It’s #NationalCookieDay so we’re gonna eat these sewing supplies!
#cookies #publishing #officelife #selfie #tachyonpublications #tachyon #danishbuttercookies
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq-p705Fr9S/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=u8pspdm6lhvg
Alec Checkerfield
About Alec Checkerfield
Posts by Alec Checkerfield:
Reviewers, booksellers, and librarians get THE BEST OF MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Review copies of THE BEST OF MICHAEL MOORCOCK are now available via NETGALLEY.
These copies are only for reviewers and librarians. For more details, visit NETGALLEY.
And while you are there, check out other Tachyon titles for review for review on NETGALLEY.
“[Moorcock] introduced me to the ridiculously powerful things that happen when you put a sophisticated, contemporary literary vocabulary at the service of a blackly grim high-fantasy imagination. A giant of the genre in every possible sense.”
—TIME Magazine
Michael Moorcock: Legendary author of the Elric saga, Science Fiction Grand Master, platinum album–receiving rock star, and controversial editor of the new wave fiction movement’s New Worlds. In this definitive collection, discover the incomparable stories of one of our most important contemporary writers.
These exceptional stories range effortlessly from the genre tales that continue to define fantasy to the author’s critically acclaimed mainstream works. Classic offerings include the Nebula Award–winning novella “Behold the Man,” which introduces a time traveler and unlikely messiah that H.G. Wells never imagined; “The Visible Men,” a recent tale of the ambiguous and androgynous secret agent Jerry Cornelius; the trilogy “My Experiences in the Third World War,” where a Russian agent in an alternate Cambodia is powerless to prevent an inevitable march toward nuclear disaster; and “A Portrait in Ivory,” a Melibone story of troubled anti-hero Elric and his soul-stealing sword, Stormbringer.
Newer work handpicked by an expert editing team includes one previously unpublished story and three uncollected stories.
The Best of Michael Moorcock
(Particle Book)
by Michael Moorcock
ISBN:
Digital/Particle Book ISBN: 978-1-61696-312-5
Particle Books/digital publication date: December 2018
Available Format(s): Digital Books
“The 17 stories in this collection demonstrate the breadth of scope and the excellence in storytelling of SF Grand Master and multigenre author Moorcock. Moorcock crosses genres, bends boundaries, and breaks rules as only a master storyteller can.”
—Library Journal
Table of Contents
- Introduction by John Davey
- A Portrait in Ivory
- The Visible Men
- A Dead Singer
- Lunching with the Antichrist
- The Opium General
- Behold the Man
- A Winter Admiral
- London Bone
- Colour
- My Experiences in the Third World War
- Going to Canada
- Leaving Pasadena
- Crossing into Cambodia
- Doves in the Circle
- The Deep Fix
- The Birds of the Moon
- The Cairene Purse
- Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club
- Afterword by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
For more info on THE BEST OF MICHAEL MOORCOCK, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Get Lavie Tidhar’s award winning CENTRAL STATION for only $1.99!
John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION by Lavie Tidhar is a Kindle Daily Deal for Tuesday, December 4.
For today only, the ebook is available for just $1.99!
- 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner
- 2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award Winner
- 2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award, Shortlist
- 2016 British Science Fiction Award, Longlist
- 2017 Geffen Award nominee, Best Translated Science Fiction Book
- NPR Best Books of 2016
- Amazon Featured Monthly Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books
- Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016
- 2016 Locus Recommended Reading List
- Winner, 2016 British Science Fiction Award Best Cover Illustration – Sarah Anne Langton
- Nomination, Chesley Award, Best Cover Illustration – Sarah Anne Langton
- 2017 British Fantasy Society – Shortlist for Best Artist – Sarah Anne Langton
“Tidhar scatters brilliant ideas like pennies on the sidewalk.”
—NPR Books
A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.
When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.
Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.
At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive … and even evolve.
- An NPR Books Best Book of 2016
- A Tor.com Best Book of 2016
- An io9 SF, Fantasy, and Horror Book That Will Blow Your Mind
- An Amazon Featured Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book
- A Publishers Weekly Staff Pick
- A Bookskill Recommended Book
- An SF Bluestocking Best of 2016
- A Kirkus 2016 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy pick
- A Tor.com Five Mosaic Novels You Should Read
- Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016
- A UK Guardian Best SF & Fantasy Book of 2016
- Best Science Fiction Books Top 10 of 2016
- Featured review on the Reading Envy podcast
- Featured Interview in the Jewish Telegraph
[STAR] “World Fantasy Award–winner Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming) magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel set under the towering titular spaceport. In a future border town formed between Israeli Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa, cyborg ex-soldiers deliver illicit drugs for psychic vampires, and robot priests give sermons and conduct circumcisions. The Chong family struggles to save patriarch Vlad, lost in the inescapable memory stream they all share, thanks to his father’s hack of the Conversation, the collective unconscious. New children, born from back-alley genetic engineering, begin to experience actual and virtual reality simultaneously. Family and faith bring them all back and sustain them. Tidhar gleefully mixes classic SF concepts with prose styles and concepts that recall the best of world literature. The byways of Central Station ring with dusty life, like the bruising, bustling Cairo streets depicted by Naguib Mahfouz. Characters wrestle with problems of identity forged under systems of oppression, much as displaced Easterners and Westerners do in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. And yet this is unmistakably SF. Readers of all persuasions will be entranced.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
[STAR] “… a fascinating future glimpsed through the lens of a tight-knit community. Verdict: Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming;The Violent Century) changes genres with every outing, but his astounding talents guarantee something new and compelling no matter the story he tells.”
—Library Journal, starred review
For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Tachyon tidbits featuring Jane Yolen, Nalo Hopkinson, Peter Watts, Rudy Rucker, and Gregory Norman Bossert
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
Jane Yolen (photo: Jason Stemple), Nalo Hopkinson (David Findlay), Peter Watts, Rudy Rucker, and Gregory Norman Bossert
At LIGHTSPEED, LaShawan M. Wanak praises Jane Yolen’s HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE.
Yolen starts off with advice on how to actually fracture a fairy tale, which is useful for writers wishing to try their hand at retelling tales. She then dives into the tales themselves, mainly retellings of folk tales, but with a couple familiar Grimm’s tales among them. The story of Cinderella, for instance, which Yolen reimagines into “The Moon Ribbon,” about a girl who escapes her stepmother with a ribbon from her dead mother, and “Cinder Elephant,” which tells the story from a fat-positive point of view.
Some stories are just straightforward tales that have very little changed in them, such as her telling of Asian folktales “One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King” and “The Foxwife.” Some are rearranged in ways you don’t expect. “Happy Dens or a Day in the Old Wolves Home” has all the wolves in folklore now residing in an Old Wolves Home and tell their own versions on what happened to them. “Sleeping Ugly,” a riff on Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, is a hilarious tale with a testy fairy godmother who deserves her own story.
There are also a couple of tales that draw directly from Yolen’s Jewish heritage. “Slipping Sideways Through Eternity” is a sobering read connecting the Hebrew version of Elijah with the Holocaust, whereas “Granny Rumple” is an actual tale within Yolen’s family told on the framework of Rumpelstiltskin, and it is not a cheerful story. Indeed, several stories in this collection are rather bleak, but so well told that they sit and make you think.
Camille Acker at ELECTRIC LIT includes Nalo Hopkinson’s FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS in A Reading List of Short Story Collections by Black Women Writers.
Rest assured: black women writers aren’t only writing realist fiction. Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor both have bodies of work that include short stories in addition to the speculative worlds of their novels. Likewise, Nalo Hopkinson builds worlds on the large scale of the novel and on the small scale in her short story collections Skin Folk, Report From Planet Midnight, and her 2015 collection FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS. Hopkinson remixes canonical texts, from fairy tales to Shakespeare, and infuses them with an Afro-Caribbean perspective. Adults become monstrous consumers of flesh and a free society of former slaves is infused with magical realism. Samuel Delany once noted that science fiction is particularly important “for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they — and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.” Hopkinson is doing just that.
Peter Watts’ THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION hits the Boswell Book Company bestseller list and is the selection for their Sci-Fi Book Club on December 10.
Paperback Fiction:
1. Hotel Silence, by Auður Ava Olafsdottir
2. Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
3. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman
4. The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens
5. The Drifter, by Nick Petrie
6. Alternate Side, by Anna Quindlen
7. The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway
8. THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION, by Peter Watts
9. The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce
10. Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward
SOMA FM publishes the podcast of the October SF IN SF with Rudy Rucker and Gregory Norman Bossert.
Readings and discussions with Rudy Rucker and Greg Bossert.
Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He received the Philip K. Dick award for his early cyberpunk novel Software, and again for his Wetware. Software (1982) was perhaps the first SF novel where a human’s personality (the “software”) is transferred into a robot. His forty published books include novels, collections, and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. Rucker’s ground-breaking cyberpunk Ware series was republished in 2010 as The Ware Tetralogy, which can also be obtained as a free Creative Commons ebook online. Rucker’s 2007 novel, Postsingular was something of a return to the cyberpunk style.
Gregory Norman Bossert won the World Fantasy Award for his short story “The Telling” in 2012; his story “Bloom” from Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2013, was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Award. He lives in Marin County, California and works at Industrial Light & Magic.
For more info on HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more information on FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover art by Chuma Hill
Design by Elizabeth Story
For more info on THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story
Happy birthday to the Hugo Award winner Jo Walton
Beginning with The King’s Peace (2000), Jo Walton’s 13
novels have garnered much acclaim. Not satisfied with just her 2002
Campbell for Best New Writer, Walton has won the World Fantasy (Tooth
and Claw, 2003), Prometheus (Ha’penny,
2007), Mythopoeic (Lifelode, 2009), and Tiptree (My Real
Children, 2014) awards. Among Others (2011) received the
trifecta of Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy awards. Last year, she
was given Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (aka
Skylark).
Her three volumes of
poetry include Muses And Lurkers (2001), Sibyls And
Spaceships (February 2009), and Rivers And Robots In The Helix
And The Hard Road (2013). Earlier this year, Tachyon published
the fiction and poetry collection STARLINGS. Her non-fiction was
collected in What Makes This Book So Great (2014) and An
Informal History of the Hugos (2018).
Walton’s other
works include the Thessaly trilogy (The Just City [2015], The
Philosopher Kings [2015], Necessity [2016]) and the
anthology The Helix and the Hard Road (2013; co-edited with
Joan Slonczewski).
All of us at Tachyon wish the talented and insightful Jo, a magnificent birthday.
For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
All things Beagle: THE LAST UNICORN: THE LOST JOURNEY giveaway and the cover reveal for THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY
The fine folks at TOR.COM are giving away Peter S. Beagle’s THE LAST UNICORN: THE LOST JOURNEY. The sweepstakes runs through December 3. Visit TOR.COM for complete details.
B&N SCI-FI & FANTASY BLOG revealed cover for the forthcoming anthology THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY, edited by World Fantasy Award winners Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman.
Earlier this year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, perhaps the 20th century’s definitive take on the mythical creatures. But unicorns are far older than that—and still in the world today—fact that will be celebrated next year in THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY, coming next year from Tachyon Books and editors Jacob Weisman and, yes, Peter S. Beagle—the same dup who this year won a World Fantasy Award for the fantastic THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY.
Today, we’ve got a look at the cover and the official summary, which hints at the participation of such heavy-hitting contributors as Garth Nix, Jane Yolen, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and more. See both below. The book arrives in April.
Unicorns: Not just for virgins anymore. Here are 16 lovely, powerful, intricate, and unexpected unicorn tales from fantasy icons including Garth Nix, Peter S. Beagle, Patricia A. McKillip, Bruce Coville, Carrie Vaughn, and more. In this volume you will find two would-be hunters who enlist an innkeeper to find a priest hiding the secret of the last unicorn. A time traveler tries to corral an unruly mythological beast that might never have existed at all. The lover and ex-boyfriend of a dying woman join forces to find a miraculous remedy in New York City. And a small-town writer of historical romances discovers a sliver of a mysterious horn in a slice of apple pie.
For more info about THE LAST UNICORN: THE LOST JOURNEY, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Thorsten Erdt
Design by Elizabeth Story
For more info about THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Thomas Canty
Design by Elizabeth Story
Office exercise initiative: uniplank! Swipe to see us hard at work and not goofing off
#tachyon #tachyonpublications #office #officeexercise #rainbow #unicorn #workinghard #hardlyworking
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqyCLLml7sC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1wh9g3mfdgrja
We received a bag of Pokemon in the office so of course the first thing I do is match them to our books. Swipe to catch ‘em all!
#books #bookstagram #pokemon #pokegram #scifibooks #fantasybooks #booklife #sff #publishing #toys #tachyonpublications #tachyon #hapandleonard #joerlansdale #centralstation #kateelliott #lavietidhar #janeyolen
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bqx2N_flJcH/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=g6vh625xtp1x
Lavie Tidhar’s “cabinet of wonders” UNHOLY LAND makes more Best of Year lists
The accolades keep rolling in for Lavie Tidhar’s beautifully written UNHOLY LAND.
Both NPR and LIBRARY JOURNAL include the book among their best books of 2018.
NPR:
It’s the kind of smart, intertextual science fiction that would make Philip K. Dick giddy.
Recalling China Miéville’s The City and the City, Tidhar’s narrative resonates with the dilemmas of modern Israel without devolving to mere metaphor.
Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013
At FANTASY LITERATURE, Bill Capossere declares the title is gong on his Best of 2018 list.
I read UNHOLY LAND straight through in one sitting, blowing off work, family, and the first few minutes of dinner to do so. And had I not finished I most likely would have just skipped dinner entire until I did. For such a short book — under 300 pages — Tidhar crams in a world (worlds) of thoughtfulness, suspense, imagery, and beautiful prose. Highly recommended.
UNHOLY LAND makes a different type of list at BOOK RIOT with Michelle Anne Schingler’s 8 Nights of Jewish Books: A Suggested Hanukkah Reading (and Gifting!) List.
A pulp writer transgresses the barriers between realities in Tidhar’s latest science fiction wonder, which finds agents who can skip between universes chasing the man who may be instrumental to a multiverse rift—centered somewhere in the forests beyond Palestina, a territory in what was Uganda, in a world that is not our own. Tidhar’s book is a cabinet of wonders—it will not stop proffering surprises ’til the end.
For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Kameron Hurley’s APOCALYPSE NYX is a world you’ll want to return to again and again
In LOCUS (October 2018), Adrienne Martini praises APOCALYPSE NYX.
Kameron Hurley’s APOCALYPSE NYX isn’t a
stand-alone novel in her God’s War serise, AKA
the Bel Dame Apocrypha series, depending on
which internet oracle you ask. And I had to ask,
because the world Hurley illustrates in the five
works of short fiction collected in APOCALYPSE NYX. is a world I want to return to again and again.
Those already familiar with Nyx and crew should
enjoy these delightfully grimy and sweaty slices of
their world. The newbies will have titles to add to
their reading lists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY lauds Hurley’s The Light Brigade with a *starred* review.
Hugo winner Hurley’s second futuristic novel (after The Stars Are Legion) is a smart, brutal, and structurally sophisticated military science fiction tale with a time travel twist.
Like Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, this book is both a gripping story of future warfare and an incisive antiwar fable. Readers will savor this striking novel’s ambitious structure and critique of rapacious, militarized capitalism.
According to LOCUS, Hurley’s Las estrellas son legión [The Stars Are Legion] won the prestigious Spanish Ignotus Award for Foreign Novel.
For more info on APOCALYPSE NYX, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Wadim Kashin
Design by Elizabeth Story