electric lit

April 9, 2020

Tachyon tidbits featuring Peter Watts, Philip K. Dick, Jane Yolen, and Jeff VanderMeer

Rick Klaw blog anne r dick, authority, c, eek you reek!, electric lit, Jane Yolen, jeff vandermeer, libros prohibidos, massachusetts book award, massachusetts center for the book, nino cipri, Peter Watts, peter watts is an angry sentient tumor: revenge fantasies and essays, philip k dick, review, the search for philip k dick, the third bear, thiersten.net 0

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

THIERSTEIN.NET recommends PETER WATTS IS AN ANGRY SENTIENT TUMOR.

Not an easy book to read quickly – for all Peter Watts being an erudite and fun-to-read writer. Both the structure and a lot of the subject matter and topics make skimming hard, I found.

But full of intelligent, and frequently original discourse and though, very much worth reading and getting entertained (and challenged) by. Go get yours, now!

Spanish sites LIBROS PROHIBIDOS and C review THE SEARCH FOR PHILIP K. DICK by Anne R. Dick.

In conclusion, In Search of Philip K. Dick is a text that will interest fans of the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But it is also an excellent memoir written by an intelligent and interesting woman in her own right who has lived in the shadow of her ex-husband. Anne R. Dick’s fluid, detailed and evocative prose, enhanced by extraordinary translation work, deserves a place on our shelves regardless of who was the subject of her memoirs.
LIBROS PROHIBIDOS “Anne R. Dick: En busca de Philip K. Dick” review by Ana Casanova
Translation from Spanish, courtesy of Google

In Search of Philip K. Dick is a book for Dick enthusiasts, for the 1960s enthusiasts, and for anyone who wants to get close to Dick and not quite know where to start.
C “En busca de Philip K. Dick, de Anne R. Dick” review by Mario Amadas
Translation from Spanish, courtesy of Google

Massachusetts Center for the Book announced the Must Reads (long lists) in the 20th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Among the honorees was Eek, You Reek! by Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple.

At ELECTRIC LIT, Nino Cipri includes Jeff VanderMeer’s Authority among 7 Terrifying Horror Stories About Class.

The second book in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy sees the weirdness of Area X permeate the facility tasked with controlling it. Authority mixes mundane office drama with spy-vs-spy paranoia and VanderMeer’s particular brand of the Weird. The novel thrums with a strain of dark humor and the surreal, familiar to anyone who’s been trapped in a job with a dysfunctional organization. For a shorter and stranger take on surreal office horror, read “The Situation” in his collection THE THIRD BEAR, or a comic adaptation of it at Tor.com.

December 3, 2018

Tachyon tidbits featuring Jane Yolen, Nalo Hopkinson, Peter Watts, Rudy Rucker, and Gregory Norman Bossert

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized boswell book company, camille acker, chuma hill, electric lit, elizabeth story, falling in love with hominids, gregory norman bossert, how to fracture a fairy tale, Jane Yolen, lashawn m wanak, lightspeed, nalo hopkinson, Peter Watts, review, rudy rucker, SF in SF, soma fm, the freeze frame revolution

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

Jane Yolen (photo: Jason Stemple), Nalo Hopkinson (David Findlay), Peter Watts, Rudy Rucker, and Gregory Norman Bossert

At LIGHTSPEED, LaShawan M. Wanak praises Jane Yolen’s HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE.

Yolen starts off with advice on how to actually fracture a fairy tale, which is useful for writers wishing to try their hand at retelling tales. She then dives into the tales themselves, mainly retellings of folk tales, but with a couple familiar Grimm’s tales among them. The story of Cinderella, for instance, which Yolen reimagines into “The Moon Ribbon,” about a girl who escapes her stepmother with a ribbon from her dead mother, and “Cinder Elephant,” which tells the story from a fat-positive point of view.

Some stories are just straightforward tales that have very little changed in them, such as her telling of Asian folktales “One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King” and “The Foxwife.” Some are rearranged in ways you don’t expect. “Happy Dens or a Day in the Old Wolves Home” has all the wolves in folklore now residing in an Old Wolves Home and tell their own versions on what happened to them. “Sleeping Ugly,” a riff on Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, is a hilarious tale with a testy fairy godmother who deserves her own story.

There are also a couple of tales that draw directly from Yolen’s Jewish heritage. “Slipping Sideways Through Eternity” is a sobering read connecting the Hebrew version of Elijah with the Holocaust, whereas “Granny Rumple” is an actual tale within Yolen’s family told on the framework of Rumpelstiltskin, and it is not a cheerful story. Indeed, several stories in this collection are rather bleak, but so well told that they sit and make you think.

Camille Acker at ELECTRIC LIT includes Nalo Hopkinson’s FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS in A Reading List of Short Story Collections by Black Women Writers.

Rest assured: black women writers aren’t only writing realist fiction. Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor both have bodies of work that include short stories in addition to the speculative worlds of their novels. Likewise, Nalo Hopkinson builds worlds on the large scale of the novel and on the small scale in her short story collections Skin Folk, Report From Planet Midnight, and her 2015 collection FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS. Hopkinson remixes canonical texts, from fairy tales to Shakespeare, and infuses them with an Afro-Caribbean perspective. Adults become monstrous consumers of flesh and a free society of former slaves is infused with magical realism. Samuel Delany once noted that science fiction is particularly important “for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they — and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.” Hopkinson is doing just that.

Peter Watts’ THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION hits the Boswell Book Company bestseller list and is the selection for their Sci-Fi Book Club on December 10.

Paperback Fiction:
1. Hotel Silence, by Auður Ava Olafsdottir
2. Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
3. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman
4. The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens
5. The Drifter, by Nick Petrie
6. Alternate Side, by Anna Quindlen
7. The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway
8. THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION, by Peter Watts
9. The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce
10. Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward

SOMA FM publishes the podcast of the October SF IN SF with Rudy Rucker and Gregory Norman Bossert.

Readings and discussions with Rudy Rucker and Greg Bossert.

Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He received the Philip K. Dick award for his early cyberpunk novel Software, and again for his Wetware. Software (1982) was perhaps the first SF novel where a human’s personality (the “software”) is transferred into a robot. His forty published books include novels, collections, and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. Rucker’s ground-breaking cyberpunk Ware series was republished in 2010 as The Ware Tetralogy, which can also be obtained as a free Creative Commons ebook online. Rucker’s 2007 novel, Postsingular was something of a return to the cyberpunk style.

Gregory Norman Bossert won the World Fantasy Award for his short story “The Telling” in 2012; his story “Bloom” from Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2013, was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Award. He lives in Marin County, California and works at Industrial Light & Magic.

For more info on HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

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 THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover and design by Elizabeth Story

August 27, 2018

The tales in Nick Mamatas’ introspective and clever THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING are entertaining

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized ashley holstrom, becky spratford, book riot, booklist, electric lit, elizabeth story, frank michaels errington, interview, jeff vandermeer, Nick Mamatas, ra for all, review, the people's republic of everything

Nick Mamatas’ recently released collection THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING impresses.

In a starred review for BOOKLIST, Becky Spratford praises the book.

Each tale is entertaining on its surface, but all hold a deeper meaning for readers inclined to ponder it. The inclusion of Mamatas’ author’s notes, offering a peek into his personal evolution, is worth the price of admission. This collection will be an easy sell to readers who enjoy genre-blending authors of thought-provoking and topical tales, such as Jeffrey Ford, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer.

Spratford expounds on the review at RA FOR ALL.

This collection is a genre blend as a whole, but even within stories, the genres can blend. I loved that. Not a single story takes you where you think you will go because no one writes like Mamatas. He is brilliant and original but he also knows how to tell a good compelling story filled with dark humor regardless of genre. He respects the genre tropes but also, refuses to let them define him or his work. It is refreshing.

I know I mentioned the first story in the review. Not only did I love it, I think it sets the stage perfectly for the unsettling, thought provoking stories that will follow. Seriously, after reading the entire collection, it was the perfect choice to kick things off.

Frank Michaels Errington on his eponymous page enjoys the work.

4 of 5 Stars

THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING is made up of fourteen short stories and one novella from genre fiction writer Nick Mamatas and is the most varied assemblage of work I’ve read in some time.

<Errington reviews every story>

I found much of the work in The People’s Republic of Everything to be introspective, clever, and fun.

Recommended.

For ELECTRIC LIT, Jeff VanderMeer interviews Mamatas.

Jeff VanderMeer: Short fiction was dead. Then it wasn’t. Let’s assume it’s alive. Why is it alive, if so?

Nick Mamatas: It’s alive for a couple of reasons. One is that just over a decade or so ago, bookstores finally understood that they could sell anthologies of short fiction by treating them as though they were non-fiction. People really do wander into bookstores and say things such as “I love The Walking Dead. Got any books about zombies?” or “I’ve been hearing a lot about steampunk — got anything that’ll explain it to me?” and a big anthology with reprints by prominent authors and new or at least obscure material by less well-known authors is basically a textbook designed to answer those questions. Phonebook-sized anthologies by you and Ann VanderMeer, or by John Joseph Adams, really grew a generation of readers.

Then there’s the smartphone and commuter culture: a short story is a commute-length read and a smartphone allows for instant access even when people don’t sit down and plan to read short fiction in advance. But short fiction is only ever a few clicks away, and unlike large collections of fiction, which require the reader to enter a narrative world, then exit it only to enter another, reading in an interstitial moment and then reading another story eight hours later doesn’t tax one’s attention span so much.

Finally, the short story is alive because it was dead. Freed from commercial considerations — there’s no reason to sit down and try to write to the men’s magazine market or for the Saturday Evening Post’s specific requirements — writers can do what they will. Good writers win. Thus a book such as Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties can through sales for enthusiasm and sheer quality get a lot of buzz built around it, enter something like its seventh or eighth printing, and even get nominated for a National Book Award. If she had written those stories according to the commercial formulae of the 1950s or ‘60s, they wouldn’t have been as good and thus the book wouldn’t have done as well.

Ashley Holstrom at BOOK RIOT includes THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING among Rockin’ August 2018 Book Covers.

For more info on THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

June 7, 2017

Tachyon tidbits featuring Patricia A. McKillip, Ellen Datlow, Nalo Hopkinson, and Lauren Beukes

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized andrew wheeler, chuma hill, electric lit, elizabeth story, Ellen Datlow, falling in love with hominids, finland, lauren beukes, nalo hopkinson, nightmares, nightmares: a new decade of modern horror, nihil, old habits, patricia a mckillip, review, tähtivaeltaja award, the antick musings of g.b.h. hornswoggler, the forgotten beasts of yeld, the writer web, Thomas Canty, tobias carrol, zoo city

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

Patricia A, McKillip (Stephen Gold/Wikimedia Commons), Ellen Datlow, Nalo Hopkinson (David Findlay), and Lauren Beukes

For THE ANTICK MUSINGS OF G. B. H. HORNSWOGGLER, GENT., Andrew Wheeler praises Patricia A. McKillip’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD.

THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD is a remarkable novel to come from such a young person: wise and deep and lucid and crisp, telling a story that contains very large things in a short space, presenting difficult decisions and hard choices without telling the reader how to feel about them. It was the first major fantasy novel in a career full of them, and it reminds me, once again, that I need to read McKillip’s books more often.

THE WRITE WEB enjoys Ellen Datlow’s NIGHTMARES: A NEW DECADE OF MODERN HORROR.

This collection of short stories can be classified as “weird” with horrific spices added into the pot.

It was just that good; and unfortunately (or fortunately), some stories give you pause. Make you cringe. Make you think.

Make you not want to sleep.

I’ve experienced that while reading this book.

Many more stories are diabolical, dreamlike, downright nightmarish and I loved the collection.

Definitely worth the read.

If you’re not scared.

Tobias Carroll at ELECTRIC LIT includes Nalo Hopkinson’s “Old Habits” (in the collection FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS) in 10 Sci-Fi Visions of the Afterlife.

The characters in Nalo Hopkinson’s “Old Habits” all reside in a strange state of life after death: their souls dwell in that most purgatory-like of modern spaces: the shopping mall. The result is a tale that’s both absurdist and tragic, turning familiar sights and spaces into something unsettling, and showing how the mundane can shift into the uncanny depending on the context.

On her own blog, Lauren Beukes reports a new award for her novel ZOO CITY.

Thank you, Finland! Zoo City won the Tähtivaeltaja Award as the best SFF book published in Finland in 2016!

Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Peter Watts, Gene Wolfe and Hannu Rajaniemi.

For more info about THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Thomas Canty

For more info about NIGHTMARES: A NEW DECADE OF MODERN HORROR, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Nihil

Design by Elizabeth Story

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

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story

May 11, 2016

Tachyon tidbits featuring Joe R. Lansdale, Peter S. Beagle, Alastair Reynolds, and George Saunders

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized abilene reporter-news, alastair reynolds, anthology, crime, cristina alves, electric lit, elizabeth story, fantasy, george saunders, glenn dromgoole, hap and leonad, invaders, invaders: 22 tales from the outer limits of literature, jacob weisman, joe lansdale, Joe R. Lansdale, jonathan strahan, magdalena korzeniewska, notes from coode street, novella, peter s beagle, rascunhos, rebecca schiff, review, science fiction, short stories, slow bullets, summerlong, swamp noir, texas noir

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

Joe R. Lansdale (Karen Lansdale), Peter S. Beagle (Gage Skidmore), Alastair Reynolds (Barbera Bella), George Saunders (Beowulf Sheehan/ZUMA Press)

Glenn Dromgoole of the ABILENE REPORTER-NEWS recommends HAP AND LEONARD.

Joe Lansdale: “Hap and Leonard” is the title of a crime-fighting series that debuted this spring on the Sundance cable channel, based on two of Joe R. Lansdale’s favorite fictional characters, straight white liberal Hap Collins and gay black conservative Leonard Pine.

As a way of introducing the unusual duo to viewers, Tachyon Publications produced a 240-page paperback collection of short stories and novellas under the title “Hap and Leonard” ($15.95). If you haven’t read any of the dozen or so Hap and Leonard novels, start here. You’ll no doubt want to read more.

At the Portuguese site RASCUNHOS, Cristina Alves includes Peter S. Beagle’s SUMMERLONG on her wish list.

Peter S. Beagle is best known for his book The Last Unicorn but it was the tales (We Never Talk About My Brother and The Rhinoceros who quoted Nietzsche ) I discovered more stories ranging from the fantastic and strange, often in mundane scenarios.

(Translated from Portuguese by Google)

Jonathan Strahan of NOTES FROM COODE
STREET is happy that Alastair Reynolds’ SLOW BULLETS received a Hugo nomination.

I could have named another handful of stories, but I loved all of these. Any would have made a terrific winner, and I’m delighted Al Reynolds’ story actually made the final ballot.

ELECTRIC LIT’s Rebecca Schiff includes George Saunders, contributor to Jacob Weisman’s forthcoming INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, in Contemporary Innovators of the Short Story: A Reading List.

I hated the first George Saunders story I read. The story was “Sea Oak,” anthologized in the O’Henry Prize stories of 1999, and it confused and bothered me. “What the hell was that?” I thought, after I finished reading it. “I’m ready to get back to the rest of these stories now. Give me affecting realistic fiction, thank you very much.” Of course I don’t remember the other stories anymore. “Sea Oak” is a Saunders masterpiece, the story of a male stripper and his dead aunt Bernie, who never had anything nice in life and so comes back from the dead to give the narrator some memorable financial advice—“Show your cock.” Saunders has figured out a way to write about poverty in America, to cut through the clichés and sentimentality. “At Sea Oak, there’s no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx.” There’s also a made-up TV show called “How My Child Died Violently,” a title that works because it has both consonance and assonance, for writers who want to learn how it’s done.

For more info on HAP AND LEONARD, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Elizabeth Story

For more info on SUMMERLONG, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Magdalena Korzeniewska

Design by Elizabeth Story

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 by Goro Fujita

Design by Elizabeth Story