On the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, host David Barr Kirtley discusses writing and blogging as an atheist with guest geeks James Morrow and Tobias Buckell.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
On his More Red Ink blog, editor Marty Halpern writes about his current assignment, The Very Best of Kate Elliott.
The beauty of any “best of” collection is that it allows the reader to experience the full expanse of the author’s writing and story telling. And, if the collection is indeed worth its (literal) weight, then the book will hopefully have some small treasure, a story unfamiliar to the reader, even if the reader is one of the author’s biggest fans. That was true of The Very Best of Tad Williams (see my November 13, 2013 blog post); and it holds true on my most recent project, The Very Best of Kate Elliott, both from Tachyon Publications.
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Regardless of the source of these stories, they are all as varied, and finely crafted, as the anthologies in which they originally appeared. My favorite story would have to be “A Simple Act of Kindness,” which originally appeared in The Shimmering Door, edited by Katharine Kerr (HarperPrism, 1996). The story of Daniella, a young girl who, in some ways, feels safer out in a storm at night – even a night and a storm such as this – searching for lost sheep, than at home with her family (not the least of which is “her cousin Robert, who had been pestering her for months now, ever since her first bleeding came on her”).
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Lastly, I hope you are as knocked out by Julie Dillon’s cover art as I am. In a one-pager entitled “About the Cover Art” in the book, Kate Elliott states that Dillon’s art illustrates a passage from Cold Steel (Book 3 in the author’s Spiritwalker Trilogy).
Read the rest of Halpern’s post at More Red Ink.
For more info on The Very Best of Kate Elliott, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Julie Dillon. Design by Elizabeth Story.
In his weekly mail review, Andrew Wheeler, aka G. B. H. Hornswaggler, Gent., discusses James Morrow and his latest book The Madonna and the Starship.
There’s no one who does blasphemous SF better than Morrow – see Towing Jehovah and Only Begotten Daughter– and he’s also good at apocalypses (as in This Is the Way the World Ends). So Madonna and the Starship looks to be right in his sweet spot; I’m looking forward to it.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
Publishers Weekly gives Daryl Gregory’s We Are Completely Fine a starred review.
This complex novel—scathingly funny, horrific yet oddly inspiring—constructs a seductive puzzle from torn identities, focusing on both the value and peril of fear.
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Gregory’s beautiful imagery and metaphors bring bittersweet intimacy and tenderness to the primal wonder of star-lit legends. Isolated people, both victims and victimizers, are ghosts in a waking world, blind to their encounters with living nightmares. Blending the stark realism of pain and isolation with the liberating force of the fantastic, Gregory (Afterparty) makes it easy to believe that the world is an illusion, behind which lurks an alternative truth—dark, degenerate, and sublime.
For information on We Are All Completely Fine, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story.
Recently, a pair of reviews for the forthcoming anthology The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 hit the interwebs.
Steve Fahnestalk at Amazing delivers a lengthy review, which features some background to the magazine, an argument about what is sf, and an overview of every story.
All in all—and I’ve read this anthology more than once—I can’t say that there are any bad stories in it; Gordon Van Gelder has proved himself, in a time when there must be many more submissions than in any other editor’s tenure, to be not only a competent editor, but a talented one as well. I can’t wait to see what diamonds he mines from the 66 years (plus!) of F&SF’s history for the next “Very Best Of” anthology!
Ventueadlaxre awards the anthology 4 out 5 stars and also reviews each story.
Overall this is a strong anthology, proving that it lives up to the title of the Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction – some anthologies are named as such, but this delivers on that promise. It’s also interesting to see what ideas were in play 60 years ago, and both how we have come from that time as technology develops, as well as how things are still eerily stagnant.
I highly recommend this anthology, and thank Tachyon for offering me a copy to review.
Bonus coverage:
I preparation for Volume 2, The Review Curmudgeon Mike Reeves-McMillan reviewed the first volume of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, giving it 4 out of 5 stars.
Some true classics here, along with stories I don’t remember hearing of or reading before. As with any anthology, it’s Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, and only the editor will love every one of the stories, but by and large these stories demonstrate why F&SF has been so successful for so long. They aren’t, for the most part, trotting out the tropes, even to play with them or subvert them; they’re taking SFF to strange and wonderful new places.
For more info on The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Thomas Canty.
For more info on The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, visit the Tachyon page.
Send us your sightings of Tachyon books. We’re always curious where these creatures are found in the wild–be it bookstores, libraries, or even airports!
For more info on Cold in July, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
thierstein.net supplies a review of the “interesting and well written” Lovecraft’s Monsters.
This is, as I would expect from any good collection (and Ellen definitely has the experience to put one of those together!) a mix of approaches, writing styles, and closeness to the actual topic.
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Overall a collection of interesting and well written stories I can recommend to any fan of the genre.
For the rest of the review, including thoughts on every story, visit thierstein.net.
For more information on Lovecraft’s Monsters, visit the Tachyon site.
Cover and illustration by John Coulthart.
Over at SF Signal, Andrea Johnson talks to the mutliple award-winning author James Morrow about his new book The Madonna and the Starship and other revelations.
Could it be that science fiction, even in its pulpiest forms, helps us get our bearings as we maneuver between the extremes of logical positivism and truculent theism? I think so. For many generations, the default sensibility of the genre was atheist — but it was never merely atheist. The foundational SF texts spontaneously melded their materialism with awestruck visions of the cosmos. For the plot to work, The Madonna and The Starship had to be set in the early 1950′s, the era of live television. But the engagement with metaphysical questions was characteristic of science fiction from the very beginning.
The Madonna and The Starship was originally titled That Buck Rogers Stuff. My plan was to transport the cast of a children’s TV space opera to a planet (or perhaps a future) where a war of the worldviews—logical positivism versus scorched-earth theism—was threatening to tear the dominant civilization apart. Back on Earth, of course, the philosophical mindset embodied by science fiction is being routinely dismissed as “that Buck Rogers stuff.” Against the odds, my dauntless troupe of actors would have found itself in a position to negotiate a truce between the two Weltanschauungs. But this was supposed to be a novella, not an epic, so I decided to simplify things by keeping the actors on Earth.
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One thing I believe I got right in The Madonna and The Starship is the ambience and protocols of a pre-digital TV studio. In 1973, after getting a teaching degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I went to work for the Chelmsford Public Schools in Massachusetts. Sometime in the 1960’s, not too long after the invention of videotape, the Chelmsford administrators had undertaken to wire the entire system for closed-circuit television, with an elaborate studio at the nexus (located in one of the middle schools). This curious and ostensibly enlightened institution was actually rather regressive in intent. The administrators thought that by embalming the “minor” subjects on videotape – art, shop, home economics, music appreciation – they could ultimately fire the corresponding teachers. I don’t think the scheme worked out very well. There is no substitute for a flesh-and-blood instructor. But the students eventually commandeered the facilities for their own purposes.
As the Chelmsford school system’s graphic artist and media specialist, I often found myself in the central TV studio, helping the students broadcast a daily morning show, create instructional videos for their English and Social Studies classes, and produce original dramas and comedies for the sheer delight of it. Although most of these program were recorded on tape, they all employed the grammar of live television—switching from camera 1 to camera 2 to camera 3 in real-time without interruption—and the stuff I learned during those years informs the climax of The Madonna and The Starship.
For the rest of this fascinating interview which includes discussions about teaching Tolkien to 7th graders, a Darwin epic, and Morrow’s 8MM film efforts, visit SF Signal.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story
In anticipation of meeting Peter S. Beagle, Stuck in a Story reviewed the author’s 2011 short story collection Sleight of Hand.
Sleight Of Hand was a beautiful collection of short stories that really made me think, feel, and inspired me to write. I think that’s what marks a book as great, if it inspires you to write something just as great.
Check out the rest of the review, which includes coverage of several of stories, at Stuck in a Story.
For more on Sleight of Hand, visit the Tachyon page.
For Locus Online, Paul Di Filippo praises James Morrow’s The Madonna and the Starship.
So it’s no surprise that his newest offering, The Madonna and the Starship, is also a novel. But what is surprising is its relative brevity, its light-hearted zip, and its rollicking comic tone, compared to the gravitas and black, piercingly satirical humor of his other books. Which is not to say that Morrow’s central theme of the role of religion in humanity’s affairs is absent. Just delivered in a madcap vehicle reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut and the film Galaxy Quest.
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Like some blend of Rudy Rucker and Howard Waldrop, this latest book by the inimitable James Morrow is rife with gonzo charm and buried barbs and offbeat parables galore.
Read the rest of Di Filippo’s review at Locus Online.
For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story
