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September 4, 2019

Happy birthday to the always affable award-winning writer and editor Rick Wilber

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alien morning, birthday, future media, josh beatman, Rick Wilber, rum road, the cold road

Currently a visiting professor for the low-residency MFA in genre writing at Western State Colorado University, Rick Wilber has penned more than fifty science-fiction short stories, several college textbooks, including Magazine Feature Writing, The Writer’s Handbook for Editing & Revision, Modern Media Writing (with Randy Miller), and Media Matters, and the acclaimed novels The Cold Road, Rum Point, and the Campbell Award-nominated Alien Morning. His stories “Something Real” won the 2013 Sidewise Award and “The Secret City” is a 2018 Sidewise Award finalist.

Wilber edited the three anthologies Subtropical Speculations: Anthology of Florida Science Fiction (with Richard Mathews), FUTURE MEDIA, and Field Of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of The Strange and Supernatural. His book length memoir about his dad, baseball player Del Wilber, My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball garnered notices from a diversity of people including Peter Golenbock, Peter Straub, and Bill Plaschke.

All of us at Tachyon wish Rick a happy birthday! Hope you get a hit! It is your birthday after all.

For more info on FUTURE MEDIA, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Josh Beatman

August 31, 2019

The complete previews of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elephant and corpses, elizabeth story, enyo-enyo, garda, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview, the corpse archives, the plague givers

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic.” (Publishers Weekly).

The previews included

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 30, 2019

Mary Shelley, writer of the first science fiction novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, was born 222 years ago

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized beyond frankenstein: the complete supernatural short fiction, birthday, elizabeth story, frankenstein, mary shelley, particle books

Mary Shelley’s portrait by Richard Rothwell

The daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797. Her seminal work Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), often considered the very first science fiction story, created the iconic mad scientist-monster tale.

Though best remembered for her archetypal creation, Shelley wrote six other novels most notably the historicals Valperga; Or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1834), and perhaps most famously the apocalyptic The Last Man (1826). Her two dozen short stories have been collected in Mary Shelly: Collected Tales and Stories and BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN: THE COMPLETE SUPERNATURAL SHORT FICTION. She penned numerous poems, travel narratives and children’s books and also contributed several entries to The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men, which comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner’s 133-Volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46).

“Frontispiece to Frankenstein 1831” by Theodore Von Holst (1810-1844) – (Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

For more info on BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN: THE COMPLETE SUPERNATURAL SHORT FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

August 28, 2019

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley preview: ”Enyo-Enyo”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elizabeth story, enyo-enyo, excerpt, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from a “brilliant story collection.” (Grimdark Magazine)

Enyo-Enyo

by Kameron Hurley

Enyo
meditated at mealtimes within the internode, huffing liquor vapors
from a dead comrade’s shattered skull. This deep within the
satellite, ostensibly safe beneath the puckered skein of the
peridium, she went over the lists of the dead.

She recited her own name first.

Enyo’s memory was a severed ocular scelera; leaking aqueous humor,
slowing losing shape as the satellite she commanded spun back to the
beginning. The cargo she carried was unknown to her, a vital piece of
knowledge that had escaped the punctured flesh of her memory.

She had named the ship after herself—Enyo-Enyo—without any
hint of irony. The idea that Enyo had any irony left was a riotous
laugh even without knowing the satellite’s moniker, and her Second,
Reeb, amused himself often at her shattering attempt at humor.

After the purging of every crew, Reeb came into Enyo’s pulpy green
quarters, his long face set in a black, graven expression she had
come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that
season in her childhood.

“Why don’t we finish out this turn alone?” he would say. “We
can manage the internode ourselves. Besides, they don’t make
engineers the way they did eight turns ago.”

“There’s the matter of the prisoner,” she would say.

And he would throw up his dark, scarred hands and sigh and say, “Yes,
there’s the prisoner.”

It was Enyo’s duty, her vocation, her obsession, to tread down the
tongue of the spiraling umbilicus from the internode to the holding
pod rotation of the satellite, to tend to the prisoner.

Each time, she greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous
green fluid with the same incurious moue she had seen Justice wear in
propaganda posters during the war. Some part of her wondered if the
body would recognize it. If they could talk of those times. But who
knew how many turns old it was? Who knew how many other wars it had
seen? On a large enough scale, her war was nothing. A few million
dead. A system destroyed.

The body’s eyes were always closed, its sex indeterminate, its face
a morass of dark, thread-like tentacles and fleshy growths. Most
sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled
a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the black
fungal sucker fused to the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body
absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of
fulfillment.

Enyo usually went straight back to the internode to recite her lists
of dead, after. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat,
gurgling drive that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had
been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become when they
reached its destination. She lost track of time in these intimate
reveries, often. After half a rotation of contemplation, Reeb would
do a sweep of the satellite. He would find her alive and intact, and
perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the
engineers or concocting a vile hallucinogen the gelatinous
consistency of aloe. They were a pair of two, a crew of three,
picking up rim trash and mutilated memories in the seams between the
stars during the long night of their orbit around the galactic core.

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 28, 2019

Get Nancy Kress’ Nebula award winning AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL for only $1.99!

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized after the fall before the fall during the fall, elizabeth story, kdd, kindle daily deal, Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress’s acclaimed, Nebula award winning AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL is a Kindle Daily Deal for Wednesday, August 28.

For today only, the ebook is available for just $1.99!

“Nebula- and Hugo-winner Kress mixes time travel, global catastrophe, and mysterious aliens in this strong post-apocalyptic tale…. Kress handles the crisscrossing timelines with cool elegance.”
—Publishers Weekly

2013 Nebula Award Winner
2012 Locus Award Winner
2013 Hugo Award Nominee
2013 Sturgeon Award Nominee

In the year 2035, all that is left of humanity lives in the Shell. No one knows why the Tesslies attacked in 2014, devastated the environment, and nearly destroyed humanity. Or why the aliens imprisoned twenty-six survivors in a sterile enclosure built on the barren remains of the Earth.

“This isn’t the usual post-environmental apocalypse/alien invasion survival book…. Readers of science fiction and those interested in environmental issues will question the current wisdom about our environment and climate science, as well as how much effect humans may—or may not—have on the future.”
—School Library Journal

Fifteen-year-old Pete, one of only six children born in the Shell, is determined to lead humanity to a new beginning. But Pete struggles to control his anger as, one by one, the survivors sicken and die. Although the Earth appears to be slowly healing, the Shell’s inhabitants may not live long enough to see it. The only chance for humanity lies within brief time portals. Peter and the survivors hatch a desperate plan: to increase their numbers by abducting children from the past.

“AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL is a highly intelligent, sublimely understated glimpse into humankind’s future—it’s comparable in thematic impact to Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, and that is saying something. Simultaneously disheartening and inspiring, this novel’s ultimate power is very much like the mega-tsunami referenced within its pages—you won’t see it coming, but when it hits you, you will be swept away.”
—Paul Goat Allen, Barnes & Noble.com

In the year 2013, a brilliant CIA consultant sees a pattern in seemingly unrelated kidnappings. As Julie Kahn’s predictive algorithms reveal that the world is in imminent danger, she discovers that she may also play a role in its possible rebirth.

“Nancy Kress is one of the best science-fiction writers working today. Her use of science is tricky and thought-provoking, her command of fiction sharp and full of feeling.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt

Julie and Pete are rapidly converging in time—a chance encounter between them may be the Earth’s only hope.

For more info about AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

August 27, 2019

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized aroundtheoffice, publishing, shelfie, tachyon, tachyonpublications

A big welcome to our new Tachyon/Unicorn Squad intern, Bella Blofeld! Hi Bella!! #aroundtheoffice #publishing #tachyon #tachyonpublications #shelfie
https://www.instagram.com/p/B1rklbTAWn7/?igshid=164lc23ka4tgk

August 27, 2019

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley preview: “The Plague Givers”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elizabeth story, excerpt, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview, the plague hunters

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “the literary sci-fi equivalent of a progressive rock album for punks.” (Starburst)

The Plague Givers

by Kameron Hurley

Inside
the tree, well insulated from the view of the two figures in the
boat, a thick, grubby woman raised her head from her work. In one
broad hand she held the stuffed skin of an eyeless toy hydra; in the
other, a piece of wire strung with a long white matte of hair. An
empty brown bottle sat at her elbow, though it took more than a
bottle of plague-laced liquor to mute her sense for plague days. She
thumbed her spectacles from her nose and onto her head. She placed
the half-finished hydra on the table and took her machete from the
shelf. The night air wasn’t any cooler than the daytime shade, so
she went shirtless. Sweat dripped from her generous body and
splattered across the floor as she got up.

Her
forty-pound swamp rodent, Mhev, snorted from his place at her feet
and rolled onto his doughy legs. She snapped her fingers and pointed
to his basket under the stairs. He ignored her, of course, and
started grunting happily at the idea of company.

The
woman rolled her brown, meaty shoulders and moved up to the left of
the door like a woman expecting a fight. She hadn’t had a fight in
fifteen years, but her body remembered the drill. She called, “You’re
trespassing. Move on.”

The
voice replied—young and stupidly confident, maybe two years out of
training in the city, based on the accent, “The whole of this
territory was claimed by the Imperial Community of the Forked Ash
over a decade ago. As representatives of the Community, and scholars
of the Contagion College, we are within our rights in this waterway,
as we have come to seek your assistance in a matter which you are
bound by oath to serve.”

The
woman did not like city children, as she knew they were the most
dangerous children of all. Yet here they were again, shouting at her
door like rude imbeciles.

She
pushed open the door, casting light onto the little boat and its
slender occupants. They wore the long black robes and neat purple
collars of the Order of the Plague Hunters. When she had worn those
robes, long ago, they did not seem as ridiculous as they now looked
on these skinny young people.

“Elzabet
Addisalam?” the tall one said. That one was clearly a shoman, hair
twisted into braided rings, ears pierced, brows plucked. The other
one could have been anything—man, woman, shoman, pan. In her day,
everyone dressed as their correct gender, with the hairstyles and
clothing cuts to match, but fashions were changing, and she was out
of date. It had become increasingly difficult to tell shoman from
pan, man from woman, the longer she stayed up here. Fashion changed
quickly. Pans dressed like men these days. Shomans like pans. And on
and on. It made her head hurt.

She
kept her machete up. “I’m called Bet, out here,” she said. “And
what are you? If you’re dressing up as Plague Hunters, I’ll have
some identification before you go pontificating all over my porch.”

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 26, 2019

Get THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY from award-winning editors David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman for only $1.99!

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized David G. Hartwell, elizabeth story, jacob weisman, jean-sebastien rossbach, kdd, kindle daily deal, the sword & sorcery anthology

David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman’s unbeatable selection of top-notch stories THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY is a Kindle Daily Deal for Monday, August 26.

For today only, the ebook is available for just $1.99!

“This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Blood will flow, heads will roll, dragons will soar, and the dead shall rise. Journey to ancient cities ruled by sinister mages, storm-tossed seas where monsters dwell, mysterious towers full of ancient secrets, and dark dungeons with untold treasures. From Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian to George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, join the legendary heroes and villains in nineteen epic adventures that are sure to bring out the barbarian in you.

Anti-hero Elric infiltrates a band of mercenaries to match wits with a powerful sorcerer. With her trio of dragons, Daenerys Stormbringer makes a fool’s bargain with slave traders. A mage’s apprentice, the young Grey Mouser uses newfound power to battle an evil duke. Conan breaks into the Tower of the Elephant to steal a spectacular jewel with a dark secret. Despite her drunkard’s ways, Malmury slays an old sea troll before facing his powerful daughter.

“Hartwell and Weisman’s choices are top-notch and provide both an excellent introduction to the subgenre for new readers and exciting reading for long-time fans.”
—Grasping for the Wind

“A big, meaty collection of genre highlights that runs the gamut from old-school classics to new interpretations, it serves as an excellent introduction and primer in one.”
—Green Man Review

“Introduction: Storytellers: A Guided Ramble into Sword and Sorcery Fiction” by David Drake
“The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard
“Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore
“The Unholy Grail” by Fritz Leiber
“The Tale of Hauk” by Poul Anderson
“The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams” by Michael Moorcock
“The Adventuress” by Joanna Russ
“Gimmile’s Song” by Charles R. Saunders
“Undertow” by Karl Edward Wagner
“The Stages of the God” by Ramsey Campbell (writing as Montgomery Comfort)
“The Barrow Troll” by David Drake
“Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted With Defeat” by Glen Cook
“Epistle From Lebanoi” by Michael Shea
“Become a Warrior” by Jane Yolen
“The Red Guild” by Rachel Pollack
“Six From Atlantis” by Gene Wolfe
“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlín R. Kiernan
“The Coral Heart” by Jeffrey Ford
“Path of the Dragon” by George R. R. Martin
“The Year of the Three Monarchs” by Michael Swanwick

“Awesome collection, very highly recommended.”
—Nerds in Babeland

“Superbly presented…reignited this reader’s interest.”
—SF Site

“This engaging anthology is a terrific way to meet some of the best fantasists for those unfamiliar with their works and for returning vets a chance to enjoy fun short stories.”
—Midwest Book Review

For more info on THE SWORD & SORCERY ANTHOLOGY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Jean-Sebastien Rossbach
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 26, 2019

Get World Fantasy Award Winner Jacob Weisman’s INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE for only $1.99!

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized elizabeth story, goro fujita, invaders: 22 tales from the outer limits of literature, jacob weisman, kdd, kindle daily deal

Jacob Weisman’s acclaimed anthology INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE is a Kindle Daily Deal for Monday, August 26.

For today only, the ebook is available for just $1.99!

“Invaders is a playful and imaginative exploration of what it means to write in the field of science fiction”
—AV Club

The invasion of the future has begun.

Literary legends including Steven Millhauser, Junot Diáz, Amiri Baraka, and Katharine Dunn have attacked the borders of the every day. Like time traveling mad-scientists, they have concocted outrageous creations from the future. They have seized upon tales of technology gone wrong and mandated that pulp fiction must finally grow up.

In these wildly-speculative stories you will discover the company that controls the world from an alley in Greenwich Village. You’ll find nanotechnology that returns memories to the residents of a nursing home. You’ll rally an avian-like alien to become a mascot for a Major League Baseball team.

The Invaders are here. But did science fiction colonize them first?

A Kirkus Science Fiction and Fantasy Book You’ll Want to Read in July
A 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Summer Read
A Foreword 4 Great Indie Sci-Fi Titles for Summer 2016

[STAR] “In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are Díaz’s “Monstro,” the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss’s near-perfect first-contact story, “Lambing Season”; Kinsella’s totally bizarre “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated”; Ben Loory’s fable-like “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun”; and Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats—technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story—but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Further proof, if any more were necessary, that the line between genre and literary fiction is simply speculative.”
—Library Journal

“Well, damn. From the first page to the last, Invaders surprised and intoxicated me, offering one stirring, visionary, warm-hearted, funny, probing story after another. Reading them in quick succession made me feel as if the world was flickering before my eyes, ricocheting from one possible reality to another, beneath a dozen different suns. It would be hard to devise a better survey of those contemporary short fiction writers, both celebrated and undersung, who have worked to smuggle the methods of science fiction into the mainstream.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip

“For almost forty years I’ve believed and practiced and preached that there’s no necessary distance between ‘high literature’ and ‘science fiction.’ Invaders is convincing proof. Funny, absurd, frightening, streetwise, probing, heartbreaking — the fiction collected here touches all registers.”
—Carter Scholz, author of The Amount to Carry: Stories and Radiance

“Portal” by J. Robert Lennon
“Beautiful Monsters” by Eric Puchner
“The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun” by Ben Loory.
“Five Fucks” by Jonathan Lethem
“LIMBs” by Julia Elliott
“We Are The Olfanauts” by Deji Bryce Olukotun
“The Region of Unlikeness” by Rivka Galchen
“A Precursor of the Cinema” by Steven Millhauser
“In the Bushes” by Jami Attenberg
“Fugue State” by Brian Evenson
“Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated” by W. P. Kinsella
“Lambing Season” by Molly Gloss
“Conrad Loomis & The Clothes Ray” by Amiri Baraka.
“Topics in Advanced Rocketry” by Chris Tarry
“The Inner City” by Karen Heuler
“Escape from Spiderhead” by George Saunders
“Amorometer” by Kelly Luce
“The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky” by Max Apple
“Monstros” by Junot Díaz
“Minotaur” by Jim Shepard
“Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” by Robert Olen Butler
“Near-Flesh” by Katherine Dunn

For more info on INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Goro Fujita

Design by Elizabeth Story

August 24, 2019

A week’s worth of previews from MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elephant and corpses, elizabeth story, excerpt, garda, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview, the corpse archives

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “one of the best short story collections you will read this year.” (B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog)

This week’s previews included

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

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Uncategorized

Enyo-Enyo

The Plague Givers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS