putting on the finishing touches before sending this Unicorn to the printer!
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THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN preview: “The Maltese Unicorn”
In celebration for the release of THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s strange and macabre tales by the “reigning queen of dark fantasy.”
The
Maltese Unicorn
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
New
York City (May 1935)
It
wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabó let her
walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was
rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its
heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably
keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were
pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and
clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough
fetid little hidey-holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the
heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know
how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as
Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around.
But
first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh
floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson
River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those
two or three little things she couldn’t bear to leave the city
without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she
hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was
Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected
me to get there at all.
From
the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the
lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the
foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French
Rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when
she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire
open in front of me.
For
a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at
me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew
they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”
“After
that gip you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me
much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or at least all the
truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here.
It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”
Ellen
sat down in the armchair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever
comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made
sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They
weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the
motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.
“You
played me for a sucker,” I said and picked up the pistol that had
been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to
steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me,
then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got
caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”
“So,
how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”
“No,
I’m going shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things
with Auntie H and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from
going on the warpath. And because
you played me.”
“In
my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way
she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s
the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They
might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it,
but, you ask them, that’s jake, cause so would anyone else.
“Is
that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked and pulled
back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t
even flinch … but, wait … I’m getting ahead of myself.
Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.
For more info about THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story
Happy birthday to the legendary writer and editor Richard A. Lupoff
Photo: George Katechis [CC BY-SA 1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
With over 50 books to his credit, Richard “Dick” A. Lupoff first rose to fame as the co-editor (with his wife Pat) of the Hugo Award winning sci-fi fanzine Xero, which helped to usher in comic book fandom and featured many astonishing established and up-and-coming contributors including Dan Adkins, ATom, Otto Binder, James Blish, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Avram Davidson, Roger Ebert, Harlan Ellison, Ron Goulart, Larry Ivie, Roy Krenkel, Fred Pohl, Bill Schelly, Robert Shea, Steve Stiles, Roy Thomas, Don Thompson, Maggie Thompson, Bob Tucker, Donald Westlake, Ted White, Paul Williams, and Don Wollheim. Pieces of the zine, which ran for only 10 issues form 1960-1963, were collected in three Lupoff co-edited volumes: All In Color For a Dime (1970 w Don Thompson), The Comic Book Book (1973 w Thompson), and THE BEST OF XERO (2004 w Pat Lupoff).
In 1963, Lupoff served as the reprint editor at Canaveral Press for the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. This lead to his first solo project, Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965) and established Lupoff as an expert on ERB. He later wrote Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Martian Vision (1976).
He has written over 30 novels. Among his best known areOne Million Centuries (1967), Into The Aether (1974), Space War Blues (1978), Buck Rogers In The 25th Century (1978, As by Addison E. Steele), Circumpolar! (1984), Lovecraft’s Book (1985), The Comic Book Killer (1988), Sun’s End (1984), Countersolar! (1987), The Black Tower (1988), The Emerald Cat Killer (2012), and Rookie Blues (2012).
Lupoff’s many short stories have been collected into several books including The Ova Hamlet Papers (1979), Hyperprism / The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick (1993), Claremont Tales (2001), Terrors (2005), Deep Space (2009), Dreamer’s Dozen (2015). and The Doom That Came to Dunwich (2017). His tale “12:01 PM” was adapted as the film 12:01.
All of us at Tachyon wish the extraordinary Dick a healthy and happy birthday. May his A’s manage to give him some joy in ‘19.
For more about THE BEST OF XERO, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Larry Ivie
John Kessel in conversation with Michael Blumlein
Michael Blumlein and John Kessel (photo: Ellen Datlow)
Join Michael Blumlein and John Kessel in conversation at The North Carolina Book Festival 2019 in Raleigh, NC, Kings on Saturday, February 23, 1pm.
The North Carolina Book Festival 2019
February 21-24
Raliegh NC
For more info about THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
For more info on THE ROBERTS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Reviewers, booksellers, and librarians get Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple’s THE LAST TSAR’S DRAGONS
Review copies of THE LAST TSAR’S DRAGONS are now available via NETGALLEY and EDELWEISS.
These copies are only for reviewers and librarians. For more details, visit NETGALLEY and EDELWEISS.
And while you are there, check out other Tachyon titles for review on NETGALLEY.
“Vivid, gripping and actually riveting, as the Red Danger takes a whole new meaning here. Loved it.” —The Book Smugglers
It is the waning days of the Russian monarchy. A reckless man rules the land and his dragons rule the sky. Though the Tsar aims his dragons at his enemies—Jews and Bolsheviks—his entire country is catching fire. Conspiracies suffuse the royal court: bureaucrats jostle one another for power, the mad monk Rasputin schemes for the Tsar’s ear, and the desperate queen takes drastic measures to protect her family.
Revolution is in the air—and the Red Army is hatching its own weapons.
Discover Russia’s October Revolution reimagined in flight, brought to life by the acclaimed mother-and-son writing team of the Locus Award-winning novel, Pay the Piper, and the Seelie Wars series.
For more info about THE LAST TSAR’S DRAGONS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover art by Anabelle Gerardy
Design by Elizabeth Story
Happy birthday to the award-winning writer and editor Nick Mamatas
Photo: Tristan Crane
The acclaimed author and editor Nick Matamas has, by his own count, written 6 and a half novels including Move Under Ground (2004), Under My Roof (2007), Sensation (2011), The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham (2011 with Brian Keene), Bullettime (2012), Love Is the Law (2013), The Last Weekend (2014), and I Am Providence (2016). His short fiction has appeared in genre publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and Tor.com, lit journals including New Haven Review and subTERRAIN, and anthologies such as Hint Fiction and Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Many of these have been collected in 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once (2003), You Might Sleep… (2009), The Nickronomicon (2014), and THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING (2018).
He gained a level of notoriety following the publication of his essay “The Term Paper,” which described how Mamatas funded his early writing career by producing term papers for college students. His numerous other non-fiction works have appeared in Razor Magazine, The Village Voice, BenBella Books’ Smart Pop Books anthologies, and others. Mamatas non-fiction books include Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life(2011), Insults Every Man Should Know (2011), and Quotes Every Man Should Know (2013).
Mamatas has been nominated for the Bram Stoker award five times, the Hugo Award twice, the World Fantasy Award twice, and the Shirley Jackson, International Horror Guild, and Locus Award. He won the Bram Stoker Award for Haunted Legends (2010 with Ellen Datlow). His other anthologies include The Urban Bizarre (2004), Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2007 with Sean Wallace), Spicy Slipstream Stories (2008 with Jay Lake), Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2010 with Sean Wallace), Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan (2014 with Masumi Washington), The Battle Royale Slam Book (2014 with Masumi Washington), Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (2015 with Masumi Washington) and Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader) (2017 with Molly Tanzer).
All of us at Tachyon wish the multi-talented Nick a happy birthday! Hope you enjoy your drinks with the Old Ones. But please be careful.
For more info on THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Elizabeth Story
THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN preview: “The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)”
In celebration for the release of THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s strange and macabre tales by the “reigning queen of dark fantasy.”
The
Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
“It
must be done precisely
as I have said,” he told the violin-maker, four months ago, when he
flew to Hotton to hand-deliver a substantial portion of the materials
from which the instrument would be constructed. “You may not
deviate in any significant way from these instructions.”
“Yes,”
the luthier replied, “I understand. I understand completely.” A
man who appreciates discretion, the Belgian violin-maker, so there
were no inconvenient questions asked, no prying inquiries as to why,
and what’s more, he’d even known something about ammonites
beforehand.
“No
substitutions,” the Collector said firmly, just in case it needed
to be stated one last time.
“No
substitutions of any sort,” replied the luthier.
“And
the back must be carved—”
“I
understand,” the violin-maker assured him. “I have the sketches,
and I will follow them exactly.”
“And
the pegs—”
“Will
be precisely as we have discussed.”
And
so the Collector paid the luthier half the price of the commission,
the other half due upon delivery, and he took a six a.m. flight back
across the wide Atlantic to New England and his small house in the
small town near the sea. And he has waited, hardly daring to
half-believe
that the violin-maker would, in fact, get it all right. Indeed—for
men are ever at war with their hearts and minds and innermost
demons—some infinitesimal scrap of the Collector has even hoped
that there would
be a mistake, the most trifling portion of his plan ignored or the
violin finished and perfect but then lost in transit and so the whole
plot ruined. For it is no small thing, what the Collector has set in
motion, and having always considered himself a very wise and sober
man, he suspects that he understands fully the consequences he would
suffer should he be discovered by lesser men who have no regard for
the ocean and her needs. Men who cannot see the flesh and blood
phantoms walking among them in broad daylight, much less be bothered
to pay tithes which are long overdue to a goddess who has cradled
them all, each and every one, through the innumerable twists and
turns of evolution’s crucible, for three and a half thousand
million years.
But
there has been no mistake, and, if anything, the violin-maker can be
faulted only in the complete sublimation of his craft to the will of
his customer. In every way, this is the instrument the Collector
asked him to make, and the varnish gleams faintly in the light from
the display cases. The top is carved from spruce, and four small
ammonites have been set into the wood—Xipheroceras
from Jurassic rocks exposed along the Dorset Coast at Lyme Regis—two
inlaid on the upper bout, two on the lower. He found the fossils
himself, many years ago, and they are as perfectly preserved an
example of their genus as he has yet seen anywhere, for any price.
The violin’s neck has been fashioned from maple, as is so often the
tradition, and, likewise, the fingerboard is the customary ebony.
However, the scroll has been formed from a fifth ammonite, and the
Collector knows it is a far more perfect logarithmic spiral than any
volute that could have ever been hacked out from a block of wood. In
his mind, the five ammonites form the points of a pentacle. The
luthier used maple for the back and ribs, and when the Collector
turns the violin over, he’s greeted by the intricate bas-relief he
requested, faithfully reproduced from his own drawings—a great
octopus, the ravenous devilfish of so many sea legends, and the maze
of its eight tentacles makes a looping, tangled interweave.
As
for the pegs and bridge, the chinrest and tailpiece, all these have
been carved from the bits of bone he provided the luthier. They seem
no more than antique ivory, the stolen tusks of an elephant or a
walrus or the tooth of a sperm whale, perhaps. The Collector also
provided the dried gut for the five strings, and when the
violin-maker pointed out that they would not be nearly so durable as
good stranded steel, that they would be much more likely to break and
harder to keep in tune, the Collector told him that the instrument
would be played only once and so these matters were of very little
concern. For the bow, the luthier was given strands of hair which the
Collector told him had come from the tail of a gelding, a fine grey
horse from Kentucky thoroughbred stock. He’d even ordered a special
rosin, and so the sap of an Aleppo Pine was supplemented with a vial
of oil he’d left in the care of the violin-maker.
For more info about THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story
Everybody have fun at the San Francisco Writers Conference? Here’s Jacob at the Meet the Editors panel. Thanks to all who came out!
#writersofinstagram #writingconference #sanfranciscowritersconference #sanfrancisco #sf #bayarea #publishing #tachyon #tachyonpublications #Jacobweisman #sfwc
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THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN preview: “A Season of Broken Dolls”
In celebration for the release of THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s strange and macabre tales by the “reigning queen of dark fantasy.”
A
Season of Broken Dolls
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
August
16, 2027 (later, 11:47 p.m.)
Sabit
came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when she’d gone out
for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other, these
days food is only fucking food—curry or wasabi, but when I
asked why she’d changed her mind, she just stared
at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead codfish, & shrugged. Then she
was quiet all night long, & the last thing I need just now is
Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s asleep,
snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. &
I’m losing the momentum I needed to say anything
more about what happened @ CeM on Sat.
night. It’s all fading, like a dream. I’ve been reading one of
Sabit’s books, The
Breathing Composition (Welleran Smith, 2025),
something from those long-ago days when the avant-garde abomination
of stitch & snip was still hardly more than nervous rumor &
theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East Coast art
pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research
for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find—or what
any of this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down?
That’s what Sabit would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do you
dream, Sabit, my dear sadistic plaything? Do you dream
in installations, muscles and tendons, gallery walls of sweating pig
flesh, living bone exposed for all to see, vivisection as not-quite
still life, portrait of the artist as a young atrocity? Are your
sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me afraid to
sleep? There was so goddamn much @ CeM to turn my fucking
stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and
popping your blue Peruvian bonbons. Just this one thing. I’m not
the squeamish sort, and everyone knows it. That’s one reason the
agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at me. Gore & sex and
mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and keeps
coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn
after the bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant
rat attacks. How many murders and suicides and serial killers does
that make for Schuler now? 9? Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx,
the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his little sister & then
fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s, yeah?
Ad
infinitum, ad nauseam, Hail Mary, full of beans.
Cause they know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I
should be making notes & getting the vid or asking questions. But
now, now
Sabit, I’m dancing round this one thing. This one little thing. So,
here there’s a big ol’ chink in these renowned nerves of steel.
Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings of flesh,
towers of iron—oh yeah, sure—fucking corpses heaped in dumpsters
and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget
the kid with the Cuisinart—sure, fine—but that one labeled #17,
oh, now that’s
another goddamn story. She saw something there, & ol’
Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the
way it goes?
Are
you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why you’re smiling next
to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your book,
Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a
woman, & Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know
her name. But Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch
prophets called her a visionary, & I’m writing it down here,
while I try to find the nerve to say whatever it is I’d wanted to
say about #17:
spines
and bellies knitted & proud and all open
all
watching spines and bellies and the three;
triptych
& buckled, ragdoll fusion
3
of you so conjoined, my eyes from yours,
arterial
hallways knitted red proud flesh
Healing
and straining for cartilage & epidermis
Not
taking, we cannot imagine
So
many wet lips, your sky Raggedy alchemy
And
all expecting Jerusalem
And
Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid transcendent
schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” &
turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause
she’d drugged her lover—she was a lesbian; of
course, she had
to be a lesbian—she drugged her lover and used surgical thread to
sew the woman’s lips & nostrils closed, after
performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t suffocate. Jane Doe
sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples & then
tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not
named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks
before someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ,
Sabit, this is the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane
Doe’s still locked away in her padded cell, I’m
guessing—hyperlucid
& worshipped by the snips—& maybe the woman she mutilated
is alive somewhere, trying to forget. Maybe the doctors even patched
her up (ha, ha fucking ha). Maybe even made her good as new again,
but I doubt it. I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my
eyes & not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking
cum bcause she can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after
midnight, & they expect copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp,
when I haven’t written a goddamn word about the phony stitchwork @
Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe & that jackoff
Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should have
screwed just to piss you off, Sabit. I should have brought her back
here and fucked her in our bed, let her use your toothbrush, &
maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist & even now I
could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever fucking
after.
For more info about THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story
Happy birthday to the acclaimed writer and editor Claude Lalumière
Photo by Alexandra Renwick
Born and raised in Montreal, writer and editor Claude Lalumière previously owned and managed the Montreal bookshops Nebula, danger!, and Nemo. In 1998, he left the world of bookselling and began writing reviews and criticism, most notably for January Magazine, The Montreal Gazette, The National Post, The New York Review Of Science Fiction, and Locus Online.
Beginning in 2002, with Telling Stories: New English Stories From Quebec, Lalumière has produced 16 acclaimed anthologies including Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction (2003), Witpunk (2003 with Marty Halpern), Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic (2003), Lust For Life: Tales of Sex and Love (2005), SUPER STORIES OF HEROES & VILLAINS (2013), Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories (2013 with Camille Alexa), The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir (2015 with David Nickle), and Superhero Universe (Tesseracts Nineteen 2016 with Mark Shainblum).
Lalumière authored the mosaic novels The Door To Lost Pages (2011) and Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment (2017) and numerous acclaimed short stories, many of which have been collected in Objects Of Worship (2009), Nocturnes And Other Nocturnes (2013), and Altre Persone/Other Persons (2018). His story “The Cornucopia of Dionysus” was adapted into the short film La Biere Eternelle (Eternal Beer). Earlier this year, Nocturnes reading series (season 1), a regular, ongoing video series of Lalumière reading one of his short stories, premiered.
All of us at Tachyon wish the multifaceted, fantastic Claude, a super birthday. Don’t forget your cape!
For more information on SUPER STORIES OF HEROES & VILLAINS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Elizabeth Story