birthday

June 23, 2022

Happy birthday to the sensational Eileen Gunn

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Acclaimed author and editor, Eileen Gunn won the 2004 Nebula Award for her short story “Coming to Terms” and was twice nominated for the Hugo Award (“Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” 1989 and “Computer Friendy,” 1990). Her stories were collected in the World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award nominated STABLE STRATEGIES AND OTHERS (2004; the Japanese translation was given the 2006 Sense of Gender Award), Steampunk Quartet (2011), and Questionable Practices (2014). Tor.com published the pair of chapbooks (co-written by Michael Swanwick), The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree (2011) and Zeppelin City (2011).

From 2001-08, she served as the editor/publisher of the acclaimed webzine The Infinite Matrix. Alongside L. Timmel Duchamp, Gunn co-edited The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future (2008). She also produced The Difference Dictionary, an Organic History Supplement to The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

All of us at Tachyon wish the amazing Eileen a happy birthday.

June 10, 2022

The beloved Kage Baker was born 70 years ago

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Best known for her Company time travel series, Kage Baker won the Theodore Sturgeon and Nebula Awards for her novellas “The Empress of Mars” and The Women Of Nell Gwynne’s. Her 13 novels include the eight volumes of the Company sequence, beginning with In The Garden Of Iden (1997) and concluding with the The Sons Of Heaven (2007), the three books that make up the Anvil of the World Universe series (The Anvil Of The World [2003], The House Of The Stag [2008], The Bird Of The River [2010]), The Empress Of Mars (2008), Not Less Than Gods (2009), and THE HOTEL UNDER THE SAND (2009).

Her numerous short stories and essays have been collected in Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers (2002), Mother Aegypt And Other Stories (2004), Dark Mondays (2006), Gods And Pawns (2007), Nell Gwynne’s Scarlet Spy (2010), ANCIENT ROCKETS: TREASURES AND TRAINWRECKS OF THE SILENT SCREEN (2011), The Best Of Kage Baker (2012), and IN THE COMPANY OF THIEVES (2013).

Sadly, the amazing Kage Baker died from uterine cancer on January 31, 2010. She is missed.

June 5, 2022

Happy birthday to the awesome Lauren Beukes

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The internationally award-winning and bestselling South African writer Lauren Beukes’ followed her first book, the non-fiction Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past (2006), with the novel Moxyland (2008). Her other novels include the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Zoo City (2010), Broken Monsters (2014), and Afterland (2020). Beukes’ British Fantasy Award-winner, The Shining Girls (2013), recently enjoyed an Elizabeth Moss-starring adaptation on AppleTV+.

Cover art by Clara Bacou
Design by Elizabeth Story

Her graphic novel work includes Vertigo’s Survivor’s Club (2016), the Fables spin-off Fairest (2013), and Wonder Woman. Beukes’s nonfiction has been published in numerous magazines including The Hollywood Reporter, The Sunday Times, Marie Claire, and Elle.

Many of Beukes’s short stories were collected in the acclaimed SLIPPING: STORIES, ESSAYS, & OTHER WRITING (2016). Among her other works are The Bostik Book of Unbelievable Beasties, made up of ridiculous rhymes with illustrations by kids in South Africa, and the Beukes’ directed, award-winning documentary Glitterboys & Ganglands, about Cape Town’s biggest female impersonation beauty pageant.

All of us at Tachyon wish the sensational Lauren a happy birthday. If you choose to time travel today, be safe and healthy while avoiding all conundrums and serial killers. Especially the serial killers.

June 4, 2022

Happy birthday to the multi-talented David Sandner, writer, editor, and fan of weird things

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Author and editor David Sandner‘s poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous publications including Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, Pulphouse, Baseball Fantastic, The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic, The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales, and The Mammoth Book of Black Magic. A noted scholar, his book length award-nominated works on weird fiction number The Fantastic Sublime (1996), Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (2004), Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831 (2011), and Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now (2020).

Cover design by Patrick Swenson and Elizabeth Story

Alongside his frequent collaborator Jacob Weisman, Sandner edited the groundbreaking, comprehensive anthology THE TREASURY OF THE FANTASTIC (2001). The duo have also written several stories together including the acclaimed Mingus Fingers (2019). Sandner co-curated the Zines to the Future! exhibition (October-December 2020) for Cal State Fullerton and maintains The Frankenstein Meme, his ongoing scholarship on the literary influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Everyone at Tachyon wishes the freakishly tall David a happy and suitably weird birthday.

May 27, 2022

The incomparable grandmaster Harlan Ellison was born 88 years ago

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Harlan Ellison in Boston
(Credit: Barbara Alper/Getty Images/*New York Times*)

Once described by Robert Bloch as “the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water,” the contentious writer/editor Harlan Ellison in a 60 year career produced more than 75 books, over 1,700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns, two dozen teleplays, and a dozen movies. His many influential works included classics as Deathbird Stories, Dangerous Visions, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Strangewine, Angry Candy, Slippage, and SHATTERDAY.

In his extraordinary career, Ellison won multiple Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, Stoker, Locus, Audie awards as well as the Silver Pen, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Bradbury, and American Mystery awards. He was honored with Stoker and World Fantasy Life Achievement Awards and is a SFWA Grandmaster.

May 26, 2022

Happy birthday to the exceptional Caitlín R. Kiernan

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Born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in the southeastern U.S., writer, vertebrate paleontologist, and musician Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of thirteen acclaimed novels including Silk (1998; winner of International Horror Guild Award), Threshold (2001; International Horror Guild), Murder of Angels (2004), The Red Tree (2009), The Drowning Girl (2012; Tiptree and Stoker), the Siobhan Quinn series (all as by Kathleen Tierney; Blood Oranges [2013], Red Delicious [2014], and Cherry Bomb [2015]), Tinfoil Dossier (Agents of Dreamland [2017], Black Helicopters [2018], The Tindalos Asset [2020]), and La Belle Fleur Sauvage: Plague of the Womb (2019).

Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story

Their more than two hundred and fifty short stories have been collected in Candles for Elizabeth (1998), Tales of Pain and Wonder (1999), Wrong Things (2001 with Poppy Z. Brite), To Charles Fort, with Love (2005), A Is for Alien (2009), Two Worlds and In Between (2011), Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (2012), The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories (2013; winner of the World Fantasy Award), Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (2015), Dear Sweet Filthy World (2017), The Dinosaur Tourist (2018), Houses Under the Sea (2019), A Little Yellow Book of Fever Dreams (2019), THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN (2019), Comes a Pale Rider (2020), Vile Affections (2021), and several others.

Kiernan has written graphic novels for both DC/Vertigo and Dark Horse Comics including The Dreaming (1996-2001 with various artists), a spin off series from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, and the Stoker Award winning Alabaster: Wolves (2013; with artist Steve Lieber). They fronted Death’s Little Sister, a short-lived goth-rock band.

A vertebrate paleontologist, Kiernan co-founded the Birmingham Paleontological Society (1984). They co-authored papers describing a new genus and species of an ancient marine lizard the mosasaur Selmasaurus russelli (1988) and in 2020, a new large fossil sea turtle, Asmodochelys parhami. In 2019, Kiernan became a research associate and fossil preparator at McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama.

In November 2005, they began publishing the Sirenia Digest, “a monthly subscription-only e-zine continuing Caitlín’s exploration of the fusion of erotic literature with elements of dark fantasy and science fiction, usually creating brief, dreamlike vignettes, and sometimes much longer short stories.” There are currently sixty-six issues and more than eighty vignettes.

Kiernan lives in Birmingham, Alabama with their partner, Kathryn Pollnac, and two very large cats, Selwyn and Lydia.

All of us at Tachyon wish the lyrical and memorable Caitlín a happy birthday, full of dark fantasy and dinosaurs.

May 25, 2022

The incomparable W. P. Kinsella was born 87 years ago

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Though now best remembered for his baseball stories, the incomparable W. P. Kinsella first established his literary reputation with his humorous and gritty short stories about the Hobbema Reserve in central Alberta. These tales, largely narrated by Silas Ermineskin, usually focused sympathetically on the lives of Indigenous people in their perennial skirmishes with blundering white institutions and bureaucracies. The first of Kinsella’s many short story collections Dance Me Outside (1977) featured the Hobbema tales. His other collection of the Hobbema stories include Scars (1978), Born Indian (1981), Moccasin Telegraph (1983), The Fencepost Chronicles (1986), The Miss Hobbema Pageant (1989), Brother Frank’s Gospel Hour (1994), and The Secret of the Northern Lights (1998).

Kinsella’s first collection of baseball stories Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes To Iowa (1980) presaged his classic magic realism novel Shoeless Joe (1982), which won the Canadian Authors Association Prize, the Alberta Achievement Award, Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. The novel was adapted into the popular movie Field of Dreams (1989) and garnered three Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. He produced four other baseball novels: The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), If Wishes Were Horses (1996), Magic Time (1998), and Butterfly Winter (2011). Kinsella’s baseball stories were also collected in The Thrill of the Grass (1984), The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt (1988), The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories (1993), and Japanese Baseball and Other Stories (2000). He co-wrote the Japanese non-fiction book Ichiro Dreams: Ichiro Suzuki and the Seattle Mariners (2002). Kinsella edited two baseball anthologies, the non-fiction Diamonds Forever: Reflections from the Field, the Dugout, and the Bleachers (1997) and the fiction Baseball Fantastic (2001).

His other novels and collections include Box Socials (1991), The Winter Helen Dropped By (1994), The Alligator Report (1985), Red Wolf, Red Wolf (1987), and Russian Dolls (2016). Tachyon was honored to produce THE ESSENTIAL W. P. KINSELLA (2015), the last collection to be published during Kinsella’s lifetime.

May 14, 2022

Jazz great Sidney Bechet was born 125 years ago

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Sidney Bechet, Freddie Moore, and Lloyd Phillips at Jimmy Ryan’s in New York City, circa 1947 (Wikimedia Commons)

Born in New Orleans on May 14, 1897, Sidney Bechet was the first great Jazz clarinetist. He famously performed with many famous musicians including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Josephine Baker. A master of improvisation, Bechet often played lead parts that were usually reserved for trumpets.

In 2004, Tachyon produced a chapbook of Bechet’s OMAR, a tale of of passion, danger, and betrayal in the Bayou. Infused with voodoo, love, music, and death, the chronicle is wrought out of a brutal period in American history, passed down by a family born into slavery. It is jazz legend Sidney Bechet’s story.

Sidney Bechet died in Paris on May 14, 1959 at the age of 62.

May 3, 2022

Happy birthday to National Book Award finalist Michael Cadnum

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The author of more than thirty books for adults, teens and children, Michael C a dnum is perhaps best know for his adult suspense fiction and young adult fiction based on myths, legends, and historical figures. His acclaimed novels include Calling Home (1991 Edgar Award nominee), Breaking The Fall (1992 Edgar Award nominee), The Crusader trilogy (The Book Of The Lion [2000, National Book Award finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, and an Owl Creek Book Award winner], The Leopard Sword [2002], The Dragon Throne [2005]), Flash (2010), and Seize The Storm (2012).

His numerous short fiction has been collected in CAN’T CATCH ME AND OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES (2006) and Earthquake Murder (2018). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Helen Bullis Prize for his poetry, Cadnum’s many books of poems include This Early Dark (2016), The Woman Who Discovered Math (2001), By Evening (1992), and Long Afternoons (1986). His short stories “Daphne” and “Can’t Catch Me” were both performed as one-act plays.

All of us at Tachyon wish Michael a very happy birthday.

April 28, 2022

Happy birthday to Leonard Pine, the ultimate bad ass

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Leonard Pine as portrayed by Michael K Williams in ***Hap and Leonard***
Photo Credit: Jackson Lee Davis/SundanceTV

Vietnam vet, sometimes private investigator, sometimes bouncer, and all around bad ass, Leonard Pine is a gay, politically conservative black man from LaBorde, TX. Alongside his “brother” Hap Collins, who is straight, white, and liberal, Pine challenges the seedier and more unpleasant elements of East Texas. The, at times, bumbling duo has fought the Klan, the Dixie Mafia, murders, kidnappers, and all sorts of other notorious hombres.

Pine has zero tolerance for racist or anti-gay slurs and will challenge the offenders with strong fists and a barbed tongue. His aggressive nature has led to many encounters with the law, most notably regarding his repeated torching of neighborhood crackhouses.

Beginning with Savage Season (1990), Joe R. Lansdale used his adventures with Collins, as the basis for the popular Hap and Leonard series. The 25 published books include five titles currently available from Tachyon Publications: HAP AND LEONARD (2016), THE BIG BOOK OF HAP AND LEONARD (2018), HAP AND LEONARD: BLOOD AND LEMONADE (2018), OF MICE AND MINESTRONE (2020), and BORN FOR TROUBLE: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF HAP AND LEONARD (2022). The pair’s life also inspired the TV series, Hap and Leonard, which is currently available on Netflix.

All of us at Tachyon wish a happy birthday to Leonard, our favorite cantankerous moral enforcer. May your day be filled with vanilla cookies and Dr. Pepper.

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