In celebration of the release of Marie Brennan’s DRIFTWOOD, Tachyon presents glimpses from the book that “celebrates the death-defying power of love and everlasting memory.” (Karen Lord, author of Redemption in Indigo)
by
Marie Brennan
“He’s not dead!” The words burst out of a small kid: Dreceyl, older than he looks but still not very old. He stamps his foot and then runs down to the stage. “How can people think Last is dead? He’s survived everything.”
A clamor fills the amphitheater, which until that point has been more or less respectfully silent. If there’s one thing capable of thriving in Driftwood, it’s rumors, and in the days since word went around that Last was gone, this one has grown a hundred heads.
He went into the Crush. He traveled to the Edge and leapt off into the Mist. He committed suicide with a weapon that before its world’s apocalypse had been used to kill a god. He ate or drank something that turned out to be poison to his kind. The final artifact of his world was caught for ages in the depths of the Crush, but now it’s finally vanished, and it took Last with it.
The whole thing was never true in the first place. The stories about Last were just that: stories. He was never immortal; at best there was just a long series of men who looked enough like the stories to pass. And now he’s gone, just like everything else in Driftwood.
What began as a silent memorial and then became a tribute starts shredding into chaos. Dreceyl shoves Kuondae, who to him is just a disrespectful stranger. She hisses at him and raises a hand, but Ioi stops her from striking, which brings the Oneui in; Ioi may be only one-quarter of their blood, but Kuondae’s provocation has temporarily erased that gap. In the stands above, people begin to shout competing theories, points and counterpoints, few of them backed by solid facts. The dark-skinned woman with the gold wound into her hair watches silently, leaning against the crumbling sandstone wall with her jaw set hard. The man in the robe sets his pen down and waits.
Michael Moorcock, organizer of The Jack Trevor Story Memorial Prize/Prix du Goncourt, announced Peter S. Beagle as the recipient of the award.
THE COMMITTEE FOR THE JACK TREVOR STORY MEMORIAL PRIZE/PRIX DU GONCOURT FOR 2020
Michael Moorcock (UK)
Guy Lawley (UK)
Linda Steele (UK/US)
Rick Klaw (US)
Brandy Whitten (US)
Jean-Luc Fromental (France)
Lili Sztajn (France)
Are unanimously agreed that Peter S Beagle has won the Story/Goncourt as he is most likely to fulfill the terms of the prize which consists of a cup and a cheque for $500. The money is linked to profits from NEW WORLDS and must be spent in a ‘a week to a fortnight’ and refers to Mr Story’s reply to a bankruptcy judge who asked where his money went. “You know how it is, judge. Two hundred or two thousand. It always lasts a week to a fortnight.’ — The Committee
Mr Beagle has written The Last Unicorn, SUMMERLONG, and many other fine works of fantastica. He is currently published by Tachyon Books.
The Committee traditionally meets at Le Goncourt, Boulevard Parmentier, Paris, France but met virtually this time.
Previous winners have included Fred Normandale, Howard Waldrop. Steve Aylett and Nicholas Lezard and is named for the humorous novelist, scriptwriter and Guardian columnist Jack Trevor Story (1917-1991), who died having typed THE END to his most recent book.
Maintained and awarded by Moorcock, The Jack Trevor was originally presented to the writer of the story in the Time Out series of London stories that he best liked. In more recent times, a special committee, organized by Moorcock, determines the winner, typically for excellence in humorous writing. The five hundred guinea prize is given with the following conditions: The entire award must be spent “in a week to a fortnight” and the recipient must have nothing to show for it. Most winners use the money for a big night or a foreign vacation. One winner, a trawlerman from Hull who spent the money with the expertise of a drunken sailor before he got home, had to spend the money all over again just to prove to his shipmates that he’d won it.
The Geek Curmudgeon
The unique terms of the award are based on Jack Trevor Story‘s famous words when asked at his second bankruptcy what happened to money from his films The Trouble with Harry and Live Now, Pay Later. The judge wondered how he managed to go through so much without having a thing to show for it.
“You know how it is, your honour ‑‑ two hundred or two thousand ‑‑ it always lasts a week to a fortnight. You can spend a couple of hundred easy just going around the supermarket.”
Via Book People, Christopher Brown discusses his latest book Failed State with Cory Doctorow on Wednesday, August 12 at 7PM CDT.
VIRTUAL EVENT
Book People
Wednesday, August 12 at 7PM CDT
Author CHRISTOPHER BROWN discussing Failed State
In conversation with Cory Doctorow
This event will be broadcast live via Zoom
Register to attend HERE.
Order now and request a signed, personalized copy of Failed State
or a signed copy of Little Brother & Homeland
Marie Brennan’s spellbinding DRIFTWOOD continues to wow readers.
SCINTILLA praises the book.
Driftwood is a challenging book. The number of points of view, the shifting settings, the diverse characters, and the short-story collection feel to the book mean that the reader has to pay attention throughout. The reward, though, is a wildly creative and imaginative novel that showcases an author’s vast talent and hard work. Grab this book with both hands and hang on with white knuckles for an experience unlike any other book you are likely to read this or any other year.
BLACK FOREST BASILISKS concurs.
Driftwood will haunt you long after you’ve set it down. Brennan has crafted a gorgeous, poignant apocalypse where getting a second chance doesn’t always mean getting a new life. Each of the diaspora she’s depicted are richly imagined, complex, and compelling. I cannot recommend it enough.
KEIKII EATS BOOKS finds the novel satisfying.
I absolutely adored DRIFTWOOD.
[…]
While short, DRIFTWOOD is just so full of life. I wouldn’t say it is full of happiness, since it is filled with people who are slowly losing their homes and lives. But it is full of life, regardless. I love the world that Brennan wrote. And I may have a small crush on Last. Even though he was rarely anything other than an enigma told by the storyteller. But when he was more, he was a friend.
I don’t know if this is a book one in a series or a standalone, but I really hope I get more from this world. And Last.
LOOKING GLASS READS continues the love.
Between the extremely original world building, effective story telling and fantastic writing I was spellbound by DRIFTWOOD
Continue onto page 2 for interviews and more with Marie Brennan.
Born in Madison, NJ on August 10, 1903, Ward Moore wrote the first of his six novels in 1942 with the picaresque, Great Depression novel Breathe the Air Again. His next novel Greener Than You Think (1947) established his reputation as a writer of intelligent science fiction. Moore’s influential masterpiece Bring the Jubilee (1953) is considered the definitive alternative world Civil War novel.
He co-authored the novels Joyleg (1962 w Avram Davidson) and Caduceus Wild (1978 w Robert Bradford). In 1996, Tachyon published the mash up novel of two famed Moore short stories LOT & LOT’S DAUGHTER. The stories served as the uncredited basis for the movie Panic in Year Zero! (1962).
“Although he contributed only infrequently to the field, each of [Ward Moore’s] books became something of a classic.”
—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
In celebration of the release of Marie Brennan’s DRIFTWOOD, Tachyon presents glimpses from the book that Publishers Weekly declares “Fantasy fans will be thrilled.”
Congratulations to editor Ellen Datlow and artist John Picacio on winning 2020 Hugo Awards.
Worcester (MA) Public Library Virtual Science Fiction Book Club selected Kage Baker’s IN THE COMPANY OF THIEVES as their July title.
Andreea aka INFINITE TEXT was excited by the review blurb in Carrie Vaughn’s THE IMMORTAL CONQUISTADOR. She also previews forthcoming Tachyon books DRIFTWOOD by Marie Brennan, NUCLEATION by Kimberly Unger, THE MIDNIGHT CIRCUS by Jane Yolen, and THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES by R.B. Lemberg.
In support of the Kickstarter for Recognize Fascism Anthology, contributor (and Tachyon editor) Jaymee Goh reads from her selection.
For The New York Times, Stephen King praises Lauren Beukes’s “splendid” new thriller Afterland.
The flap copy on my advance edition declares that “Afterland” is a “high-concept feminist thriller that Lauren Beukes fans have been waiting for.” It is a thriller, I grant you that, and feminist in the sense that most of the men have been erased by a flu virus that develops into prostate cancer, but Beukes is too wise and story-oriented to wham away at ideas that have been thoroughly explored, sometimes at tedious length, on cable news and social media. She lets her tale do the talking, and the results are quite splendid.
In celebration of the release of Marie Brennan’s DRIFTWOOD, Tachyon presents glimpses from the book that is “An exciting delve into a conglomerate land filled with magic and mystery.” (Kirkus)
by
Marie Brennan
The tenements presented a blank face to the border: an unbroken expanse of wall, windowless, gapless, resolutely blind to the place that used to be Oneua. Only at the edges of the tenements could one pass through, entering the quiet and sunlit strip of weeds that separated the buildings from the world their inhabitants had once called home.
Eyo stood in the weeds, an arm’s length from the border. The howling sands formed a wall in front of her, close enough to touch. They clouded the light of Oneua’s suns, until she could barely make out the nearest structure, the smooth lines of its walls eroded and broken by the incessant rasp of the sands. And yet where she stood, with her feet on the soil of Gevsilon, the air was quiet and still and damp. The line between the two was as sharp as if it had been sliced with a razor.
“I wouldn’t recommend it, kid.”
The voice was a stranger’s, speaking the local trade pidgin. Eyo knew he was addressing her, but kept her gaze fixed on the boundary before her, and the maelstrom of sand beyond. She didn’t care what some stranger thought.
People came here sometimes. Not the Oneui—not usually—but their neighbors in Gevsilon, or other residents of Driftwood looking for that rare thing, a quiet place to sit and be alone. The winds looked like their shrieking should drown out even thought, but their sound didn’t cross the border, any more than the sand did. As long as you didn’t look at the sandstorm, this place was peaceful.
But apparently the stranger didn’t want to be quiet and alone. In her peripheral vision she saw movement, someone coming to stand at her side, not too close. Someone as tall as an Oneui adult, and that was unusual in Driftwood.
“You wouldn’t be the first of your people to try,” he said. “You’re one of the Oneui, right? You must have heard the stories.”
Oh, she had. It started as a dry, stinging wind, after their world parched to dust. Then it built into a sandstorm, one that raged for days without pause, just as their prophecies had foretold. Eyo’s grandparents and the others of their town had refused to believe it was the end of the world; in their desperation, they gathered up their water and food and tied themselves together to prevent anyone from getting lost, and they went in search of a place safe from the sand.
They stumbled into Gevsilon. And that was how they found out their world had ended.
But not entirely. This remnant of it survived. And Gevsilon, their inward neighbor, had gone through an apocalypse of its own: a plague that rendered all their people sterile. There weren’t many of the Nigevi left anymore, which meant there was enough room for the Oneui to resettle. Just a stone’s throw from the remnants of their own world, and everything they’d left behind.
Of course some of them tried to go back. The first few returned coughing and blind, defeated by the ever-worsening storm. The next few stumbled out bloody, their clothing shredded and their flesh torn raw.
The last few didn’t return at all.
“Why do you lot keep trying?” the stranger asked. “You know by now that it won’t end well. Is this just how your people have taken to committing suicide?”
Some worlds did that, Eyo knew. Their people couldn’t handle the realization that it was over, that Driftwood was their present and their future, until the last scraps of their world shrank and faded away. They killed themselves singly or en masse, making a ritual of it, a show of obedience to or protest against the implacable forces that sent them here.
Not her.
She meant to go on ignoring the stranger. It wasn’t any of his business why she was here, staring at the lethal swirls of the sandstorm. But when she turned to go, she saw him properly: a tall man, slender and strong, his hair and eyes and fingernails pure black, but his skin tinged lightly with blue.
In Driftwood, people came in all sizes and colors and number of limbs and presence or lack of horns and tails. Eyo didn’t claim to know them all. But she’d heard of only one person fitting this man’s description.
“You’re Last,” she said. Sudden excitement made her tense.
His eyes tightened in apprehension, and he retreated a careful step. “I am.”
“You can help me,” Eyo said.
He retreated again, glancing over his shoulder, toward the faceless wall of the Oneui tenements, and the nearest opening past them. “I don’t think so, kid. Sorry. I—”
She stepped forward, matching him. She didn’t have her full growth yet, but she was quick and good at running; she would chase him if he fled. “You’re a guide, aren’t you? Someone who knows things, knows where to find things.”
He stopped. “I—yes. I am.”
One of the best in Driftwood, or so people said. He knew the patchwork of realities that made up this area, because he’d been around for longer than any of them. The stories claimed he was called Last because he was the last of his own world—a world that had been gone longer than anyone could remember.
Clarity dawned. “Oh. You thought I was going to ask you to go into the sandstorm?”
He gave the howling storm a sideways glance. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
Because the stories also said he couldn’t die. Eyo scowled. “Someone asked you? Who? Tell me their name. I don’t care what the storm is like; the idea of sending an outsider in there, asking them to bring back the—”
She cut herself off, but not before Last’s eyebrows rose. “Bring back? You lost something in the storm?”
“It isn’t lost,” Eyo snapped. “We know exactly where it is.”
Now she saw clarity dawn for him. “That’s why your people keep going in,” he said thoughtfully, gaze drifting sideways again. “Look, whatever it is—it may not even be there anymore. This is Driftwood; things crumble and fade away, even without apocalyptic sandstorms to scour them into dust.”
Conviction stiffened Eyo’s crest, her scalp feathers rising in a proud line. “Not this. Everything else will fall apart and die, but not—” She swallowed and shook her head. “When we are gone, this will remain.”
His shrug said he didn’t agree, but he also didn’t care enough to argue anymore. “So if you don’t want to send me into that, what do you want me for?”
Eyo smoothed her crest with one hand, as flat to her skull as she could make it. If he knew her people, he would recognize that as a gesture of humility and supplication. “I want you to help me find a way to survive the sand.”
