Though months away, Elly Bangs’ debut UNITY is already generating excitement. Coming your way in April, UNITY by Elly Bangs is available for pre-order through all finer booksellers or direct from Tachyon.
With a glowing review, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY delivers the first review for the novel.
Chock-full of both big ideas and high-energy action, Bangs’s thrilling debut centers on a mad chase across a dystopian Earth in search of a collective consciousness that could save humanity from itself.
[…]
This gritty, thought-provoking cyberpunk adventure does the genre justice.
SFF180 includes the work among Anticipated Science Fiction 2021.
DEAR GEEK PLACE feels much the same.
Time for one that hit my radar thanks to Sci-Fi Month! Anything that can be compared to both Mad Max and Sense8 is definitely going to interest me, so this one immediately went on my list of books to watch out for, next year.
On the Tachyon Publications Channel, Bangs talks UNITY.
Tachyon Publications is hiring a part-time publicist in early 2021. We strongly prefer candidates with many of the following skills:
Candidates from underrepresented communities are encouraged to apply.
Not in the Bay Area? No worries, we are open to a remote position.
Please email a cover letter in the body of the email and your current resume to publicity@tachyonpublications.com.
OBLONG BOOKS & MUSIC includes Daniel Pinkwater’s ADVENTURES OF A DWERGISH GIRL among their best-selling titles. (This along with all the rest of the 2020 titles, is currently 20% off with free media mail shipping on the Tachyon site)
Deborah J. Ross, on her eponymous blog, loves the book.
Daniel Pinkwater is at his best, most charming and delightful in this tale of a girl from the Dwerg people – you know, the “little men” responsible for Rip Van Winkle sleeping for twenty years? The ones you can never find, no matter how hard you look? The ones who mine gold in the Catskills, can run unbelievably fast, practice domesticity on a level capable of boring any young person to tears? Such is Molly Van Dwerg’s world until she decides to leave home, armed with a couple of Dwergish gold coins and irrepressible self-confidence.
For DO THE M@TH, Ethan Iverson recommends this new classic.
Kids still read! On the YA tip, the great Daniel Pinkwater has a new book out, ADVENTURES OF A DWERGISH GIRL. It’s classic Pinkwater, one of his best. Yes! God bless Daniel Pinkwater. When I was a kid, I treated Alan Mendelsohn, Boy From Mars and Lizard Music as manuals of style. I will always owe Pinkwater a great debt.
Cory Doctorow, at PLURALISTIC, revisits the title in his All the books I reviewed in 2020.
Like every Pinkwater novel, it defies description, it is brilliant, and it is his best to date. Ghosts, Revolutionary War fleshbots, papaya juice, and supernatural beings from the Catskills!
A UNIVERSE IN WORDS praises Jane Yolen’s beautiful THE MIDNIGHT CIRCUS.
Jane Yolen doesn’t consider herself a horror writer, not even a particularly scary one. And yet her stories bristle with the unknown, the edge of something not quite safe, the supernatural. It is not about the blood or the glint of moonlight on a knife. It’s not about the abject sadness of a matchstick girl freezing to death on Christmas eve. Yolen’s stories that are scary are so because they recognize the emotional weight of it all. No need for guts spilling out here! Yolen’s THE MIDNIGHT CIRCUS retains her traditional magical beauty while she pulls back the curtain on the darkness backstage.
[…]
Jane Yolen is a master story writer. Although not all stories with resonate with every reader, there is a gem or three in The Midnight Circus for everyone. Get your ticket, join the queue, and get ready for beauty, horror, sadness and beauty.
At REDDIT r/Fantasy, The_Real_JS agrees.
So, as a rule, short stories aren’t really my thing. I generally try and read one a year just to try new and different things. This year, that just happened to coincide with my first Yolen book ever. And I have to say, there was a lot here to love. I’m coming to this review a bit late, more than a month after I finished it, and there are still stories that have stayed with, ideas that really grabbed a hold. I’ll touch on a few of them here.
Canadian Kelley Armstrong’s first novel Bitten, the initial book of Women Of The Otherworld, was published in 2001. The immensely popular series eventually culminated with the thirteenth volume, Thirteen, in 2012. The seventh book No Humans Involved was Armstrong’s first New York Times best-seller. For three seasons from 2014 to 2016, the Canadian channel Space adapted Bitten into a popular television series.
In 2007, Armstrong began her second series, Nadia Stafford, with Exit Strategy. 2008’s The Summoning started The Darkest Powers trilogy. The second volume of the series Awakening achieved a number one status on the New York Times best-seller list. She followed that series in 2011 with the sequel trilogy The Darkness Rising.
Armstrong started the Cainsville series in 2013, which is comprised of five novels-(Omens [2013], Visions [2014], Deceptions [2015], Betrayals [2016],Rituals [2017]) and the young adult The Age Of Legends with Sea Of Shadows (2014), Empire Of Night (2015), and Forest Of Ruin (2016). She has published (as K. L. Armstrong co-authored with Melissa Marr) the middle-grade fantasy series Blackwell Pages Trilogy (Loki’s Wolves [2013], Odin’s Ravens [2014], Thor’s Serpents [2015]).
2020 was another busy year with The Gryphon’s Lair (2nd volume to volume in a new middle grade series that began with A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying (2019), Wolf’s Curse, the conclusion to Otherworld: Kate and Logan duology that began with Wolf’s Bane (2019), and the stand-alone novels, Every Step She Takes and A Stitch in Time.
Her short stories have been collected in several books including Men Of The Otherworld (2010), Tales of the Otherworld (2012), Otherworld Nights (2014), Darkest Powers Tales (2015), LED ASTRAY: THE BEST OF KELLEY ARMSTRONG (2015), Otherworld Chills (2016), The Complete Darkest Powers Tales (2017), and Portents (2018)
All of us at Tachyon, wish the extraordinary Kelley a happy birthday! Beware the creatures of the night. They’re not be trifled with.
At EVERYTHING2, Dustyblue praises Peter Watt’s THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION.
This book is a real thriller. It mixes a sort of psychological agoraphobia and claustrophobia into one setting in a ship that is at once to big and empty and stifling. Chimp is a monomaniacal and engaging antagonist. He isn’t cruel or selfish. He’s just a machine trying to do his job. He’s not smart. He has nearly unlimited surveillance powers. The whole scenario is delightfully suspenseful and made even better by the relationship between Sunday and Chimp. They are almost friends and Chimp expresses fondness for her. Is it real feeling or applied psychology? There’s just no way to know and the question gnaws even even as she prepares to betray the mission. Since this is a Watts book we aren’t guaranteed a happy ending. Humanity, Fuck Yeah! aficionados will walk away confused about whether this story was for them since the whole mess was engineered by folks on Earth so long ago. It’s a story about the unbroken human spirit but it doesn’t portray it as an unalloyed good. If dark science fiction with a strong first person narrative appeals to you give THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION a read.
The French site LES BLABLAS DE TACHAN usually doesn’t like hard science fiction, but they really enjoyed Eriophora, the French edition of THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION.
As far as I am concerned, I really liked this short reading, however rather dense, where finally the hard science decor was indeed quite affordable because popularized by the author for novices like me. I was much more carried away by Sunday’s trajectory and the reflections that it prompts to have on our relationship with AI but also with industry and at work, which were for me the heart of this story. This reading was therefore a little favorite!
Translation from French courtesy of Google
At REDDIT r/printSF, the book gets a favorable mention.
You would definitely like THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION by Peter Watts. It involves the main character leapfrogging literally millions of years and waking for only days at a time. They then have to plan a revolution under these circumstances. It’s very interesting.
OrthogonalBestSeries, IMHO, King’s 11/22/63 as a time travel story is not great. Can we post and discuss good time travel fiction? Dissenting opinions welcome.
BEAUTY IN RUINS just can’t wait for Marjorie Liu’s forthcoming collection THE TANGLEROOT PALACE. Though not out until June, preorders for THE TANGLEROOT PALACE are available from all finer booksellers and the Tachyon Publications site.
My pick for this week features a collection of unexpected delights, dangerous magic, and even more dangerous women, with a cover that’s just too gorgeous to resist…
Over the years, many designs were produced by different artists for theoretical theatrical and/or movie adaptations of the short story “The Tangleroot Palace.”
Congratulations to Nalo Hopkinson on being named the 37th SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) is pleased to announce that Nalo Hopkinson has been named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master for her contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy.
SFWA
The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award recognizes “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” Hopkinson joins the Grand Master ranks alongside such legends as C. J. Cherryh, Peter S. Beagle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Ray Bradbury, and Joe Haldeman. The award will be presented at the 56th Annual Nebula Conference and Awards Ceremony, held online the weekend of June 4–6, 2021.
SOUTHERN TODAY GONE TOMORROW enjoys Carrie Vaughn’s KITTY’S MIX-TAPE.
Absolutely I recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Urban Fantasy, who likes some stakes in their stories, or even those who like some re-imagined historical fantasy.
Dennis Callegari in SF COMMENTARY 104 praises a pair of Peter S. Beagle titles.
A unicorn appears in a field beside the home of a man who lives in Calabria. At first this is his secret; the pain begins after other people discover his secret. The suspenseful climax to the story is heart-stopping. Everything works out for the best eventually, but his main characters have experienced the best and the worst aspects of human behaviour in sunny Calabria.
The most memorable historical fantasy in the collection is ‘The Queen Who Could NotWalk’ (first published in 2013), which has a wonderful surprising-yet-inevitable ending. Other special favourites from this collection are ‘The Story of Kao Yu’ (2016) and ‘The Way It Works Out andAll’ (2011). There are other authors who can write a sentence as well as Beagle, but there are very few who keep inventing sparkling fantasy ideas for decade after decade.
Ian Sales on IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE RIGHT… in his review of Michael Blumlein’s collection All I Ever Dream mentions THE ROBERTS.
The three novellas are probably the strongest works. THE ROBERTS is available separately from Tachyon Publications, and is typical of Blumlein’s work: dense, intense and set somewhere at the intersection of science and technology and human relationships.
At REDDIT r/printsf, Kameron Hurley’s Apocalypse Nyx books get an unexpected mention in Speculative Fiction for mental health?
at first i laughed when i saw “Stars are Legion and The Light Brigade” because i thought you were going to be listing fun, lighthearted reads. but actually Kameron Hurley’s Apocalypse Nyx books (God’s War) helped me a lot with my mental health. They’re gruesome and brutal at times but the main character is such a badass that she makes you feel like you could do anything. It’s a cool series and feels very cinematic.
Smoldero
Patricia A. McKillip for TOR.COM crafts the essay Gingerbread Bricks, Cherry-Stealing Cats, and Other Culinary Disasters.
I’ve been asked if I cook as well as I write about cooking.
It’s a fair question: I’ve been cooking almost as long as I’ve been writing. Writing was something I fell into, much like Alice down the rabbit-hole, when I was fourteen. I sat down one day to write myself a story instead of reading one, and thirty-two pages later—pencil and lined paper tablet—I finished my tale and realized that my predictable world had expanded wildly, enormously, with endlessly diverging and intriguing paths running every which way into an unknown I suddenly knew existed. Having ended one story (which is locked away, guarded by dragons and evil-eyed basilisks, and will never see the light of day if I have anything to say about it), I wanted to start all over again on another.
When or why I decided I needed to inflict culinary disasters on my long-suffering family and others, I don’t remember.
My most vivid cooking memory, even after so many years, is setting my brother on fire with my Cherries Jubilee.
