June might be over but every month is Pride month on this blog! Because let’s be honest, to be able to recommend you as many books and movies, as we do, we must consume giant amounts of them on daily basis. No matter what it is.
So check out what Pride had to offer to us, and hopefully get inspire to read/watch something new!
The latest release from this historical fiction author marries Victorian England with supernatural oddities. Thomas, a proper gentleman, navigates a mysterious murder, all while trying to understand why magic is transforming him into something unexpected: a tree.
I love big career-retrospective single-author collections, especially when the author provides notes on genesis and biographical context. John Kessel’s turn has come with The Dark Ride, a gathering of 20 stories from 1981-2021 that shows his command of a wide range of motifs and styles and his recurring concerns in our field and beyond. It adds up to a map of a career that has been interestingly consistent over the four decades covered.
This has been a lot of hard work behind the scene, and today I’m delighted to share the cover and table of contents for The Best of World SF: Volume 2! Published by Head of Zeus in hardcover and e-book in September (UK and elsewhere) and November (US), this is big 175,000 words anthology! Cover design by Ben Prior. It makes a gorgeous set with the first volume!
NECON is summer camp for writers, artists, and fans of speculative fiction!
Like Unger’s debut novel, NUCLEATION, THE EXTRACTIONIST features vivid and highly imaginative hard science fiction world-building. I’m not a tech person or familiar with virtual reality, but the characters and situations were compelling enough to keep me reading, and eventually the internal consistency made sense to me. The story is full of fascinating details, like the need to replace neurotransmitter chemicals after a prolonged VR session. Unger writes with the ease of familiarity with challenging technical material, so that even if I couldn’t explain what was happening, I knew she could. The sureness of an author’s voice can carry us into worlds and situations we’ve never experienced for ourselves. Unger’s work is cutting-edge science fiction. I can hardly wait to see what she comes up with next!
1. What book are you currently reading?
I have, in my hot little hands, both Quantum of Nightmares and Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross. I’m a fan of all his work, but the Laundry Files strike a particular chord for anyone who has 1. spent significant waking business hours in some form of cubicle hell and 2. who has witnessed first hand the way bureaucracies have begun to evolve to handle agile and fast moving threats.
These days, ‘punk’ is added to a whole host of different genres, sub-genres, and words never before used to indicate book genres before. But there was once only one kind of literary punk: cyberpunk.
Pioneered in the 1980s by authors like Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk imagined a dystopian world of advanced technology and crime. In the face of unprecedented levels of corruption on an incredible scale, cyberpunk stories are populated with down-on-their-luck rebels intent on overthrowing the ruling classes, usually by way of their expert tech skills.
Borrowing heavily from tropes in film noir, cyberpunk tends to be gritty, dark, and pessimistic. But has the genre changed since it first came on the scene? Are we finding more optimism in feminist cyberpunk narratives? And why is thriller cyberpunk’s the natural genre companion?
“Cyberpunk is tech in conflict with its creator.”
Kimberly Unger
The New York Times bestselling writer, editor, teacher, and publisher, Jeff VanderMeer has won the Rhysling Award, British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, the World Fantasy Award three times, Nebula Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. His acclaimed novels include Dradin, in Love (1996), Veniss Underground (2003), Shriek: An Afterword (2006), South China Sea (2008), Finch (2009), The Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation [2014], Authority [2014] and Acceptance [2014]), Borne (2017), The Strange Bird (2017), Dead Astronauts (2019), A Peculiar Peril (2020), and Hummingbird Salamander (2021). The film Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tessa Thompson and based on the VanderMeer novel, premiered in 2018.
Many of his shorter works have been collected in The Book of Frog (1989), Lyric of the Highway Mariner: A Collection of Poems (1991), The Book of Lost Places (1996), City of Saints and Madmen (2001), The Day Dali Died (2003), Secret Life (2004), Ein Herz für Lukretia [German] (2007), Secret Lives (2008), The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories (2007; with Cat Rambo), THE THIRD BEAR (2010), Balzac’s War (2011), and The Compass of his Bones and Other Stories (2011).
VanderMeer co-edited (unless otherwise noted all alongside award-winning editor Ann VanderMeer) several groundbreaking and popular anthologies including Leviathan, Volume One: Into the Gray (1996 with Luke O’Grady), Leviathan 2 (1998 with Rose Secrest), Leviathan 3 (2002 with Forrest Aguirre), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2003; with Mark Roberts), Best American Fantasy (2007; Vol 2 2008), Fast Ships, Black Sails (2008), THE NEW WEIRD (2008), STEAMPUNK (2008), Last Drink Bird Head: Flash Fiction for Charity (2009), STEAMPUNK II: STEAMPUNK RELOADED (2010), ODD? (2011), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011), The Weird (2011), The Time Traveler’s Almanac (2013), Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015), The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (2019), and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (2020). Also with Ann, he created THE KOSHER GUIDE TO IMAGINARY ANIMALS (2010).
Among his numerous nonfiction volumes are the acclaimed Why Should I Cut Your Throat? Excursions in the World of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror (2004), BOOKLIFE: STRATEGIES AND SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY WRITER (2009), Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy through Essays, Articles and Reviews (2011), The Steampunk Bible (2011; with S. J. Chambers), Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013), and The Steampunk User’s Manual: An Illustrated Practical and Whimsical Guide to Creating Retro-Futurist Dreams (2014 with Desirina Boskovich).
All of us at Tachyon wish the multi-faceted Jeff a squidastic birthday, full of fungi and other things that creep in the darkness.
ISBN: Print: 978-1-61696-386-6 Digital: 978-1-61696-387-3
Published: February 2023
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital Books
Jane Yolen is, simply, a legend.
—Catherynne M. Valente, author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own
From ecstasy to tragedy, with love blossoming shyly, love at first sight, and even love borne of practical necessity—beloved fantasist Jane Yolen’s newest collection defies the very notion of simple love stories. This bewitching assemblage of passion and adventure by a legendary, World Fantasy Award-winning author, is a delightful read for absolutely anyone who appreciates witty, compelling and cleverly-wrought romance.
The Hans Christian Andersen of America
—Newsweek
A ship at sea encounters a mysterious merman they must learn to communicate with. A fairy rake meets the real Juliet behind Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. A jewelry artist falls into the past to meet the man who will establish a long-running silversmithy. And more than one ignored princess finds their match in the most unlikely men.
Following the acclaimed collections The Emerald Circus and The Midnight Circus, The Scarlet Circus brings you the many treasures and transformations that only love can bring.
The Aesop of the twentieth century
—The New York Times
The worldbuilding is immersive, with gripping descriptions of the sights and sounds of Qilwa jumping from the page. But the fantasy setting is not so impenetrable as to obscure the novel’s real-world themes. Post-imperialism, colonization, and immigration are key elements of the text, and nuanced questions arise as power structures topple and invert. Within this shifting landscape of power, there are no easy answers, and characters are often led to the question of how many wrongs can still lead to a right.
Foreword
Jamnia’s queer-normative world is a welcome break from fantasy trends and tropes: people introduce themselves with pronouns without fanfare, and homophobia and transphobia as forms of oppression do not factor in.
Cracking the door to a fresh fantasy world, THE BRUISING OF QILWA makes an unforgettable first impression.
THE BRUISING OF QILWA is a beautiful, slow-paced novella with an intricate setting and big found-family vibes – to say nothing of it being casually and frankly queer. The Persian-inspired, queernorm setting is a wonderful change from the white cishet quasi-Medieval Europe aesthetic we see so often in Western fantasy, and Jamnia’s prose is lovely and descriptive, making that setting come alive for us in these pages.
Every Book a Doorway
A book that covers a great deal in a small amount of space! Perfect for lovers of found fantasy, blood magic, and migration.
The Girl Who Reads
I finished this one in the last hours of the 30th and I really enjoyed it. I loved the mystery, some of the medical aspects, and the magic system, as well as the themes explored.
Word Wonders
Unger (NUCLEATION), a game designer and VR programmer by day, delivers an edge-of-your-seat technothriller with a refreshingly relatable protagonist.
—Library Journal
Our heroine is a business consultant, but we live in her cyborg brain, we see every detail through her augmented eyes, and the future world she haunts is crammed with invention to the point of psychedelia. I quite enjoyed this.
—Bruce Sterling, author of Schismatrix
In her breakout technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic cyberpunk heroine we need: Eliza McKay, a disgraced underground hacker just trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. But when McKay’s latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life in both the real and digital worlds.
A fast paced and complex tale of corporate and governmental intrigue, Unger has given the world another winner.
—Joseph Karpierz, MT Void
Eliza McKay is an Extractionist: an expert in the virtual reality space where people’s minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky—it’s McKay’s job to quietly extract them. And McKay’s job just got a lot more dangerous.
After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try and hack her cybernetic implants directly. Meanwhile, the corporate executive she was hired to rescue from VR space is surprisingly reluctant to be extracted. Something is lurking in the Swim, and some very powerful people will stop at nothing to keep it secret.
Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.
Publishers Weekly
