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

Nalo Hopkinson, Kage Baker, and Jeff & Ann VanderMeer (photo: David Backman)

Nalo Hopkinson was a guest on THE
CANDY PALMATER SHOW.

“One of the things that science fiction and fantasy do is look at what it means to be human—like any literature, of course. It teaches you about [how] the world changes and how that affects both systems and people. So it really is a lot of looking at people as social beings,” Nalo told Candy.

The author talked to Candy about the ways she’s fighting to keep the genre of science fiction growing.

At TOR.COM in the latest installment of the Rereading Kage Baker series, the late author’s sister Kathleen Bartholomew recounts the beginnings of the Company Series.

So Kage decided to write something more classical. She decided on Time Travel because it interested her more than rockets and aliens. Over breakfast one morning, reading about yet another animal presumed to be extinct but found inexplicably flourishing somewhere, Kage suddenly invented The Company: Dr. Zeus, who loots the past to enrich the future, and uses immortal agents to walk all its loot forward through Time.

Mendoza was a figure envisioned one evening on the side of the I­-5—a woman in a broad-­brimmed dark hat and a Clint Eastwood serape, looking at a huge turnip­-style pocket watch and saying “Okay, as long as you get me out of here before 1906, when the quake hits San Francisco.” Then she ended up beginning her adventures in the England of Mary Tudor—because Kage was deeply embroiled in the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and believed in the axiom Write what you know. Most of what she knew was scholarship, and pretending to be a Tudor Englishwoman, so that’s what Mendoza knew, too.

At the shared universe site NATION STATES, an anonymous user shares a history of Steampunk.

Nick Gevers’s original anthology EXTRAORDINARY
ENGINES (2008) features newer steampunk stories by some of the genre’s writers, as well as other science fiction and fantasy writers experimenting with neo-Victorian conventions. A retrospective reprint anthology of steampunk fiction was released, also in 2008, by Tachyon Publications; edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and appropriately entitled STEAMPUNK, it is a collection of stories by James Blaylock, whose “Narbondo” trilogy is typically considered steampunk; Jay Lake, author of the novel Mainspring, sometimes labeled “clockpunk”;[61] the aforementioned Michael Moorcock; as well as Jess Nevins, known for his annotations to
THE
LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (first published in 1999).

For more info about FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info about IN THE COMPANY OF THIEVES, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Thomas Canty

For more info about STEAMPUNK, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn