science fiction motifs in the sf/f that Israeli authors tend to produce. When it comes to the home-grown stuff, the Hebrew book-buying public has expressed a lingering distaste for material reminiscent of what Lavie Tidhar, in his Central Station stories (2016), calls the great interplanetary ‘Up and Out’, that is to say, ultrahard science fiction. After all, what good is the Up-and-Out when you can’t get a handle on the ever-stifling here-and-now? This aversion is made abundantly clear not only by the limited imaginary horizons imposed on so much storytelling but also by marketing via book covers. Next time you visit Israel, stop by your nearest book emporium and check out their sf/f inventories. Half of it you’ll find on shelves labelled as ‘sf/f’: a cause of so much anti-ghettoization consternation abroad (Le Guin 2002b). But the other half will bear no genre markings at all and will be interspersed among the mainstream titles. And for a good reason. When not told they are reading sf/f, Israeli readers may proceed without protest, rarely grokking that they have, like Wile E. Coyote, stepped off the proverbial cliff into fabulist realms. But if the publishers see fit to mention ‘science fiction’ on the cover, the book is ghettoized not only on the shelves but also in the eyes of potential buyers. As a case in point, Gail Hareven’s first sf/f collection, Ha-Derekh Le-Gan Eden (The Way to Heaven) (1999), bore a nondescript and unlabelled cover, which suited her purpose. As a widely celebrated Israeli author with a vast mainstream fan base, her book, consisting entirely of speculative fiction stories, received stellar reviews. One is left wondering whether, had this book been labelled as science fiction, the reviews would have been equally complimentary. What we have, then, is a body of work that is by and large contemplative, brooding and solipsistic. Furthermore, it is all too often obsessed with death. It may be uniquely Israeli in the limited sense of the names given to places and persons, or it may be more firmly rooted in this soil. But that, as we said, is trivial. The real common denominator seems to be the darkness and alienation that creep into an individual’s life. Noa Menhaim explains further in our personal correspondence: Israeli creators who’ve grown up within the genre, and more than that, within fandom […] already feel – as a broad generalization – as aliens, not part of the Israeli experience, and therefore are not interested in trying to understand it, interpret it, or respond to it with genre tools.

What they are interested in is how they feel. They deal, using sf/f tools, with personalities and interactions between individuals, with emotional conflicts that are often irresolvable. Ehud Maimon, editor of the annual Hebrew-language series of Israeli sf/f anthologies, Hayoh Yihyeh (Once Upon a Future), wrote to us: The younger [generation’s] writing has become more personal and less national. It deals with the individual as an individual, not as a representative of a generation or society at large. The focus is on quotidian rather than national issues.

This may be true of much new sf/f writing the world over, but what we have noticed about the writers here is that, on the whole, their writing tends to be darker than most. How dark? Not only does it deal all too often with death in general, but further than that, it seems to be overly concerned with suicide in particular – either actually taking one’s life, or attempting to do so, or contemplating it as the best solution to the emotional (lower-case) situation the protagonist is facing. True, suicide is no longer the taboo issue in world sf/f that it used to be. But as Maia Amitai argues, ‘some [scholars] make a case for a higher frequency of this phenomenon [suicide] in modern Hebrew literature, compared with Western literature’ (Amitai 2014: 24). On the face of it, this seems to run against 3000 years of religion and tradition. But in fact, suicide is quite common in both the Bible and in Jewish history (for example, the mass suicide of the last defenders of Masada against the Romans in 72 C.E.), as a form of martyrdom or escape from a fate worse than death. In modern times, Israeli culture used to make a great deal of similar selfsacrifice for the sake of the nation, lionizing soldiers who gave up their lives (sometimes in acts of actual suicide) for their country. But much room was also left for anomic or egoistic suicide, to use Emile Durkheim’s categories. And indeed, suicide as a motif occurs in the work of many well-known Israeli authors – distinguished poets such as Haim Guri, Amir Gilboa, Yehuda Amichai and Natan Zach, and prose writers such as Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Yehoshua Kenaz and Etgar Keret (see Harris 2014). We find this exceedingly strange. Israel has one of the lowest rates of suicide in the western world: less than 7 per 100,000 for the whole population in 2018 (Goldberger et al 2020: 13). At the same time, the UN World Happiness Report in 2021 ranks Israel forteenth among the world’s happiest nations. Still, this act keeps reappearing in Israel’s literary corpus. In his study of suicide in sf, William Gutiérrez-Jones (2015) has suggested that writers from H.G. Wells through to William Gibson have subjected their protagonists to self-induced destruction as a bid to remain relevant in the midst of transformative scientific and technological change. Suicide may be terminal, or the characters may trade in their corporeal existence for uploads into other planes of existence. One way or another, this strategy is presented as transcendental. Yet, this does not fully explain the grimness of Israeli sf/f, a fact also marked by the absence of humour despite its long tradition seen elsewhere in the Jewish diaspora. In recent decades, there have not been many laughs in Israeli literature in general, let alone Israeli sf/f. Satire is well founded, but chuckles for their own sake? Hardly. The overall tendency is a studious avoidance of any writing that could be interpreted as a reflection of The Situation, even in metaphorical or allegorical ways. Elana Gomel uses a term she has coined with her colleague Vered Shemtov, ‘limbotopia’: the sense of being stuck in an eternal present. In a private email, she explains: Sf/f is all about difference: whether utopian or dystopian, its worlds are an alternative to what is. I think The Situation has created such a paralysis of the historical imagination that we can no longer think of any such alternative. Maybe fantasy or horror offers a possibility to representing the Conflict in a mediated, allegorical way. But I don’t see how Israeli sf can do it directly.

Aharon Hauptman, the founding editor of the seminal magazine Fantasia 2000 (1978-84), wrote to us: Perhaps [sf/f] writers in this land fear being ‘infected’ by politics, accused of being either left-wingers or right-wingers, perish the thought. Write about a future in which there is a Palestinian state beside Israel? That’s political. Instead of Israel? Even worse. Unending occupation and apartheid? Again, politics. Perhaps they are just afraid to deal with this.

With the exception of the inordinately prolific Lavie Tidhar who, not coincidentally, grew up abroad in a variety of countries and now lives in the UK, this may explain the relative rarity of alternate history in Israeli sf/f, compared with some other subgenres. Science fiction and fantasy tends, in Israel, not to a description of a brighter history than the one we have, starting with a twist in some key point in the past, but rather to desperation. Author Yitzhak Ben-Ner provides an illuminating example. In 1988, forty years after the establishment of the state of Israel, a glossy monthly magazine called Politika (now defunct) asked a number of local thinkers to portray Israel forty years hence. Almost all of them wrote didactic essays describing how the nation should look like by then, according to their various scholarly, philosophical or political views. Only one, Ben-Ner, wrote what would have been regarded at the time as a science fiction story: ‘Fucking City’, a first-person account of a day in the life of an Israeli infantryman tasked with patrolling a Palestinian town under Israeli occupation (Ben-Ner 1988: 52–5). The idea that the IDF might still be playing the same old cat-and-mouse games with stone-throwing kids in the West Bank decades hence seemed to the magazine’s editors and readers alike to be, per a term Israelis are overly fond of, inconceivable. The author must have regarded his work as an alternate history – the occupation of the West Bank would still go on in 2028…? No way. Today, it reads like journalism pure and simple. It took until 2018 for Israel’s first bona fide alternate history: Autonomies. This six-part TV show, set in the present, envisioned a civil war in 1989 between secular Israel and ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, splitting the country into semiindependent statelets. Most saw the series in strictly dystopian terms. Yet Carlo Stenger wrote in the left-wing Haaretz, ‘I do not claim that Israel’s cantonization would solve all of the country’s problems. But Autonomies shows that it could lead to the point where Israel’s various cultures would begin to appreciate each other’s beauty, rather than feel mutually threatened’ (Stenger 2018). This brings us to the elephant in the airlock, namely, the almost complete absence of Arabs – Palestinians and others – or, more broadly, the Situation at large, from recent Israeli sf/f. The general reluctance to regard Arabs as part of Israeli society, or to deal with them as part of the Situation, seems to us quite puzzling, to put it mildly. All the more so for overseas readerships, who seem to have a knee-jerk association between the name ‘Israel’ and the Conflict. Truth to tell, it is the same with Israelis. The Situation dominates their life, yet their speculative storytellers fail to tell about it. It is next to impossible to find science fiction or fantasy stories that offer a resolution – a future (or alternative) history of either peaceful co-existence or Armageddon, futuristic warfare between Jews and Arabs using robots and cyborgs, whatever. There simply is nothing of the kind. Why is this? Racism? Nationalism? Myopia? Are we witnessing here an imagination utterly depleted by generations of struggle? Fears and terrors so near to the surface that they threaten to erupt into chaos if not assiduously sidestepped? Or perhaps worst of all, is Israeli sf/f simply as escapist as its myriad critics charge, its practitioners lamentably isolated in self-imposed literary bubbles? Science fiction, we have been told time and again, offers up a mirror to realities too glaring, discomfiting or painful to face directly. By rights, then, Israeli sf/f writers should have been leaping ahead of their mainstream counterparts, some of whom did place the Conflict and its constituent players front and centre in their narratives. This is not to suggest that Israeli sf/f writers suffer any obligation to reflect directly on the Rabin assassination, the Iranian nuclear threat, the recurrent Lebanese and Gaza imbroglios, the Intifadas, or any other inflection point experienced by or facing the Jewish state. Before statehood and during its early years, writers were indeed frequently told what to write about. Those days, mercifully, are long gone. Still, if we didn’t know better, we’d conclude that today’s crop of genre writers has placed themselves in revolt not only against their forbearers’ prostration before the gods of Russian social realism but against any kind of reality that exists beyond the quotidian concerns of their respective personal lives. Nevertheless, this is curious. One cannot but think of American science fiction of the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, the height of the Cold War, when people were living under a constant threat of nuclear warfare. So many stories were written on this theme then and there, from Judith Merril’s ‘That Only a Mother’ (1948) to Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), not to mention Robert Heinlein’s execrably racist Farnham’s Freehold (1964). By contrast, although during the last decade Israel has been living under a similar shadow emerging from Iran, Israeli sf/f writers have not found this to be compelling, worthy, interesting or appropriate subject-matter. One Canadian did: the sea-warfare-savvy Noah Beck engaged with these dangers in his self57 published novel, The Last Israelis (2013), which featured the Israeli submarine force, Flotilla 7. Despite several full-length novels, such as Zev Ben-Yosef’s Shalom ‘al Yisrael (Peace Upon Israel) (1995), depicting Israel’s demise at its enemies’ hands, no single Israeli short story has this threat as its subject or even as a part of its subtext. Why is this? Rachel Harris has argued that, in the work of Israeli writers born since the 1970s, there has been a shift away from a single national ethos anchored in Jewish religion and history, the Hebrew language, and the Zionist culture, that had characterized Israeli literature from the founding of the state, toward more variegated yet often overlapping affiliations (Harris 2015: 1–14). To this, Gomel adds in her personal correspondence: Israeli sf/f is actually not that different from the sf/f of many nonAnglocentric literatures that have to define themselves both in opposition to the consensus reality of their own countries and to the Anglo-American hegemony. [...] As the global consensus reality crumbles, it is harder and harder to decide what is, in fact, ‘fantastic’ as opposed to ‘realistic’. So, sf/f becomes a set of conventions disseminated by the powerful English market throughout the world, and Israeli sf/f necessarily has to position itself in relation to these conventions, much like any other national literature. […] I’d say that what really distinguishes Israeli sf/f is a particular relation to space and time. Space: the Promised Land/the occupied territories; and time: Israeli/Jewish history, continuity or rupture. This is very different from the unlimited space and linear time of American sf/f. The chronotope (to use Bakhtin’s term) of Israeli culture is multi-layered, paradoxical, and self-enclosed.

Are these factors responsible for the elephant in the airlock? Perhaps. But there are other undercurrents as well. Yuval Benziman believes that the reluctance among Israeli writers who now avoid depicting relations with the Palestinians should not be traced to denial or deflection, to cowardliness or callousness, or even to obliviousness. The problem for those so inclined – and certainly within the Israeli mainstream, there have been many – lies in the problematics of ‘writing a story of not being able to tell a story’ (Benziman 2011: 95). Benziman contends that the Arabs and Jews who do inhabit Israeli literature, however multidimensional in presentation, cannot successfully forge any kind of consensual reality, even an imagined one. And if so, why bother trying? Interestingly, Benziman offers up a set of speculative novels of the 1980s to illustrate just how difficult it was for Israeli writers to do so. David Grossman’s The Smile of the Lamb (1983), an early and accomplished example of Israeli magical realism, requires four distinct narrators, none of whom can ultimately devise a shared perspective on even the most basic facets of the Conflict. Amos Kenan’s The Road to Ein Harod (1984), a thriller about a near-future military takeover of the Jewish state, offers up perspectives on the Conflict that frequently depend on whether the protagonists and antagonists momentarily inhabit the surface (Israel) or the (archaeological and political) underground. Arab-Christian author Emile Habibi’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (1974) begins with the titular fool accounting for the absurdities of life in Israel through letters to visiting aliens. In each narrative, says Benziman, ‘the narrators can tell the story [only] by adopting a distant perspective and deluding themselves that the story they tell is not their true reality, but rather a fairy tale. They tell it as a fantasy, which supposedly has a happy ending, yet the ending is unhappy, and the world they describe is revealed to be concrete’. Their attempts almost inevitably fall short, with the efforts to ‘present the [C]onflict comprehensively through one stable prism [are] dealt with by presenting the interaction between Israelis and Palestinian-Arabs as a dialog between deaf people’ (Benziman 2011: 96–7). Maybe Israel’s speculative cohort has simply been exposed to enough stories about time loops to believe that they are literally living in one. And as we all know, when you’re in a time loop, the House is stacked against you, no matter how much you fiddle with the fundamentals. By contrast, the rise of religious messianism and the expansion of ultraOrthodoxy (Jewish and Muslim alike) are not absent from Israeli sf/f. The authors of such stories, like Benjamin Tammuz in his Jeremiah’s Inn (1984) or Ben-Ner in his The Angels are Coming (1985), do not shy away from these issues because this conflict, unlike the Situation, can have some resolution – maybe a grim one, but at least it is there. With regard to the religious-secular strife, there can be a future, and therefore stories can be told about it. In contrast, the Situation can only be written about in present tense, as a vicious circle that just keeps going around. The cultural historian Ortzion Bartana wrote to us that Israeli literature has never been able to shake itself free of its inability to look forward. Perhaps it does not look forward because, once it became secular, it started looking from past times into the present, but not beyond… Perhaps the future was left, without admitting this, to the religious culture, and people [became] afraid of any abstract futuristic thinking or any serious thought about our future. […] Let me put it this way – in Israeli society there is an antagonistic duality: either institutionalized religious thinking, and then there is no place for science fiction because it might challenge the traditional metaphysical pattern, or secular thinking, and then there is no place for science fiction because secularism, when it runs against the grain of institutionalized religious thinking, ‘pours the baby with the bathwater’.

Noa Menhaim wrote to us that Israeli sf/f’s failure to deal with the Conflict and, more specifically, with the Palestinian point, was ‘particularly painful to me, drawing as it does from generations of education that turns its back to the [Middle Eastern] region, and tendentious media that obfuscates and obliterates the Other. Since science fiction has been dealing with otherness and alienness in profound ways for a long time, it could have been a fertile ground for dealing with the subject. But to represent the Others, in any manner whatsoever, to be curious about them and give them a place in your work [of literature], you have to see them first. And this, regrettably, is something we simply refuse to do, in each and every level of our existence here.’ The writer Rotem Baruchin views things quite differently: I think sf/f has moved during these past decades away from focusing on the national and political side to concentrate on social issues. In this context, you compare our Situation today to the Cold War – but as I see it, it is very far from it. The Iranian nuclear menace, for instance, does not frighten me at all. I see it as an empty threat that Prime Minister [Netanyahu] brandishes to scare us, as hate and incitement to violence in this country (which do worry me a great deal) are only getting worse. […] In my life as an LGTB, incitement against me and people like me is growing from year to year, and this is the social politics I write about… In short, I do write about political and social issues, but they are not the issues that you asked about – and I think any writer in this country will tell you similar things: we write about our own difficulties.

Rami Shalheveth brings together these two seemingly contradictory points of view: True, many of our writers are not afraid of going into dangerous places. They cope with death and social tensions, challenge fundamental assumptions of Israeli society and culture, and disagree with universal conceptions. But looking at this literature more closely, one finds that it has invisible boundaries. There are topics that are rarely discussed.

Interestingly, Elana Gomel finds a similar disinclination among her ‘Arab students, some of them interested in writing sf/f in English: they don’t see themselves as Israelis but more as members of an international community of writers who would like to make it elsewhere. I think many of them are just sick and tired of the Situation and have nothing to say about it.’ However, to these explanations we add another one, namely, the power and influence of the market. As noted above, Israel is politically split right through the middle. This means, in practical terms, that appearing to take any position on the elephant in the airlock issue will immediately alienate one half of one’s potential readership, which is scant enough to begin with. Hence, most Israeli sf/f writers avoid any hint of any kind of public controversy. Are we able, then, to decipher the conundrum of the elephant in the airlock? Of course not. It is rooted too deeply in the realities of the Situation, and its political, social and cultural ramifications, to have one comprehensive answer. Any attempt to figure out why the Conflict is absent from modern Israeli sf/f encounters resistance by the most profound aspects of the Israeli psyche. Yet, at these deep levels, we believe that the Situation is not really absent; it is present in all too many of these writings but in subtle, almost invisible ways. It is present in the dark doom-and-gloom ambience, the overweening sense of desperation, and the death wishes that show up so frequently in the stories we have read. The insolubility of the Conflict inevitably generates an inability to imagine any possible future that contains some glimmer of hope. If there is light at the end of the tunnel, it is only the headlight of the oncoming train. Barring some totally artificial ending, of the kind eschewed by all readers, the Situation is hopeless, and this hopelessness finds its way into many Israeli sf/f stories, even when they are saying nothing whatever about the Conflict, not even hinting at it. So many protagonists choosing to die or wishing they were dead. So many of them finding their lives empty, purposeless, leading nowhere. The sense of hopeless desperation that so many stories evoke is an indelible mark imprinted by the Situation. Although the Conflict itself is absent from modern Israeli SF/F stories, its shadow looms over many of them. And yet, as Ursula K. Le Guin observed, ‘Of course everything one writes about comes from experience. Where else could it come from? But the imagination recombines, remakes […] makes a new world, makes the world new’ (Le Guin 2002). Note: This article is an edited version of the authors’ introduction to More Zion’s Fiction: Wondrous Tales from the Israeli ImagiNation (2021).

Works Cited

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Harris, Rachel S. 2014. An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. ----- 2015. ‘Israeli Literature in the 21st Century – The Transcultural Generation: An Introduction’. Shofar 33.4: 1–14. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2002a. ‘Answers to a Questionnaire.’ Ursula K. Le Guin’s Website. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/FAQ.html (accessed 3 November 2021). ----- 2002b. ‘On Despising Genres’. The Birthday of the World. London: HarperCollins [e-book]. Shalheveth, Rami. 2020. ‘Why Do We Need Politics Now?’ [Hebrew], Bli Panika, 1 September. https://www-blipanika-co-il (accessed 4 November 2021). Stenger, Carlo. 2018. ‘The TV Series That Offers a Possible Solution to Israel’s Problems’. Haaretz, 25 October. Teitelbaum, Sheldon and Emanuel Lottem. 2018. Introduction to Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Fiction. https://locusmag.com/introductionto-zions-fiction/ (accessed 3 November 2021). Tidhar, Lavie. 2016. Central Station. New York: Tachyon.