| Osama | |
| Author: | Lavie Tidhar |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Alternate History, Metafiction |
| Publisher: | PS Publishing |
| Pub Date: | 2011 |
| Media Type: | Book |
Osama is a 2011 alternate history metafictional novel by Lavie Tidhar. It was first published by PS Publishing.
In a world without terrorism, a private detective is hired to locate Mike Longshott, the mysterious author of a popular series of novels about a fictional vigilante named "Osama bin Laden".
Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.[1]
Publishers Weekly described it as "offbeat and enigmatic", but with "less than rigorous internal logic".[2]
The Guardian saw conceptual parallels to Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, emphasizing that Tidhar's goal is to "show that behind every manufactured enemy, is a real human being".[3]
in Locus, Gary K. Wolfe observed that although Longshott is supposed to be a pulp fiction writer, the excerpts of Longshott's works (depicting various real-world instances of terrorism) "aren’t pulpish at all" but rather are "rendered in a crisp, journalistic prose" — unlike the rest of the novel, which is in a "deliberately pulp-noir style".[4] Strange Horizons noted the possibility that "the entire story may be little more than [the detective's] opium-induced hallucination."[5]