Literary history & community
Science fiction in Israel
A literary field seen through its writers, books, magazines and readers.
From the editorial board of Fantasia 2000 to Locus, Foundation, encyclopedia entries and the Zion’s Fiction anthologies, Teitelbaum has chronicled and helped introduce Israeli speculative fiction to English-language readers.
The new anthology · In development
The Elephant in the Airlock
Israeli Speculative Fiction Before & After Oct. 7
Edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum. Stories of grief, survival and imagined futures, written before and after October 7.
Larry Niven has agreed to contribute the foreword; Valerie Estelle Frankel will provide the afterword.
Foundation · 1990
Tales of Zion’s Fiction
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
A first-person account of Israeli science fiction, its writers and its readership, published in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, no. 49 (Summer 1990), pp. 35–47.
Read the literary history
Writers, books & early voices
Herzl’s Altneuland, Levinsky’s future Hebrew society, Roshwald’s nuclear dystopias, and later generations of Israeli writers: the directory preserves the wider illustrated record, with author and edition links.
Open the illustrated writers & books directoryThe community
Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers, readers, conventions and Hebrew speculative literature.
Visit the SocietyFantasia 2000 & its readers
Poetry & the future
David Avidan’s SF poetry
David Avidan (1934–1995) brought space travel, time travel and technological change into experimental Hebrew poetry. His fascination with the future extended to the language itself: he coined words and tested how poetry could communicate with machines.
Poetry as transmission
Cryptograms from a Telestar (1978) mixes poems, transmissions and documents. Futureman (2017), translated by Tsipi Keller with an introduction by Anat Weisman, offers an English selection from his work.
Writing with a computer
My Electronic Psychiatrist (1974) records eight conversations with ELIZA. This experimental prose work places human–machine dialogue alongside his poetic investigations of language, identity and the future.
His futuristic imagination also reached film in A Message from the Future (1981). Film record and archival stills.