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Israel, I am informed, seems to be having an SF moment. Or, from the unexpectedly enthusiastic early reviews of the anthology I co-edited with Emanuel Lottem, Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, SF may be having an Israel moment.

As well it should. After all, the Jewish State drew inspiration from a knock-off of Edward Bellamy’s late 19th-century utopian romance, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, notably, Zionist ideologue Theodore Herzl’s Altneuland (Old New Land). A mere 70 years after its troubled foundation, his dream-child is recognized worldwide as a scientific and technological powerhouse and the purveyor of any number of SFnal inventions and innovations. The modern State of Israel, moreover, straddles a former Herodian fortress – Megiddo, or, as the Greeks called it, Armageddon – Ground Zero for the apocalyptic imagination. Among Israelis, fears of terminal conflagration are never far from the surface.