2020 is one of a very small group of Israeli science fiction books, what is interesting that a great portion of those books are being written by women like Sara Blau or Hagar Yannay. This book is special because unlike Asaf Gavron’s Hydromania that was described in the newspapers as “sci-fi that isn’t sci-fi”, he is following the model of stretching the present reality (and in the case of the chaotic Israeli reality he should receive a reward for at least trying to do so). 2020 tries to tell a story that takes place in America in the near future, about a society that doesn’t have physical or mental love because of a virus that is a combination of AIDS and the swine flu.
Sometimes it works, sometimes there are glitches, for example, when the scientist begins to sing an Israeli children’s song there is no way that he could have known this song, and I wonder how the editor of the book did not notice this mistake. The book flows naturally and what is special is the fact that the hero of the book is a male doctor and the female author succeeds in understanding his point of view. This is a point that I will deal with in the following weeks the passing from gender to gender in literature. This book reminded me of the classic Dune, where the writer Frank Herbert knew the world of Bedouins in the Mediterranean in an in depth way. Similarly, 2020 is a book based on a world of science that Chamutal Shabtai, the daughter of one of Israel’s greatest writers Yaakov Shabtai, knows very well and I believe that in science fiction one must know his back yard very well in order to write this sort of book. JR Tolkien invented a world and a language but he did his homework on ancient civilizations, literature and languages. If one betrays the laws of his own world, it’s a greater sin than mistakes in realistic literature.