The Hugo and Nebula winning author of BEARS DISCOVER FIRE, FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN, GREETINGS & OTHER STORIES, and NUMBERS DON’T LIE, Terry Bisson turns 73 today.
All of us at Tachyon wish the amazing Terry a happy birthday!
Cover to GREETINGS & OTHER STORIES by John Picacio.
Cover to NUMBERS DON’T LIE by Ann Monn.
For more about Terry Bisson publications, visit his Tachyon page.
The late Thomas M. Disch was born 75 years ago February 2, 1940. The Hugo award winning author and poet penned many works including the legendary Camp Concentration, 334, and On Wings of Song.
Tachyon was honored to publish Disch’s final two books (The Word of God and The Wall of America). His poem Billet-doux was produced as limited edition broadside in celebration of Tachyon Publications’ twelfth anniversary.
Covers for The Word of God and The Wall of America by Ann Monn.
Art and design for Billet-doux by Barry Barnes.
All of us at Tachyon wish the extraordinary, Nancy Kress a very happy birthday. The multiple award winner is the author of Yesterday’s Kin, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Dogs, Dancing on Air, and many others.
Yesterday’s Kin cover by Thomas Canty.
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Elizabeth Story.
Dancing on Air cover by Michael Dashow.
Ron Charles of The Washington Post discussed the Charlie Hebdo killings with acclaimed religious satirist James Morrow, author of The Madonna and The Starship and Shambling Towards Hiroshima.
Morrow has never shied away from making fun of religions. The Denver Post once called him “Christianity’s Salman Rushdie.” His “The Godhead Trilogy,” published in the 1990s, involves the discovery of the giant body of God floating in the ocean. Religious figures, relics and beliefs are all fair game in his cerebral comedies. His new novel, “Galápagos Regained,” which pits Christianity against Darwinism, is being released this week.
“I would be deluding myself if I imagined that I was doing anything as brave as what [the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists] were doing,” he says from his home in State College, Pa. “They knew that the sights of those rifles were trained on them, and they had the raw courage to keep on fulfilling that sacred obligation to be satiric. I’ve worked exactly the same side of that street: I see blasphemy not only as a right, but as a sacred duty.”
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The problem, as he sees it, is that Islam never went through its own Enlightenment. “In the West, we’ve benefited from the great Enlightenment conversation. We enjoy the benefit of free speech — it’s the default,” he said. “But that’s a very recent and begrudging breakthrough on the part of religion. I don’t take it for granted.”
He’s quick to note that the gunmen in Paris on Wednesday did not represent the Islamic intellectual classes in any way. But he would like to see “the Islamic world educate its children in a plenary fashion.”
“Manichean dualism is the worst,” he said, “the single worst idea people ever came up with — this notion that you can divide humankind into the children of light and the children of darkness.”
He’d also like to see schools in the West do more to teach children about Islam and its extraordinary intellectual cultural heritage. “This was a world that kept civilization alive,” he notes, citing the lasting contributions of Islamic scholars to science and mathematics.
Read the rest of Charles’ conversation with Morrow at The Washington Post.
For more info on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover and design by Elizabeth Story.
For more info on Shambling Towards Hiroshima, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn.
In The New Yorker, Peter Bebergal delivers a profile of “the anti-Tolkien” Michael Moorcock.
Moorcock’s influence is nothing like Tolkien’s, at least on the surface, but his vision of a speculative-fiction genre that can be psychologically complex is evident in how very sophisticated some of it has become—from “True Detective” to Jeff VanderMeer, from David Mitchell to “Under the Skin.” But Moorcock also embraces the joy of pulp, and, like Tolkien, his creations are namedropped and sourced high and low.
Rock and roll has proved to be one of the more potent vehicles for enshrining both Tolkien and Moorcock’s characters in pop culture. For all the claims of devil worship lobbed at Led Zeppelin, Satan makes only one appearance in their lyrics.* Tolkien is where their real allegiance lies, with references to Gollum, Mordor, the Misty Mountains, and Ringwraiths. Moorcock, however, came of age during rock’s ascension and understood rock’s power to give electrified life to his creations. Moorcock worked directly with bands like Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult as both a spiritual and literary guru. And, like Tolkien’s characters, Moorcock’s heroes and anti-heroes appear in comic books and role-playing games. But more often his presence is seen the form of loving nods as, when, in the “Game of Thrones” television series, someone yells out “Stormbringer” when King Joffrey asks for possible names for his sword.
Moorcock’s literary agitation shook the fantasy and science-fiction establishment and made it possible for writers to step outside the long shadow of Tolkien and other fantasy devices. And frail Elric, dependent on a soul-stealing sword to keep his kingdom from utter dissolution, is a necessary corrective to the bloat of something like the “Hobbit” movie trilogy. Elric is not high art by any means, but is as rich and complex as anything calling itself fantasy. And the Elric stories are terrific fun. But, more importantly, Elric is not about abstract ideas of good and evil, with faceless powers looking to strip the world of its trees and its hobbit holes. Elric is about law and chaos, and how, sometimes, choosing one over the other is no more or less just.
Read the rest of Bebergal’s Michael Moorcock profile at The New Yorker.
For a survey of Moorcock’s literary legacy, check out Tachyon’s The Very Best of Michael Moorcock.
Cover by Ann Monn
Michael Senft of Relentless Reading (And Writing About It!) provides a retro review of Michael Moorcock’s legendary and controversial novella “Behold the Man,” which was reprinted in The Very Best of Michael Moorcock.
And writing like this prompts plenty of questions from the reader. Glogauer is not a religious person, instead he struggles to find existential meaning in Jung and balance that with the diverse faiths he was exposed to as a child. He also struggles with homosexuality and a bit of a masochistic messiah complex — in short, he’s a psychologist’s dream.
There is also a question of what is truth within Behold the Man. Glogauer is determined to recreate the truth behind the gospels, yet the events described never happen in his world. Where do the stories come from? Is Glogauer the true messiah, or is this another archetype he is simply reenacting? If it is believed as the truth by millions throughout the ages, is it really a lie?
An intriguing and thought-provoking examination of faith, myth and Truth.
Read the rest of Senft’s review at Relentless Reading (And Writing About It!).
For more about The Very Best of Michael Moorcock, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
All of us at Tachyon Publications wish Ellen Datlow, the award-winning, superstar editor of The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen, Lovecraft’s Monsters, Hauntings, Darkness, and countless other anthologies, a very happy birthday. We look forward to whatever is next.
For more about Ellen Datlow, visit her Tachyon page.
The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen cover by Josh Beatman.
Lovecraft’s Monsters cover by John Coulthart.
Hauntings cover art “Voice of Shades” by Valentina Brostean. Design by Elizabeth Story.
Today, the influential and acclaimed Michael Moorcock turns 75.
Not only did he create numerous legendary characters such as the definitive fantasy anti-hero Elric, the proto-cyberpunk Jerry Cornelius, and arguably the first modern steampunk protagonist Oswald Bastable, but Moorcock pioneered the concepts of the multiverse and as the editor of New Worlds, ushered in the New Wave literary movement.
For a fan wanting to relive some of this extraordinary writer’s finest works, or introducing a neophyte to this living legend, The Very Best of Michael Moorcock is the perfect book.
“The 17 stories in this collection demonstrate the breadth of scope and the excellence in storytelling of SF Grand Master and multigenre author Moorcock…. Moorcock crosses genres, bends boundaries, and breaks rules as only a master storyteller can.”
—Library Journal
From the legendary author of the Elric saga, a Science Fiction Grand Master, a platinum album–receiving rock star, and the
controversial editor of the new wave’s New Worlds, this definitive collection captures the incomparable short fiction of one of science fiction and literature’s most important contemporary writers.
These exceptional stories range effortlessly from the genre tales that continue to define fantasy to the author’s critically acclaimed mainstream works. Classic offerings include the Nebula Award–winning novella “Behold the Man,” which introduces a time traveler and unlikely messiah that H.G. Wells never imagined; “The Visible Men,” a recent tale of the ambiguous and androgynous secret agent Jerry Cornelius; the trilogy “My Experiences in the Third World War,” where a Russian agent in an alternate Cambodia is powerless to prevent an inevitable march toward nuclear disaster; and “A Portrait in Ivory,” a Melibone story of troubled anti-hero Elric and his soul-stealing sword, Stormbringer.
Newer work handpicked by the expert editing team includes one previously unpublished story and three uncollected stories. With his finest stories finally collected in one volume, this book is a long-overdue tribute to an extraordinarily gifted, versatile, and much-beloved author.
“…Moorcock is a throwback to such outsized 19th-century novelistic talents as Dickens and Tolstoy.”
—Locus
“[Moorcock] introduced me to the ridiculously powerful things that happen when you put a sophisticated, contemporary literary vocabulary at the service of a blackly grim high-fantasy imagination. A giant of the genre in every possible sense.”
—TIME Magazine
“It is all quintessential Moorcock—a wild, fascinating batch of stories fairly balancing the fantastic and the nearly ordinary, and showcasing Moorcock’s talent very well, thank you.”
—Booklist
“…a handy, one-volume collection that serves as a superb introduction to the boundless imagination of this unique and fascinating author….”
—Bookgasm
“..something for everyone to love…. This collection illustrates the breadth of Moorcock’s talent. A long-overdue retrospective.”
—The Guardian
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover by Ann Monn
As featured on their site, Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under The Sand joins the Worldreader digital collection of over 11,000 books in 44 languages.
The charity “is on a mission to bring digital books to every child and her family, so that they can improve their lives.”
Literacy is transformative: it increases earning potential, decreases inequality, improves health outcomes and breaks the cycle of poverty (UNESCO). Yet there are 740 million illiterate people in this world and 250 million children of primary school age who lack basic reading and writing skills (UNESCO). Books are necessary for the development of these skills, and still 50% of schools in Africa have few or no books at all (SACMEQ II).
To learn more about and how they accomplish these admirable goals, visit the Worldreader site.
For more on The Hotel Under the Sand, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
SF To Read Before You Die! recommends Michael Swanwick’s collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow.
A collection of Swanwick’s trademark quirky tales from the early to mid Noughties. Very stylish and individual pieces.
Read the rest of the review, which includes commentary on every story, at SF To Read Before You Die!
For more info about The Dog Said Bow-Wow, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn
