About this item
A retelling of Arthurian myth for the age of Brexit and Trump, from World Fantasy Award-winner Lavie Tidhar, By Force Alone.Everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.The fact is they don't know sh*t.Arthur? An over-promoted gangster.Merlin? An eldritch parasite. Excalibur? A shady deal with a watery arms dealer. Britain? A clogged sewer that Rome abandoned just as soon as it could.A savage and cutting epic fantasy, equally poetic and profane, By Force Alone is at once a timely political satire, a magical adventure, and a subversive masterwork.
About the Author
Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu. Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist. Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy. He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010) , Camera Obscura (2011) , and The Great Game (2012) .Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie. His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century. Much of Tidhar's best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005) , Cloud Permutations (2010) , British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011) , and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011) .Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012) .He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there. He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008) ; wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004) ; wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery) ; and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler's I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers) .Tidhar lives with his wife in London.
