birthday' Archives - Tachyon Publications

April 11, 2024

Happy birthday to the award-winning author and anthologist James Patrick Kelly

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The acclaimed James Patrick Kelly has garnered many awards including the 1996 Hugo for his novelette “Think Like a Dinosaur,” 2000 Hugo for his novelette “10 to 16 to 1,” 2007 Nebula for the novella BURN, and numerous Locus and Asimov’s Readers’ Poll for many of his short stories. Among his brilliant novels/novellas are Planet of Whispers (1984), Freedom Beach (1985 with John Kessel), Look Into the Sun (1989), Wildlife (1994), Mother Go (2017), and King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats (2020).

Kelly’s amazing short stories have been collected in Heroines (1990), Think Like A Dinosaur And Other Stories (1997), Strange But Not A Stranger (2002), The Wreck Of The Godspeed And Other Stories (2008), Ninety Percent of Everything (2011 with Kessel and Jonathan Lethem), Masters Of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly (2016), The Promise Of Space (2018), and The First Law of Thermodynamics (2021). He produced 5 issues of the ezine James Patrick Kelly’s Strangeway (2011-2012) which featured Kelly stories and essays.

Beginning in 2006, Kelly began producing a series of successful anthologies with his good friend John Kessel. The compelling books include FEELING VERY STRANGE: THE SLIPSTREAM ANTHOLOGY (2006), REWIRED: THE POST-CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY (2007), THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION (2009), KAFKAESQUE: STORIES INSPIRED BY FRANZ KAFKA (2011), DIGITAL RAPTURE: THE SINGULARITY ANTHOLOGY (2012), and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (2012).

All of us at Tachyon wish the sensational Jim a happy birthday.

August 30, 2022

Mary Shelley, writer of the first science fiction novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, was born 225 years ago

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The daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797. Her seminal work Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), often considered the very first science fiction story, created the iconic mad scientist-monster tale.

Though best remembered for her archetypal creation, Shelley wrote six other novels most notably the historicals Valperga; Or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1834), and perhaps most famously the apocalyptic The Last Man (1826). Her two dozen supernatural short stories have been collected by Tachyon in print as THE MORTAL IMMORTAL (1996) and as the ebook BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN (2017). She penned numerous poems, travel narratives and children’s books and also contributed several entries to The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men, which comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner’s 133-Volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46).

“Frontispiece to Frankenstein 1831” by Theodore Von Holst (1810-1844)
(Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

May 26, 2022

Happy birthday to the exceptional Caitlín R. Kiernan

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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]), Tinfoil Dossier (Agents of Dreamland [2017], Black Helicopters [2018], The Tindalos Asset [2020]), and La Belle Fleur Sauvage: Plague of the Womb (2019).

Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story

Their 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), Houses Under the Sea (2019), A Little Yellow Book of Fever Dreams (2019), THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN (2019), Comes a Pale Rider (2020), Vile Affections (2021), and several others.

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). They fronted Death’s Little Sister, a short-lived goth-rock band.

A vertebrate paleontologist, Kiernan co-founded the Birmingham Paleontological Society (1984). They co-authored papers describing a new genus and species of an ancient marine lizard the mosasaur Selmasaurus russelli (1988) and in 2020, a new large fossil sea turtle, Asmodochelys parhami. In 2019, Kiernan became a research associate and fossil preparator at McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama.

In November 2005, they 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 their 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.