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

Lisa Goldstein (photo: Doug Asherman), Nalo Hopkinson (David Findley), Ellen Klages (Scott R. Kline) and Peter S. Beagle (Rina Weisman)

As part of WORLD WEAVER PRESS’ Small Press Week, K. Bird Lincoln recommends Lisa Goldstein’s THE UNCERTAIN PLACES.

I also dug THE UNCERTAIN PLACES by Lisa Goldstein from Tachyon Publications.  No surprise I enjoyed this take on the “kidnapped by faeries” trope, it won the Mythopoeic Award in 2012. Fantasy always pleases me when it uses the fantastic to explore human feelings and relationships and this book does that with a young man getting involved with two sisters.

The class “Black and Brown Future,” a part of The University of Texas at San Antonio Honors College for Spring, 2018, will use Nalo Hopkinson’s FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS.

HON 3233.004 Black and Brown Futures, MW 2:30-3:45p (K. Brooks)

This course will center on reading and analyzing materials that highlight the themes of race and genre fiction (i.e. science fiction/fantasy/horror). This course will feature the following texts: 

Salsa Nocturna, Daniel Jose Older
Certain Dark Things, Silvia Morena Garcia
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin
The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, Nalo Hopkinson
Mama Day, Gloria Naylor
Get Out (2017), dir. Jordan Peele
Attack the Block (2011), dir. Joe Cornish
Wake (2010), dir. Bree Newsome
Dumplings (2004), dir. Fruit Chan

Fran Wilde for TOR.COM includes Ellen Klages’ PASSING STRANGE and WICKED WONDERS in “Fantasy Books Where Magic Turns Out to Be Math.”

More recent fiction uses math magic for other purposes, including Ellen Klages’ PASSING STRANGE (Tor.com, 2017) and “Caligo Lane,” a short story found in WICKED WONDERS (Tachyon, 2017). In both, math is an active ingredient in Franny Travers’ cartographic witchery. The 1940s-era San Franciscan uses this to save and transport people, both across town and away from desperate times in 1940s Europe.

At CATHOLIC SENTINEL, Brett Robinson mentions Peter S. Beagle in “Searches beyond Google’s capabilities.”

I can remember my own mother coming into my room in our suburban Pittsburgh home in the mid-1980s with a copy of “The Hobbit” in her hand. She read a line from the foreword where a reviewer recounted coming across the book in the stacks of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh – our hometown library.

My mother was very good at teaching me to read the subtle signs of providence, and she got me very excited that this book that had been so magical for the reviewer was rediscovered in our library. I felt a little like Bilbo receiving the ancient map from the dwarves.

The reviewer, Peter Beagle, a fantasy writer himself, wondered why the book was enjoying such a resurgence in the 1960s. He wrote:

“They were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the ‘60s were the time when the word ‘progress’ lost its ancient holiness, and ‘escape’ stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. ”

For more info on THE UNCERTAIN PLACES, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn

For more information on FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on WICKED WONDERS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story