Tachyon tidbits featuring Alastair Reynolds, Jacob Weisman, and Joe R. Lansdale

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

Alastair Reynolds (photo: Barbera Bella), Jacob Weisman (Jill Roberts), and Joe R. Lansdale (Karen Lansdale)

On THE VERGE, Andrew Liptak includes Alastair Reynolds’s Locus Award-winning and Hugo nominated novella SLOW BULLETS among his 11 science fiction adventures to escape into this Thanksgiving holiday.

If you’re looking for a bit of a shorter read, Alastair Reynold’s novella SLOW BULLETS is an excellent, bite-sized story. Protagonist Scur awakens on a prison transport to discover that everything is wrong, and nobody can remember their past. Along with another passenger, she begins to piece together what had happened before the ship’s computer dies, taking their memories with it. Along the way, the passengers must learn to cooperate, and overcome their respective histories.


Jeremy Adam Smith in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION profiles Jacob and Rina Weisman and Tachyon for his piece “Jewish SF and the San Francisco Bay.”

You can almost see the future from Jacob and Rina Weisman’s doorstep near the top of Potrero Hill.

The couple, who met on the Jewish dating site J Date, run a range of science-fiction institutions in the Bay Area—most notably Tachyon Publications, which publishes between eight to ten books per year and gets shelf space for them nationally in major chains such as Barnes & Noble. Rina runs the “SF in SF” event series (“Science fiction, San Francisco—a perfect fit”) and stages monthly film screenings and author events around the city in venues such as the Balboa Theater in the Richmond and the American Bookbinding Museum in the Financial District. Jacob focuses on Tachyon, which publishes work by Peter S. Beagle, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Nancy Kress, Lavie Tidhar, Michael Moorcock, Carol Emshwiller, and James Tiptree Jr., among others.

And they do it all out of their hillside Victorian, with a view of a Bay Area promised land that encompasses a surprising amount of the science-fiction and fantasy genres’ terrain—from locations for the Star Wars and Star Trek movie franchises to the former homes of such visionary writers as Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Rina and Jacob Weisman in their home office (Photo: Cathleen Maclearie)

What’s not easy to spot at first glance is how surprisingly Jewish the Bay Area’s science-fictional landscape is. In fact, when you shine science fiction through the prism of the San Francisco Bay Area, it splits into many colors, and Judaism is one of the brightest.

Joe R. Lansdale chats with cultural critic on Chauncey Devega on THE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA SHOW.

Author, writer extraordinaire, and friend of the podcast “Champion” Joe Lansdale stops by to share his thoughts on Donald Trump’s winning the White House, if Trump’s voters are stupid, ignorant, racist or all three, and updates us on Season Two of Hap and Leonard on SundanceTV.

For more info about SLOW BULLETS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Thomas Canty

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info about INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Goro Fujita

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info about HAP AND LEONARD: BLOOD AND LEMONADE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story