Jewish Book Council Blogpost by Phil

In search of sci­ence fic­tion with seri­ous Jew­ish con­tent I came upon two antholo­gies of short sto­ries edit­ed by Jack Dann: Wan­der­ing Stars, An Anthol­o­gy of Jew­ish Fan­ta­sy & Sci­ence Fic­tion and More Wan­der­ing Stars (Jew­ish Lights: 1974, Dou­ble­day: 1981). I was famil­iar with many of the authors in these books and had read sev­er­al of the old­er sto­ries in them when I was a kid. Each sto­ry in these vol­umes can be apt­ly char­ac­ter­ized as hav­ing some sort of ref­er­ence to Jews, Judaism, or Jew­ish­ness. Though the con­cerns vary, many con­tain con­sid­er­able irony, wry humor, and a love of Yid­dish words. These sto­ries show how Jew­ish authors uti­lize the tropes of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion — a more accu­rate term than sci­ence fic­tion, as much of this writ­ing has lit­tle to do with sci­ence — to express Jew­ish ideas.

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