Tachyon tidbits featuring Ellen Klages, Peter Watts, Jaymee Goh, Daryl Gregory, and Avram Davidson & Grania Davis

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

Adding the inclusion of Skye Walker’s comments, FANTASY LITERATURE updated their review of Ellen Klages’ WICKED WONDERS.

Wicked Wonders by Ellen Klages fantasy book reviews

WICKED WONDERS is an absolutely lovely collection, with some stories that I continue to recommend well after having read them here. The author’s notes on each story were insightful and interesting, and often funny as well.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

WICKED WONDERS is a fantastic collection to have. Beyond the enjoyment I got out of it as a reader, the author’s notes on each story were delightful and fascinating insights that have helped me better recognize and appreciate aspects of writing as well. I am glad to have it on my shelf to put in the hands of others who need these stories.

EGO SUM QUI SUM awards 5/5 to Peter Watts’ THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION.

Watts did it again. This book is the main one of the Sunflower cycle, and he managed to paint even more fascinating picture than in Firefall or Rafters cycles, in my opinion. A travel through space and time of such colossal proportions that you hardly percive it scale. New pictures of dehumanised humans and humanised machines that will make you think again about problems of free will and purpose.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

For STRANGE HORIZONS, Jaymee Goh contributes Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-RaceFail.

In a recent conversation with newer writers, I realised sufficient time had passed that The Young™ did not know what RaceFail is. RaceFail was a trial by whiteness, a discourse created upon a backdrop of white supremacy, necessitated by ongoing calls for equality. This column will discuss RaceFail, whiteness in the acts of writing, and whiteness in the global Anglophone publishing industry.

There are multiple descriptions of the event—the most useful one is on Fanlore.org—which presents a bit of an oral history of that series of conversations happening across LiveJournal and blogs. Over the course of several months, fans of science fiction and fantasy across multiple blogging platforms organised as communities of fans of different texts, writing personal essays on the emotional effects of not seeing themselves reflected in the texts they consumed. They addressed not only representation within the texts themselves, but representation within the processes by which these texts were created and processed through the industries that produced them for mass consumption, most notably the publishing or film industries.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

In interview at FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION with C. C. Finlay, David Erik Nelson mentions Daryl Gregory’s WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY FINE.

Other stories that paved the way for me to see this in myself include the films A Dark Song; As Above, So Below; The Endless; and The Babadook; and Daryl Gregory’s excellent novella WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY FINE.

THE BOSS IN THE WALL by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis is now available as an audio book.