Meet the award-winning Michael Blumlein
Michael Blumlein delivers his “The Body As Story” presentation on Sunday, October 29, 3PM at Borderlands in San Francisco.
Alec Checkerfield
About Alec Checkerfield
Posts by Alec Checkerfield:
Meet BSFA Award winner Sarah Anne Langton
Sarah Anne Langton, BSFA Award winner for her cover to Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winning CENTRAL STATION, is a Guest of Honor at BristolCon.
October 28, 2017
9 AM – 11 PM
DoubleTree by Hilton
Hotel Bristol City Centre
Other Guests of Honor include authors Jonathan L. Howard and Jen Williams.
For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Happy birthday to the groundbreaking, award-winning Suzy McKee Charnas
Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree award–winning author Suzy McKee Charnas is best known for her groundbreaking HOLDFAST CHRONICLES, a four-volume story written over the course of almost thirty years (1974-1999) which addressed the oft-controversial topics of feminist dystopia, separatist societies, war, and reintegration, and her critically acclaimed exploration of the vampire mythos, THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY.
The first and second volumes of the HOLDFAST CHRONICLES, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974) and MOTHERLINES (1978), each won a 1996 Retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award. The final volume THE CONQUEROR’S CHILD (1999) won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. The series as a whole which also included THE FURIES (1994) was given the 2003 Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award. Her young adult novel THE KINGDOM OF KEVIN MALONE earned the Aslan Award for Best Children’s Book of 1993. The novella “The Unicorn Tapestry,” that was part of THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, won a 1980 Nebula.
Other works include THE SORCERY HALL trilogy – THE BRONZE KING (1985), THE SILVER GLOVE (1988) and THE GOLDEN THREAD (1989) – and the short story collections MOONSTONE AND TIGER-EYE (1992), MUSIC OF THE NIGHT (2001), and STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES AND OTHER PHANTASMS (2004). Charnas adapted THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY into the two-act play VAMPIRE DREAMS. It enjoyed runs in both San Francisco and New York, debuting as part of Springfest in San Francisco in 1990.
All of us at Tachyon wish the sensational Suzy a happy birthday!
For more information on STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES AND OTHER PHANTASMS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by John Picacio
Tachyon tidbits featuring Peter S. Beagle
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
Photo: Paul Todisco
On THE GUILD podcast of The Writer’s, Artist’s & Reader’s Guild (W.A.R.G.), C. Marry Hultman interviews Peter Beagle.
The second INKLINGS newsletter for 2017 includes Lilly Stahl’s praises for IN CALABRIA.
Ending with the prospect of true everlasting
love, Peter S. Beagle’s new novel is
magical, furious, gripping, and heartwarming.
A story that despite its mythical component is
a story of determination, bravery, faithfulness,
and love that can give hope and a new life to a
beaten and bruised soul.
NON-STOP READER lauds Peter Beagle and Tachyon Publications in general, and THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY in particular
I love Peter S. Beagle. I’ve loved (and read, and owned) pretty much everything he’s ever published. He’s permanently on my shortlist to automatically buy whatever he puts his name on.
I have loved so many Tachyon press books that again, basically anything they stick their imprint on, I’ll line up at the bookstore, wave my filthy lucre and hop up and down impatiently. Tachyon’s catalog is impressive and a no-fail reading list for speculative fiction fans. It would be fun to just start at one end of the list and read to the other end.
So getting this book was an automatic “Yes, please, with sugar on top”!
Most anthologies have a thematic cohesiveness. This one’s stated purpose was to pass the baton to the next generation of authors and though many of the authors included are well known, they are the ‘up and coming’ or relatively newly arrived standard bearers.
There are some exquisitely written pieces in this anthology. All of them are worthy.
Four stars!
Matthew Rettino at ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE WEIRD announces his intention to review stories from THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY.
I may not have posted for a while, but I wanted to share this success with as many of my readers and listeners as I can. I have had plans over the last few weeks to give this blog a new start and possibly a re-brand. I’ve had the idea of reviewing short stories as I read through fantasy/weird fiction anthologies, such as the massive volume known as The Weird by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and the slimmer but no less rewarding THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman. I hope that some of my present responsibilities will free up soon so I can dedicate time for these ambitious projects.
For more info on THE OVERNEATH, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info about IN CALABRIA, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover art by Camille André
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon tidbits featuring Jo Walton, Kage Baker, and Ellen Klages
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
Jo Walton, Kage Baker, and Ellen Klages (photo: Scott R. Kline)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY praises Jo Walton’s STARLINGS.
This collection of fiction and poetry from Hugo- and Nebula-winner Walton (The Just City) showcases her trademark focus on genre and philosophical questions. Most of the fiction is very brief, and fans of the form will have plenty to appreciate.
The collection will appeal most strongly to Walton’s dedicated fans and those with academic interest in her work.
THE LITTLE RED REVIEWER is charmed by Kage Baker’s THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND.
Full of humor and happiness, THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND was a pure joy to read. Most of the books I read have some level of darkness and tragedy. People die, lovers are separated, there is a war, the good guys lose, someone finds out they’ve been manipulated their entire life, etc. And then of course, there is social media and the news, which is a thousand times worse than any fictional story. To randomly pick up THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND and find it to be 180 pages of pure sunshine was next level selfcare. A comfort book that makes you feel good about yourself and universe on every page? Yep, this is it.
THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND is a wonderful book for parents to read to their kids. A kid can certainly read this to themselves with no problem, but there are a handful of jokes and subtleties that will be very meaningful to adults.
Never read a Kage Baker before? THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND is an excellent place to start. Your children will thank you.
Liz Bourke at TOR.COM in her essay Sleeps With Monsters: My Year In Queer mentions Ellen Klages’ PASSING STRANGE. The novella contains characters and the same setting from two stories in her collection WICKED WONDERS.
This year, I’ve come across a whole eighteen new books with significant queer inclusion. (From mainstream imprints. This is important, because it means they are more likely to have bookshop distribution. People won’t necessarily have to go and specifically seek them out.) Five of them are novellas, but they’re substantial novellas. And this number represents only the new books I’ve read so far this year that represent worlds that aren’t almost entirely heterosexual. (And that aren’t genre romance. I like romance! Romance is fine. But sometimes I want other things to happen in the plot.) There may yet be one or two more. I have my fingers crossed for several—it’d be nice to have twenty-four as a number!—but that might be hoping for too much.
I have, it turns out, come across more books that include women who love women than those that include men who love men, and more of either than those that include trans characters—though there are a few. When it comes to nonbinary characters, the list is fairly short.
<snip>
Ellen Klages’s PASSING STRANGE, which is an ode to, and a love story set in, 1940s San Francisco.
For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info about THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
For more info on WICKED WONDERS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon tidbits featuring Joe R. Lansdale
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
On Twitter, producer/director Jim Mickle shared this from the set of HAP AND LEONARD Season 3.
The master himself on set
@joelansdale
#HapAndLeonard
For CEMETERY DANCE ONLINE, Blu Gilliand praises the graphic novel adaptation of HAP AND LEONARD: SAVAGE SEASON.
Fortunately, publishers Short, Scary Tales Publications and IDW have brought in Finnish comics master Jussi Piironen to handle the scripting and illustration of this adaptation of Savage Season, the first novel in Lansdale’s beloved series. Piironen (Jerry Cotton, Raid) does a great job of using a few simple details to evoke the harsh environments of the book, particularly the lush, almost alien landscapes of a Texas river bottom. In one particularly tense sequence, in which Hap almost succumbs to freezing river water while diving, Piironen uses a few elements—currents, bubbles, and Hap’s eyes, growing confused and heavy-lidded behind his swim mask—against a dark backdrop to bring us down into the cold, suffocating water with him.
Still, while Savage Season (and the “Hap and Leonard” series in general) seems to me something of a strange choice for graphic novel adaptation, and while I do have a couple of reservations about the approach take here, there’s enough good to make me want more. Piironen puts together some really provocative and effective sequences, and does a good job of giving Lansdale’s trademark dialogue room to breathe. Here’s hoping we get news about an adaptation of Mucho Mojo sooner rather than later.
Cullen Bunn at TOR.COM discusses 5 Books About Folk Horror and includes a surprising Lansdale selection.
THE BOTTOMS by Joe Lansdale
Not a horror story necessarily, but full of horrific themes and creepy imagery. This is a crime story and murder mystery set, like many of Lansdale’s stories, in East Texas. During the Great Depression, a group of kids set out to solve a violent murder. That’s my kind of story. But the addition of a local legend, the Goat Man (who is sort of a Boo Radley boogieman figure) makes this yarn something special. Urban legends can be spooky enough to make your skin crawl. But in my experience, those rural legends are all the more terrifying.
Peter S. Beagle’s THE OVERNEATH will enchant any reader who still believes in magic
More enthusiasm surrounding Peter S. Beagle’s forthcoming THE OVERNEATH.
In a starred review, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY praises the collection.
With sharp, lean elegance, Beagle (IN CALABRIA) effortlessly chronicles the lives of unicorns, trolls, magicians, and adventurers in 13 poignant stories, many of which caution readers about magic gone awry and temperamental creatures.
<snip>
This enchanting collection employs simple humor and affectionate sarcasm and will enchant any reader who still believes in magic.
Matt Hlinak at POP MYTHOLOGY lauds the stories and the author.
Still going strong at age 78, Peter S. Beagle’s version of fantasy is a whimsical one, though he never descends into farce. He takes his characters seriously, even if the reader cannot help but chuckle at their misadventures. Beagle’s charms have not worn off.
Photo: Rina Weisman
THE BOOK LOVER’S
BOUDOIR enjoys book.
This is only my second time reading this author. I’ve clearly been missing out.
I loved this collection of stories. Every story was well-written, compelling and just fantastic. I liked the fact that no two stories were the same, they’re all different even if some of the themes and ideas are the same.
For more info on THE OVERNEATH, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon tidbits featuring George Saunders, Bruce Sterling, Lavie Tidhar, and Peter Watts
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
George Saunders (photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/AFP/Getty Images), Bruce Sterling, Lavie Tidhar (Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013), and Peter Watts (Johan Angelmark [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)
George Saunders, whose short story “Escape from Spiderhead” appeared in Jacob Weisman’s acclaimed INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, has won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln In The Bardo.
On the Portuguese site RASCUNHOS, Cristina Alves praises Bruce Sterling’s Sidewise Award-nominated PIRATE UTOPIA.
Brutal graphic appearance and fantastic premise – what could fail? The embodiment. PIRATE UTOPIA presents an alternate reality within the genre Dieselpunk, where pirates, anarchist warriors, build their own world by hating fascists and communists alike.
The original atmosphere is delightful, with hordes of rough men watching a delicate film in which there are unlikely relationships (and far more platonic than we anticipate).
Translation from Portuguese courtesy of Google.
Zeno Agency reports that תחנה מרכזית from Yaniv Publishing, the Hebrew edition of Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winning CENTRAL STATION, is now available.
TOR.COM reprints Peter Watts’ “ZeroS” from Infinity Wars, the latest Infinity Project anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan.
From the author:
In my last novel, a grizzled old soldier reminisces bitterly about the early days of the military zombie program, of which he was an early recruit. He wasn’t the first recruit, though. The first recruits, some of them at least, were corpses scraped off various battlefields, booted temporarily back to awareness with jumper cables to the brain, and told Hey, you’re actually dead, but we can bring you back to life so long as you’re willing to work for us for a few years. Or if you’d rather, we could just unplug these cables and leave you the way we found you. As contracts go it’s pretty take-it-or-leave-it, but given the alternative would you walk away? […] “ZeroS” is the story of one of those first recruits.
ZeroS
Asante goes out screaming. Hell is an echo chamber, full of shouts and seawater and clanking metal. Monstrous shadows move along the bulkheads; meshes of green light writhe on every surface. The Sāḥilites rise from the moon pool like creatures from some bright lagoon, firing as they emerge; Rashida’s middle explodes in dark mist and her top half topples onto the deck. Kito’s still dragging himself toward the speargun on the drying rack— as though some antique fish-sticker could ever fend off these monsters with their guns and their pneumatics and their little cartridges that bury themselves deep in your flesh before showing you what five hundred unleashed atmospheres do to your insides.
It’s more than Asante’s got. All he’s got is his fists.
He uses them. Launches himself at the nearest Sāḥilite as she lines up Kito in her sights, swings wildly as the deck groans and drops and cants sideways. Seawater breaches the lip of the moon pool, cascades across the plating. Asante flails at the intruder on his way down. Her shot goes wide. A spiderweb blooms across the viewport; a thin gout of water erupts from its center even as the glass tries to heal itself from the edges in.
The last thing Asante sees is the desert hammer icon on the Sāḥilite’s diveskin before she blows him away.
For more info on PIRATE UTOPIA, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and image by John Coulthart
Jo Walton’s entertaining STARLINGS is well worth it
NIKK @ THE BIBLIOPHIBIAN praises Jo Walton’s STARLINGS.
It’s no secret that I love Jo Walton’s work, and I’d better add here that I’ve spent time with her as well — I’d call her a friend. Still, I knew her work first, and this is a fun collection. Jo may say she doesn’t know how to write short stories, but all the same everything here works pretty well. I only knew ‘Relentlessly Mundane’ and some of the poetry before, I think. It was nice to re-encounter the poetry here and spend some time with it — reading it online wasn’t the same at all. I hadn’t read the play, either, ‘Three Shouts on a Hill’; entertaining stuff.
My favourite of the short stories… hmm, possibly ‘Sleeper’, and I liked ‘What Joseph Felt’ a lot too.
Really, I never know quite how to review short story collections: suffice it to say that I enjoyed it, and I think it’s worth it, especially if you’re already a fan of Walton’s work. I’m glad I got to read it ahead of time.
RATING: 4/5
Paul Cranswick on LIBRARYTHING issues the British Author
Challenge – October 2017 – Jo Walton & Roald Dahl.
amanda4242 was the first to reply:
It’s here! It’s here!
I read Walton’s fantastic What Makes This Book So Great in April for the non-fiction challenge. It’s a collection of blog posts she did for tor.com, mostly concerning her re-readings, but it also has entries on what not to say when you meet an author, different types of series, and a lament that George Eliot never tried writing science fiction. All of the entries in the book, and more stuff, can be found online here.
My local library has a large collection of Dahl audiobooks, and I’ve started working my way through them. So far I’ve finished Fantastic Mr. Fox and Other Animal Stories, read by Chris O’Dowd, Geoffrey Palmer, Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie, and The Witches, read by Miranda Richardson. All of the readers are amazing, but Richardson and O’Dowd are real standouts.
And this from cbl_tn:
I have been dying to read Farthing for a while and this was just the nudge I needed to get it read. I had a hard time putting this one down. The alternate history is understated. By that I mean that Walton doesn’t go out of her way to emphasize the differences between the alternate reality and actual history.
Walton adds a different twist to the Golden Age country house party mystery. If all they were all like this one, it would no longer be my favorite genre. On the other hand, since I’ve read so many Golden Age mysteries, I can appreciate what Walton has done with this novel.
I have downloaded an Overdrive ebook copy of Matilda. I’ll try to get to it before it expires, but no guarantees since I’m still in the process of moving.
For TOR.COM, Jo Walton revisits the recently rediscovered 1956 Hugo Awards ballot.
When I wrote my post in 2010 about the Hugos of 1956, the nominees for that year were lost in the mists of time. Last month they were found again, by Olav Rokne in an old Progress Report, which is very exciting, because it gives me the chance to compare what I thought they might be to what they really were. It’s great to be wrong, and goodness me I was wrong!
And here’s the rediscovered actual list of nominees:
- Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein [Astounding Feb,Mar,Apr 1956]
- Call Him Dead, by Eric Frank Russell
- The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov
- Not this August, by Cyril Kornbluth
- The Long Tomorrow, by Leigh Brackett
Double Star is the winner. I was right about The End of Eternity, so I get one point. One. One of the commenters, “Bob”, mentioned Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, so he also gets a point.
We didn’t even find the others never mind consider them—which shows the inadequacy of relying on Wikipedia’s list of books for a year! (I later switched to using the Internet SF Database, which was better.) Of my potential nominees, it’s interesting that The Return of the King didn’t get on the actual ballot. In those days fantasy wasn’t as highly regarded, and Tolkien didn’t become big in the U.S. until the paperbacks came out, but even so, it seems very strange at this distance.
Of the real nominees, the most exciting one is the Brackett. This is the first time a woman was nominated for a best novel Hugo—or indeed, any Hugo. Zenna Henderson, Katherine MacLean, and Pauline Ashwell were all nominated in novelette in 1959, and Marion Zimmer Bradley was, until now, believed to be the first woman nominated for best novel, in 1963. But in fact Brackett beat them all to it. So that’s great to know
For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Jane Yolen’s dazzling THE EMERALD CIRCUS maybe the best book of the year
The buzz surrounding Jane Yolen’s forthcoming THE EMERALD CIRCUS continues.
For SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, Mark Flowers praises the collection and author.
In fact, Jane Yolen’s EMERALD CIRCUS may be my favorite book of the year, period, with apologies to Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne. Many years ago, when I had my own blog, I wrote a post celebrating the versatility of Yolen—one of the few authors who can write top-shelf books at any age level. Emerald Circus is a perfect example of her fluid but rock-solid prose.
Photo: Jason Stemple
Biz Hyzy at BOOKLIST ONLINE enjoys the book.
Ever the wordsmith, Yolen dazzles with her first short story collection for adults in years. In these fairy-tale retellings, she cites popular tales as well as obscure myths, uniting them with strangeness and whimsy. Some entries are dark, some optimistic, but all delve into real-life sensations and emotions.
<snip>
Readers may even wonder if she, like Hans Christian Andersen in “Andersen’s Witch,” cut a deal with the Ice Maiden to deliver such enchanting results. Even though Yolen subverts the folklore that made the original stories famous in the first place, she stays true to why they matter and why we continue to revisit them.
THE EMERALD CITY BOOK REVIEW announces the forthcoming giveaway for two Tachyon titles.
Thanks to Tachyon Publications, I’m thrilled to be able to offer a giveaway of THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD by Patricia McKillip AND THE EMERALD CIRCUS by Jane Yolen. As well as the US-only giveaway for paperback copies of each book, there will also be an e-book giveaway for the same titles, open internationally.
For more info on THE EMERALD CIRCUS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
For more info about THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Thomas Canty