Haiblum, Isidore
Entry updated 21 April 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1935-2012) US author, born, educated and based in New York, where he set much of his fiction. Haiblum's best work can best be described as Judeofuturism, a term for which he must be considered an obvious early influence in the same sense as, say, Samuel R Delany's influence on Cyberpunk. The bulk of Haiblum's work combines a tongue-in-cheek hardboiled narrative with a distinctly Yiddish Humour sensibility. His first and most significant novel was The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders (1971), which while little appreciated on publication it became a kind of rallying point for Israeli sf/fantasy writers who encountered it in Hebrew translation; its influence can be felt on the works of both Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv. The novel concerns an intergalactic operative caught in a complex Time Loop that runs through Jewish history – "Because Jews are everywhere", as the Tsaddik of the title explains. It is a novel to be experienced as much as read, and has remained, if not a sole example then a very rare one, of purely Jewish sf.
Later works continued to mix hardboiled and humour to varying effect, as in The Wilk Are Among Us (1975; rev 1979) with its amusingly overcomplicated plot, its frenetic spoofing of the Aliens-in-our-midst theme, and its general failure to take hold of its materials. Nightmare Express (1979), a comparatively ambitious Alternate-History detective novel, and the later Mutants mystery series set in the twenty-first century – The Mutants Are Coming (1984) and Out of Sync (1990) – maintain a similar tone. After at least two extremely loose sf series featuring detectives – the Gunjer books beginning with Interworld (1977) and the Siscoe and Block books beginning with The Identity Plunderers (1984) – Haiblum began to publish non-fantastic detective novels, of which the Weiss and Weiss sequence is of significant interest for its near-wholesale invention of Yiddish Hardboiled, but remains outside the scope of this encyclopedia. [JC/LTi]
Isidore Haiblum
born New York: 23 May 1935
died New York: 25 October 2012
works
series
Gunjer/Happy City
- Interworld (New York: Dell Books, 1977) [Gunjer/Happy City: pb/Larry Kresek]
- Specterworld (New York: Avon Books, 1991) [Gunjer/Happy City: pb/Gary Ruddell]
- Crystalworld (New York: AvoNova Books, 1992) [Gunjer/Happy City: pb/Gary Ruddell]
Siscoe and Block
- The Identity Plunderers (New York: New American Library/Signet Books, 1984) [Siscoe and Block: pb/Paul Alexander]
- The Hand of Ganz (New York: New American Library/Signet Books, 1985) [Siscoe and Block: pb/Paul Alexander]
Mutants
- The Mutants Are Coming (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1984) [Mutants: hb/Margo Herr]
- Out of Sync (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1990) [Mutants: pb/Alan Daniels]
individual titles
- The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) [pb/David Johnston]
- The Return (New York: Dell Books, 1973) [pb/]
- Transfer to Yesterday (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973) [pb/Bob Abbett]
- The Wilk Are Among Us (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1975) [hb/Emanuel Schongut]
- The Wilk Are Among Us (New York: Dell Books, 1979) [rev of the above: pb/]
- Nightmare Express (New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1979) [pb/]
links
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