A Long Time Ago... with Lavie Tidhar
Hello there.
Welcome to A Long Time Ago… the fortnightly series where I ask a different guest to share with us a favourite Star Wars story and historical site. This started as a tie-in to my first piece of published writing, the article ART WARS for Star Wars Insider #226. The whole archive of my exploration of fourteen ancient art sites and every Star Wars story on my shelves can be found here.
Today, I hand over to Lavie Tidhar!
Lavie’s work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama, Six Lives, and Golgotha), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020), children’s books such as Candy (2018) and the Children’s Book of the Future (2024), and created the animated movie Loontown (2023) and webseries Mars Machines (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London. His work has been translated into multiple languages. He lives in London.
I’ll link to Lavie’s website here. And alongside Jared Shurin he edits a Shelfies newsletter which takes “a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves!” Alongside the obvious joy of soaking up others’ shelves, you may want to subscribe now as a familiar face may feature down the line…
In A Galaxy Far, Far Away…
Shamefully, I never actually watched Star Wars until a few years ago when I figured I should perhaps finally do it. So I did watch the first three films eventually, and if I remember right I did go to see (googling what it’s called, ah, yes) The Phantom Menace in the cinema. I also watched about four episodes of The Mandalorian at some point. So I can’t honestly say I have a favourite Star Wars story, though I have a deep abiding fondness for the little-seen Fanboys (2009) which was co-written by Ernest Cline (whose Ready Player One was, I thought, much more fun than it had any right to be!). Fanboys is about four friends, one of whom is dying of cancer, and his last wish is to watch The Phantom Menace before it’s released... (I think the last line in the film is “but what if it sucks?”). It’s great fun, anyway.
So, my one Star Wars story is that one day I decided I should write a Star Wars novel. I was going to do it as an existential noir, give it the heft of literature, my sort of Osama... in space (Osama is my 2011 novel that got the World Fantasy Award, yes, I know, I’m showing off the war medals here). So I mentioned it to my agent, who laughed uproariously down the phone at me and still to this day laughs at me about it at every given opportunity. The only Star Wars novel you’d write, he rightly pointed out, is one they’d never publish.
So there we are, with the Great SW Novel remaining unwritten and unpublished. It would have probably been fun...
In Leipzig, Saxony, Germany…
Similarly, I don’t really have a favourite historical site – writers are a bit like magpies. I get excited about whatever I’m researching in the moment (Neolithic dolmens in the Galilee (appear in Adama), the guano islands of Peru (appear in Six Lives), Victorian London (The Bookman, Adler), what have you) and then I move on. I’m lucky enough to be invited to festivals and conventions around the world from time to time, and I use that as a handy excuse to set stories there – I recently finished a story started in Chongqing, China, and my vampire detective, Judge Dee, has only visited Epinal in France because I once spent an afternoon with Samantha Shannon exploring a ruined castle and the very gothic cathedral there once in between book signings.
(By “book signings” I mean mostly sitting there doodling on a pad as you wait hopefully for someone who might actually want a book signed at some point as people browse around you and give you pitying looks. In contrast, Samantha’s queues were massive, but I did turn her into a vampire in “Judge Dee and the Executioner of Epinal”. So there you go.)
But for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to pick the Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig, the 500 year old wine bar that appears in Goethe’s Faust. I was there a few years ago with one of my favourite writers, Philip Kerr, who wrote the classic Berlin Noir trilogy and other novels featuring his detective Nazi-era detective, Bernie Gunther. We were taken down to the famous cellar, sampled a range of German wines, but didn’t quite make it up onto the giant wine barrel one is supposed to ride (like Mephisto and Faust do).
Anyway, about a year later I picked up Kerr’s latest Bernie Gunther novel and there, in one single paragraph, Bernie mentions having once been to Leipzig and visiting Auerbachs! So an entire weekend was condensed into one throwaway line, but this is my line in Kerr’s oeuvre, a reminder (Kerr sadly died a few years after our visit) of my tiny, incidental connection to the book – and its author.
So if you are ever in Leipzig, I do recommend a visit!
Thank you so much Lavie!
These posts come out every other Sunday so subscribe today to discover the next guest and their picks!
Cheers,
Harvey