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The Science Fiction and Fantasy Satire Bundle, curated by Nick Mamatas, features Thomas M. Disch, Andrew Fox, Lavie Tidhar, and Terry Bisson
STORYBUNDLE offers a science fiction and fantasy satire bundle of 12 extraordinary tales including Nick Mamatas’ brilliant, oddball THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING, Thomas M. Disch’s extraordinarily funny bit of heresy THE WORD OF GOD: OR, HOLY WRIT REWRITTEN, Andrew Fox’s intensely interesting, wild ride THE GOOD HUMOR MAN, Terry Bisson’s fresh, imaginative Tva Baby, and Lavie Tidhar’s inspired and fantastical Jesus and the Eightfold Path.
Curator Nick Mantas, dubbed “The People’s Commissar of Awesome” by China Miéville, had this to say:
Satire runs through the field of science fiction/fantasy like veins of gold in the Earth. Both genres have their origin with Lucian’s A True Story, which parodied the various epics and myths known to educated readers in the second century AD, and which featured a trip to the moon, interplanetary warfare, and philosophical analysis of some rigor. Even the title is both satirical and an exercise in logic—the text of the story is all lies, Lucian admits, but the work is a true story because it exists in the category of story: it is true that it is a story.
And now let us skip ahead almost two thousand years, thanks! You all know about H.G. Wells and Joanna Russ and Kurt Vonnegut and all that stuff. The world we live in is obviously absurd, and has been so for quite some time. (It’s why we needed to skip ahead.) But one cannot just strip off one’s clothes and run through downtown screaming, “We used to pretend little pieces of paper had value just to be able to eat and live, but now we pretend that little bits of electricity are the valueless pieces of paper! We’re all mad! Resist! Revolt!” and expect to get very far, even if climate change means more days per year of appropriate streaking weather. But when we can do is trade electricity for electricity, and get you a dozen amazing books for fifteen or more amazing dollars.
For more info on The Science Fiction and Fantasy Satire Bundle, visit STORYBUNDLE.
For more info on THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Elizabeth Story
For more information about THE WORD OF GOD: OR, HOLY WRIT REWRITTEN, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
For more info on THE GOOD HUMOR MAN, visit the Tachyon page.
Reviewers, booksellers, and librarians get Hugo Award winner Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE
Review copies of the acclaimed badass Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE are now available via NETGALLEY and EDELWEISS.
“One of the best story collections of the past few years.” —Booklist, starred review
“16 hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Kameron Hurley is a badass.” —Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous
When renegade author Kameron Hurley (The Light Brigade; The Stars Are Legion) takes you to the future, be prepared for the unexpected. Yes, it will be dangerous, frequently brutal, and often devastating. But it’s also savagely funny, deliriously strange, and absolutely brimming with adventure.
In these edgy, unexpected tales, a body-hopping mercenary avenges his pet elephant, and an orphan falls in love with a sentient starship. Fighters ally to power a reality-bending engine, and a swamp-dwelling introvert tries to save the world—from her plague-casting former wife.
So come meet Kameron Hurley in the future. The version she’s created here is weirder—and far more hopeful—than you could ever imagine.
Table of Contents
- An Introduction: Meet Me in The Future by Kameron Hurley
- Elephants and Corpses
- When We Fall
- The Red Secretary
- The Sinners and the Sea
- The Women of Our Occupation
- The Fisherman and the Pig Garda
- The Plague Givers
- Tumbledown
- Warped Passages
- Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!
- Enyo-Enyo
- The Corpse Archives
- The War of Heroes
- The Light Brigade
- The Improbable War
For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story
The incomparable grandmaster Harlan Ellison was born 85 years ago
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.
For more info about SHATTERDAY, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
Happy birthday to the exceptional Caitlín R. Kiernan
Photo: Kyle Cassidy
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]), Agents of Dreamland (2017), and Black Helicopters
(2018). Her 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), and THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN (2019).
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).
She fronted Death’s Little Sister, a short-lived goth-rock band. As a
vertebrate paleontologist in 1988, she
described a new genus and species of an ancient marine lizard, the
mosasaur Selmasaurus russelli.
In November 2005,
she 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 her 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.
For more info about THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story
Nebula-nominated short story writer Bob Leman was born 97 years ago
Source: LESSER-KNOWN WRITERS/Jim Rockhill and the Leman family
Prior to his first short story “Bait” appearance in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1967), Bob Leman’s contributions to fandom were mostly as part of First Fandom and the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA). He produced several fanzines during that period including The American Journal of Oculenteratology (renamed The Vinegar Worm with it’s second issue), Inquiry into Certain Little-Known Consequences of the Berlin-Bagdad Pact, Nematode, and Bulletin of the Dorcas Bagby Society.
The acclaimed Leman’s modest output of just 15 published short stories, 13 of which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, included INSTRUCTIONS, “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” and “Loob.” “How Dobbstown Was Saved” was originally slated for Harlan Ellison’s infamous The Last Dangerous Visions and finally appeared in the collection Feesters in the Lake & Other Stories, alongside all his other stories.
His most well-known work was the Nebula-nominated “Window.” Filmed as part of Night Visions, the renamed “A View through the Window” aired in July 2001 and starred Bill Pullman.
For more in on INSTRUCTIONS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Michael Dashow
Join Charlie Jane Anders, Jaymee Goh, and Pat Murphy at Wiscon 43
Charlie Jane Anders (photo: Tristian Crane), Jaymee Goh, and Pat Murphy (Lawrence Person)
Co-guest of honor (alongside G. Willow Wilson) Charlie Jane Anders, author of The City in The Middle of the Night and SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, the acclaimed writer, reviewer, editor, and essayist Jaymee Goh, and writer, scientist, and toy maker Pat Murphy are attending Wiscon 43 in Madison, WI on Memorial Day Weekend, May 24-27.
Wiscon offers an extensive programming slate. Visit the site for full details.
Wiscon 43
Madison Concourse Hotel
Madison, WI
Memorial Day Weekend, May 24-27
With the wildly inventive and entertaining UNHOLY LAND, Lavie Tidhar delivers an intriguing novel with multiple realities and hard-boiled detectives
Lavie Tidhar’s richly detailed UNHOLY LAND continues to astound.
For GEEK DAD, Robin Books delivers 5 Reasons to Read ‘Unholy Land’ by Lavie Tidhar.
1. Intriguing Premise.
As I said at the top of the review, Tidhar’s books always have at their heart a strong, often unusual premise. Whilst Unholy Land‘s premise isn’t quite in the same “You’re doing what?!” category as Osama and A Man Lies Dreaming, it does immediately capture the reader’s attention. Much like Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Tidhar imagines the existence of an alternative Jewish homeland, Palestina.
Drawing on the real-world possibility of a Jewish settlement in Africa, mooted in the early part of the 20th Century, Tidhar imagines what the world might have been like if the such a state had been set up. What follows is an alternate history where key events for history are different, but how much will things really change?
<snip>
UNHOLY LAND is another Lavie Tidhar novel based on a strong premise that goes outside of those generally found in mainstream science fiction. With gentle wit and strong alternate history, Tidhar pokes at the folly of humanity and wonders whether even if historical calamities are avoided, we’ll just come up with new ones to replace them. Threaded with themes of identity and belonging, Tidhar once again delivers an intriguing novel with multiple realities and hard-boiled detectives.
Ian Mond at LOCUS praises the novel.
So many possibilities, so many alternative histories, yet it’s the 1903 proposal to create a Jewish State in Uganda, mooted by Joseph Chamberlain to Theodore Herzl, that forms the basis of Lavie Tidhar’s provocative and brash new novel, UNHOLY LAND.
<snip>
While I found the subject matter challenging, there’s no denying that UNHOLY LAND is a wildly inventive and entertaining novel that moves at a breathless gallop. If the rules that underpin the Pattern – Tidhar’s multiverse – didn’t entirely make sense to me, there’s a conviction to the storytelling that pulls you through the narrative. In the introductory piece to “Art and War”, Tidhar makes the observation that because of his niche interests, “I’m kind of resigned to a sort of obscurity by now.” It’s true that Tidhar will unlikely be a household name, but in our neck of the woods, he’s already staked a claim as the genre’s most interesting, most bold, and most accomplished writer.
THE GAME OF NERDS’s Aaron Heil enjoys the memorable book.
Lavie Tidhar’s new book UNHOLY LAND came out last October and it’s… weird, even for Tidhar, a veteran of the weird and frequent editor of the Apex World SF Series. This novel looks deep at the human soul and the actions that drive men to do questionable things to survive. UNHOLY LAND reveals both sides of an ethical dilemma by exposing the dark sides, the good intentions, and the branching effects.
<snip>
Though I read UNHOLY LAND back in October, it keeps surfacing in my mind and a book that won’t stay down has the greatest impact. It will be well worth a reread someday and all the more enjoyable for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.
For more info on UNHOLY LAND, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Get WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD by the endlessly astonishing and impressive fantasist Patricia A. McKillip for only $1.99!
Patricia A. McKillip’s exquisitely written collection of short stories WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD is a Kindle Daily Deal for Wednesday, May 22.
For today only, the ebook is available for just $1.99!
“Endlessly astonishing and impressive fantasist McKillip (The Bards of Bone Plain) travels the shadowy twilight realm between worlds and returns with the raw stuff of dreams.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Pass through fairy tales into the magic of invisible worlds in these opulent stories by a beloved fantasy icon and author of the classic Riddlemaster trilogy. Patricia McKillip has inspired generations of dedicated readers with enchanting tales that are as romantic as they are unexpected. Her lush, mesmerizing narratives are as deliciously bittersweet as the finest chocolate and as intoxicating as the finest wine.
“Mesmerizing…. Any collection of McKillip’s short stories will be a valuable asset to any library and a joy to her many fans.”
—Library Journal, starred review
The bewitching wonders offered here include princesses dancing with dead suitors, a knight in love with an official of exotic lineage, and fortune’s fool stealing into the present instead of the future. You’ll discover a ravishing undine and her mortal bridegroom who is more infatuated with politics than pleasure, a time-traveling angel forbidden to intervene in Cotton Mather’s religious ravings, a wizard seduced in his youth by the Faerie Queen returning with a treasure that is rightfully hers, and an overachieving teenage mage tricked into discovering her true name very close to home.
“Anybody who loves fantasy—not just for what most fantasy does, but for what the genre is really capable of—should definitely pick this book up. It’s like a perfect encapsulation of fantasy writing at its most brave and beautiful.”
—io9.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Wonders of the Invisible World
- Out of the Woods
- The Kelpie
- Hunter’s Moon
- Oak Hill
- The Fortune-Teller
- Jack O’Lantern
- Knight of the Well
- Naming Day
- Byndley
- The Twelve Dancing Princesses
- Undine
- Xmas Cruise
- A Gift to Be Simple
- The Old Woman and the Storm
- The Doorkeeper of Khaat
- What Inspires Me: Guest of Honor Speech at WisCon (2004)
“A casket full of wonders. I think each one is my favorite, until I read the next. McKillip has the true Mythopoeic imagination. Here lies the border between our world and that of Faerie.”
—P. C. Hodgell, author of the Kencyrath series
“This brilliant new collection puts on display the audacity, the warmth, the intelligence, and depth of [McKillip’s] huge and magnificent talent.”
—Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story and A Dark Matter
“The lively and enchanting stories in Wonders of the Invisible World certainly deserve all the accolades I can summon.”
—Paul Goat Allen, Barnes and Noble.com
“I loved all the stories in this collection, and if I still have to tell you to try this out, well, you haven’t been reading my review…. Patricia Mckillip is a master at what she does. Strongly recommended.”
—Locus
“Wonders of the Invisible World is a wonderful collection of stories full of wit and insight wrapped in beautiful, effortless prose. McKillip’s ability to convey so much in so few words is impressive, as is her ability with storytelling, characterization, and thematic elements.”
—Fantasy Cafe
“This is one to dip into, savour, and place on that special shelf for books to be cherished.”
—Starburst
“…she’s still one of the best fantasy writers out there.”
—Green Man Review
“Exquisitely written with destinations beyond your imaginings!”
—My Shelf Confessions
For more info on WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Thomas Canty
Jane Yolen’s impressive HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE wins Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award
The Westchester Library Association announced the 2019 winners of Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award. Both Jane Yolen ‘s HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE and Once There Was a Story were recognized.
This award was established to honor Anne Izard, the noted librarian, storyteller and Children’s Services Consultant in Westchester County (NY) who died in 1990. It is hoped the award will highlight and promote distinguished titles published in the field of storytelling and in doing so, bring the many riches of storytelling itself to a much greater public recognition.
- The Annotated African-American Folktales (Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Maria Tatar)
- Beauty and the Beast (Maria Tatar)
- Brave Red, Smart Frog (Emily Jenkins)
- Crane Girl (Curtis Manley)
- Daemon Voices (Philip Pullman)
- Dancing on Blades (Csenge Zalka)
- HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE (Jane Yolen)
- Manjhi Moves a Mountain (Nancy Churnin)
- Norse Myths (Kevin Crossley-Holland)
- Norse Mythology (Neil Gaiman)
- Once There Was a Story (Jane Yolen)
- The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet (Carmen Deedy)
- Thank You, Omu (Oge Mora)
Congratulations to all the winners
Photo: Jason Stemple
Gary K. Wolfe at LOCUS praised the collection.
Yolen draws on an impressive variety of other folk and fairy tale traditions – Chinese dragon stories (“One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King”), Greek mythology (“Sun/Flight”, a variation on Icarus), Japanese kitsune stories (“The Fox Wife”), Scottish legends (“The Faery Flag”, “Sule Skerry”), Arthuriana (“The Gwynfahr”), Native American tales (“The Woman Who Loved a Bear”), even vampire lore (the surprisingly tender tale of a revenant mom, “Mama Gone”). The poems which accompany the story comments at the end of the book also offer additional perspectives – sometimes a bit sharper and more directly political – on the themes of the stories. If THE EMERALD CIRCUS provided an extensive overview of Yolen’s dialogue with many of her literary predecessors from Andersen to Baum, HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE serves as a useful and timely companion volume, demonstrating an equally astute and critical dialogue with the world’s folk traditions. While nine of these stories were included in the NESFA retrospective Once Upon a Time (She Said) in 2005, and a half dozen were in Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories way back in 2000, these Tachyon volumes are an invaluable reminder of Yolen’s central role in contemporary fantasy, and perhaps an equally invaluable starting point for readers daunted by the sheer volume and variety of her work.
SURLALUNE FAIRY TALES recommends HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE.
This collects many of Yolen’s previously published fairy tale retellings and includes her notes on the tales, too. Some are short stories, others are poems. A very handy collection of Yolen’s short fairy tale works.
For more info on HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE, visit the Tachyon page.
For more info on THE EMERALD CIRCUS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover designs by Elizabeth Story