approaching pavonis mons by balloon Archives

approaching pavonis mons by balloon

February 8, 2017

Tachyon tidbits featuring Peter S. Beagle, Lauren Beukes, James Morrow, and Alastair Reynolds

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alastair reynolds, Ann Monn, approaching pavonis mons by balloon, clara bacou, collection, elizabeth story, James Morrow, lauren beukes, magdalena korzeniewska, Marty Halpern, More Red Ink, novella, peter s beagle, review, shambling towards hiroshima, slipping, slipping: stories essays & other writing, summerlong, the asylum of dr caligari, the madonna and the starship, the warbler, twitter, tyson adams

The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.

Peter S. Beagle (photo: Paul Todisco), Lauren Beukes, James Morrow, and Alastair Reynolds (Barbera Bella)

THE WARBLER enjoys Peter S Beagle’s SUMMERLONG.

SUMMERLONG is on the outer fringes of fantasy, more a story of modern slipstream fiction like something by Haruki Murakami. It’s the kind of book where the boundaries of reality slowly erode and the characters’ realities unravel in consonance with the surreal.

The story itself is excellent, full of emotion and tension, action and introspection, character and mystery. But the writing itself is so damn good that even if the plot was weak this would be a fantastic read. Beagle’s language is sophisticated but relatable, his characters bleeding through every word, every carefully placed comma, and the spaces between. Their pain and hope and love and confusion suffuse the text so completely that I achieved that sought-after state of readvana, wherein you look up from a book and you aren’t sure what life is, who you are, or what anything is.

I was enchanted by this book. I was transported, surprised, and amazed by it. If I had read a synopsis of it, I may have passed on it altogether, which would have been a terrible loss. It’s books like SUMMERLONG that are defining points in a budding writer’s journey, where you read something and say “I want to be able to do that.”

On his eponymous site, Tyson Adams praises Lauren Beukes’ SLIPPING: STORIES, ESSAYS, & OTHER WRITING.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Could zombies be a viable replacement for slave labour? Asking for a certain electronics company. And most clothing manufacturers.

SLIPPING is an interesting collection of writing from the brain of Lauren Beukes. From enhanced athletes to bored ghosts, these stories display Lauren’s spec-fic interests. There are also a few essays at the end of the collection, one of which explains the personal inspiration behind The Shining Girls; an essay well worth reading.

Marty Halpern on MORE RED INK lauds James Morrow’s forthcoming THE ASYLUM OF DR. CALIGARI.

I have been quite fortunate to have worked on not just one, not two, but three novellas by James Morrow that have been – or will be – published by Tachyon Publications. The first of these, SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA, was published in 2009.

The second, THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP, published in 2014, was the focus of my blog post of November 24, 2013, in which I wrote of my work on this novella.

In that blog post I stated (and I quote): “James Morrow is an absolute master of the sardonic…” – and with THE ASYLUM OF DR. CALIGARI, his third novella from Tachyon, due to be published in June, James Morrow does not disappoint.

At APPROACHING PAVONIS
MONS BY BALLOON, Alastair Reynolds announces his decision to leave Twitter.

And, rather abruptly, perhaps, I decided to leave Twitter and deactivate my account. One or two people were kind enough to ask if all was well, and indeed it was, but I’d been tweeting less and less as we went into the latter half of 2016, and it seemed as good a time as any to knock it on the head. Rather than risk temptation, I decided that the safest option was to close the account. Good thing too, as there’ve been a number of occasions when I felt the urge to tweet something, and I doubt I’d have had the self-control not to go back onto it full-time.

For more info on SUMMERLONG, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Magdalena Korzeniewska

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more information about SLIPPING: STORIES, ESSAYS, & OTHER WRITING, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Clara Bacou

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on THE ASYLUM OF DR. CALIGARI, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

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

June 4, 2015

The origins of SLOW BULLETS, as revealed by Alastair Reynolds

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alastair reynolds, approaching pavonis mons by balloon, cheryl morgan, elizabeth story, essay, novella, origin, science fiction, secret, slow bullets, Thomas Canty

(Image courtesy of Cheryl Morgan)

On his site APPROACHING PAVONIS MONS BY BALLOON, Alastair Reynolds discusses the roots behind the recently released novella SLOW BULLETS.

Like many of my stories, this one had a very long gestation. For several years I’d been playing around with two completely separate story ideas. The first concerned a prison ship, loaded with an assortment of the good, the bad and the ugly, suddenly catapulted into a situation where only the collective wisdom of those on board is going to save the day. I could see the opening scenes in my head – a battle-scarred planet, soldiers and POWs being loaded onto transports, former enemies forced into close confinement with each other. Then something goes wrong…

But that was as far as it went; all I had was the outline, not a stab at the material, as I knew that something was missing.

The second idea was also only a series of outlines. I’d become fixated on the idea of scribes, of regiments of monk-like scholars being forced to transfer information from one medium to another, by hand … I could see them sitting in the hulk of a crashed ship, half submerged in some alien sea, trying to preserve as much knowledge as possible from the ship’s dying memory. Perhaps they’d been doing this for long that they barely remembered what the ship was, or where it had come from … all that mattered was the task of transcription. The monks had to work to the point of exhaustion, though, because on some level time was against them.

The performance started. I enjoyed it, but some part of my mind was busy beavering away on the connections between those two story ideas. One by one the pieces began to fit together. By the end of the evening, I was in no doubt that I could write the implied story. I knew it was going to be a larger piece – a novelette or maybe even a novella. But even then I didn’t anticipate that it would still make me more than a year, and that the finished article would be closer to 50,000 than 40,000 words.

When Marty Halpern contacted me in April 2013, asking about the possibility of a novella for Tachyon Books, it was already more than a year since I’d found a way to merge the two ideas … and it would be the better part of a year again before Marty had the story. At one point I rewrote the entire thing without using a single comma or quotation mark… before sense prevailed.

Read the rest of Reynolds’ revelations at APPROACHING PAVONIS MONS BY BALLOON.

For more about SLOW BULLETS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Thomas Canty.

Design by Elizabeth Story.