Forget about start-up nations! Inspired by a science fiction novel — the 1903 proto-Steampunk utopia Old New Land by Theodor Herzl – the State of Israel is the quintessential science fiction nation. Enter, Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (Mandel-Vilar, 2018) the first authoritative collection of Israeli speculative fiction ever published in English. Herzl, the Austrian journalist (and, not coincidentally, the bearded gentleman featured on our cover) once famously declared: “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl’s dream was to create a modern Jewish state in the historical homeland of the Jewish people. Ours was to forge out a literary refuge for the kind of unbridled literary fancy his aspirants, tasked with transforming his science-fictional vision into a hardscrabble reality, could not bring themselves to accomplish. Yours, we hope, will be to help us pry open a long-shuttered window into the dreams and nightmares of a nation quite unlike any other.