fairy bookmother

March 7, 2019

Award winners Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman’s varied and creative THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY will make you reconsider the unicorn trope

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized elizabeth story, fairy bookmother, foreword, infinite text, jacob weisman, meagan logsdon, peter s beagle, review, the unicorn anthology, Thomas Canty

With over a month until publication, reviews keep rolling in for Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman’s recommended THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY.

At FOREWORD, Meagan Logsdon praises the anthology.

Unicorns in literature are fascinating, evocative, mysterious, and elusive, and with THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY, editors Peter S. Beagle—himself of unicorn fame—and Jacob Weisman invite continued appreciation of the legendary beast, drawing it beyond its familiar medieval framework.

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A particular standout is Beagle’s own contribution, “My Son Heydari and the Karkadann,” which removes the figure of the unicorn from its typical Western context. Bruce Coville’s “Homeward Bound” enters beautiful metaphysical territory in its final scene. And Jane Yolen’s “The Transfigured Hart,” a hermetically inspired call to see with more than the eye, is a lovely end to the short stories. Nancy Springer’s series of unicorn poetry completes the collection as an effective set of word paintings that tie together, with shimmering thread, all that comes before.

The varied and creative stories of THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY inspire new ways of engagement with an old legend. Across cultures and times, the mystical essence of this beast continues to haunt the forest of the collective human psyche.

FAIRY BOOKMOTHER recommends the book.

This is not an anthology for younger readers, as there are references to bestiality (didn’t finish this story), references to sexual acts, and references to heavy-handed violence to people of all ages. This is a collection of stories that will make you reconsider the unicorn trope, and the collection includes a wide variety of stories to appeal Overall, it’s a solid collection of stories, and I found myself wishing for a few more at the end.

My favorites were “The Maltese Unicorn” by Caitlín R. Kiernan (the lesbian unicorn noir you didn’t know you needed to read until now), “Ghost Town” by Jack C. Haldeman II (brother of Joe Haldeman!, and I also love western-esque stories about rogues being changed by chance encounters in nearly-abandoned towns), “The Highest Justice” by Garth Nix (I love anything Nix writes), “Survivor” by Dave Smeds (a Vietnam soldier gets a unicorn tattooed on his chest and therefore cannot die), “Homeward Bound” by Bruce Coville (he wrote a series of unicorn books for middle grade readers that I thoroughly enjoyed and was happy to see another unicorn story by him!), and “The Transfigured Hart” by Jane Yolen (anything she writes is pure magic and pure joy).

This collection comes with a recommendation from me, especially with the introduction by Peter S. Beagle himself.

Jacob Weisman and Peter S. Beagle at Worldcon 76 in San Jose, CA

INFINITE TEXT enjoys the different look at unicorns.

There are also tales in this collection on the darker more erotic side. I have recently become more acquainted with Cailtín R. Kiernan’s writing style and even so, I can honestly say her story “The Maltese Unicorn” will leave you in a state of shock. There are also more classic fantasy takes like the one found in “The Highest Justice” by Garth Nyx, and “The Transfigured Heart” by Jane Yolen. Far too many in this collection go right for your heartstrings like “Stampede of Light” by Marina Fitch: “Open a child’s mind and heart to the world, and you achieve immortality…whether they remember you or not, you’ll live forever” or a story by Beagle himself about a boy and an injured beast, the brief moments of friendship, and the intricacies of the healing process. There are many others in this collection, and they are all incredible voices contributing on the multi-faceted, and versatile existence of a unicorn in our collective imagination.

The collection ends on a poem written by Nancy Springer capturing the innocence and magic surrounding our fascination with unicorns. Reading this poem feels like walking straight into a Pre-Raphaelite painting. This collection is a great introduction to various authors and a great sample of their writing, in addition to various ways one can look at a unicorn.

For more info about THE UNICORN ANTHOLOGY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Thomas Canty
Design by Elizabeth Story

March 7, 2017

Tachyon tidbits featuring Patricia A. McKillip, Jacob Weisman, and Jane Yolen

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized am reading, elizabeth story, fairy bookmother, goro fujita, invaders, invaders: 22 tales from the outer limits of literature, jacob weisman, Jane Yolen, Marty Halpern, More Red Ink, patricia a mckillip, the emerald circus, the forgotten beasts of eld, Thomas Canty

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

Patricia A. McKillip (photo: Stephen Gold/Wikimedia Commons). Jacob Weisman, and Jane Yolen (Jason Stemple)

At MORE RED INK, Marty Halpern discusses Patricia A. McKillip’s THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD.

My most recent project was THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD by Patricia A. McKillip, forthcoming in September from Tachyon Publications.

I’ll admit that I had not read this book previously (it was originally published in 1974), and to my delight, the story had me intrigued from the very beginning. Which seems to be the overall consensus from the many reviews I have read since completing work on this project.

This is one project that I wanted to keep working on, and working on…not to be done with the project itself, but to find out what came next in the story. And as noted in one of the reviews I read, the prose is so seductive that I had to keep reminding myself that this is work!

FAIRY BOOKMOTHER enjoys Jacob Weisman’s INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE.

INVADERS is a collection of stories written by “literary” writers exploring the concept of invasion in science fictional settings. While some of the stories didn’t grab my attention (and that can probably be attributed to timing and my state of mind more than anything else), it’s a solid effort to show that writers bleed through genre lines more often that we realize. I did, however, really enjoy the following stories: “Portal” – J. Robert Lennon, “The Inner City” – Karen Heuler, “Topics in Advanced Rocketry” – Chris Tarry, “A Precursor of the Cinema” – Steven Millhauser, “Monstros” – Junot Díaz, and “Near-Flesh” – Katherine Dunn. These explore the weirdness of human psyche and will linger in my mind for a long time.

#AM READING includes Jane Yolen’s THE EMERALD CIRCUS in Tell It To Me Again: 9 YA Retellings Of Fairytales And Classics Hitting Shelves In 2017.

A collection of fairytale retellings from Jane Yolen? Sign me up! THE EMERALD CIRCUS twists a ton of tales that we know and love on their heads. Yolen messes with Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland to name a few. The adventures include sassy girls in Never Never Land who lead strikes for equal work rights, and a circus twist on Dorothy’s famous journey. Sounds like just the thing we’d all want to read, but we’ll have to wait till November to do so.

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

Cover by Thomas Canty

For more info on 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 on THE EMERALD CIRCUS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

December 14, 2016

SLIPPING delivers Lauren Beukes’ acerbic, sharp, and intuitive writing

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized clara bacou, cockburn's eclectics, collection, dj cockburn, elizabeth story, essays, fairy bookmother, instagram, lauren beukes, review, short stories, slipping, slipping: stories essays & other writing, the book lounge, twitter

FAIRY BOOKMOTHER praises Lauren Beukes’ SLIPPING: STORIES, ESSAYS, & OTHER WRITING.

Beukes’s writing is acerbic, sharp, and intuitive, and I was drawn in immediately to many of her stories. SLIPPING is a collection of stories written over about ten years for various other publications, and I would have really liked to have some background information before or after the stories to know when and why each of these stories were written.

My favorite stories were “Princess,” “Exhibitionist,” “Ghost Girl,” and “Dial Tone.” Each of these stories made me whisper what after I finished reading them. Beukes’s writing is at the same time subtle and straightforward. She does not shy away from difficult or terrifying imagery, and she makes you think about why she uses that imagery to explore some weird aspect of human life. Many of her stories cross the genre line between fiction and science fiction, and while a lot of it seems weird at times, it’s also so eerily recognizable. Beukes’s writing asks us why we consider “commonplace” and “everyday” as commonplace and ordinary, because isn’t life weird?

Over on INSTAGRAM, the Fairy Bookmother shares an excerpt from the Beuekes short story “Confirm/Ignore.”

On TWITTER, THE BOOK LOUNGE recommends the collection.

#giftideas The thrilling new collection SLIPPING: STORIES, ESSAYS, & OTHER WRITING. by perennial favourite author @laurenbeukes.

DJ Cockburn on his COCKBURN’S ECLECTICS excerpts Lauren Beukes’ 2011 essay from THE WORLD SF BLOG.

The protagonists of both Zoo City and Slipping, Beukes’s protagonists were very different characters, but what they had in common was being young black South African women, which led her to describe the process of writing the ‘other’ for the World SF blog.

As ever with my greater minds posts, this is a set of thoughts inspired by what Beukes wrote, and I’m not trying to repeat or reply to it. Please have a look at her much more concise writing on the subject. I’m calling her a greater mind for a reason.

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Beukes starts with the obvious point that any fictional character is ‘other’, in that they are not us:

Unless you’re writing autobiography, any character you write is going to be The Other.

But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the authentic portrayal of someone with very different life experiences than our own. Even if we create a completely fictional culture, our characters’ experiences are likely to reflect experiences of real people in the real world. If we don’t portray them authentically, someone who knows better than us is going to lose their suspension of disbelief when they read it. That alone is a good reason for getting it right, but it can also lead to being slated by reviews or on social media for being insensitive.

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Cultural conversations

We can gather a lot vicarious experience of different personalities without going out of our way to find them, and we can use that experience to write different characters. Unless we go out of our way, our vicarious experience will be limited to people who share the same cultures (sub or super) as we do. That won’t stop us writing characters from other cultures, but the limits of our experience will make it very unlikely that we’ll get them right. We’re going to have to take that step out of our way.

As Beukes says:

The only way to climb into that experience is to research it, through books or blogs or documentaries or journalism or, most importantly and obviously, talking to people.

As an introvert and worse, an Englishman, the idea of spending ‘a week just walking round Hillbrow and talking to people’ is terrifying. That’s not because I lived in Cape Town long enough to absorb the capetonian conviction that Johannesburg is one step removed from a war zone, but because I didn’t live there long enough to dislodge my own cultural indoctrination that taught me you don’t just walk up to someone and start babbling at them.So it’s with some reluctance that I admit Beukes’s point. Conversation is the best way to access experiences other than our own. The written word can only go so far, even when people write about themselves. Very few writers can resist a bit of self-curation, subconsciously or otherwise. The same problem arises if we simply ask someone to tell me about their culture or subculture. When talking about the mores of their own culture, people often lead with the absolute ‘rule’ that is most often broken. They’re not being intentionally dishonest, it’s just that it’s at the front of their mind because there are constant arguments about it. Other mores that may seem more strange to an outsider and are more rigidly followed don’t get mentioned because people don’t give them much thought.The only way to develop an understanding of such things is to get to know someone from that culture.

For more information about SLIPPING: STORIES, ESSAYS, & OTHER WRITING, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Clara Bacou

Design by Elizabeth Story

August 11, 2016

The strong CENTRAL STATION isn’t just about science fiction

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized central station, fairy bookmother, interview, lavie tidhar, mithila review, reddit, review, salik shah, sarah anne langton, science fiction

FAIRY BOOKMOTHER praises Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION.

Short story collections that contain stories that stand alone in their own right but intertwine with each other are my favorite sort of short story collections. This collection is a strong one as I found there wasn’t a single story that I felt dragged or didn’t quite mesh. The characters are so diverse, the setting is so foreign yet in some way instantly recognizable. Even though it’s set in a futurisitic, post-singularity Tel Aviv, the stories evoke a feeling as if it’s really a central station and that we’re all still connected here on this planet.

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This is a solid collection of science fiction stories that isn’t just about science fiction. It’s about what one must do and how one must survive in a universe that is often too unforgiving. It’s not a plot-heavy set of stories, but it’s one that will make you care at least a little bit about all of the characters between the covers.

Salik Shah interviews Tidhar for MITHILA
REVIEW.

CENTRAL STATION pays
homage to a bygone era of science fiction. You said its influences
include seminal classics: Clifford Simak’s PROJECT POPE (1981),
Cordwainer Smith’s NORSTRILIA (1975), C.L. Moore’s SHAMBLEAU
(1953), Philip K. Dick’s UBIK(1969), Zenna Henderson’s PILGRIMAGE
(1961). When did you first start building Central Station as a
massive spaceport, a border town in the middle of Israel and
Palestine? Did you set out to write a mosaic novel from the
beginning?

I started writing the wider world — the “future history” — where Central Station is set, years ago. But the novel — and yes, it was always planned as a mosaic novel! — started for me when I was living briefly back in Israel in 2010-2011. I became fascinated by Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station area, which is much as described here, and by the people living there. I’ve always wanted to write a mosaic novel, though I was never quite sure how one goes about it. Some of my favourite science fiction novels when I was growing up were done in this way — City, LORD OF LIGHT, or pretty much anything by Cordwainer Smith, who to me is maybe one of the two or three most important American SF writers of the 20th century. And I like short stories, obviously, as a writer. So to me it was a technical challenge, in part — how do I write these more-or-less self-contained chapters/stories, that still add up to a bigger whole? But it allowed me to work on it, on and off, as I was working on “proper” novels. So I started it in Israel and then worked on it in London through the next several years. All this time I was writing books like
THE
VIOLENT CENTURY and A MAN LIES DREAMING. And of course working on other stories and so on. But to my delight the Central Station stories started to sell, and were picked up for various Year’s Bests anthologies and so on. So that was nice. But it was my weird little passion project! I didn’t really expect anyone to end up publishing it, or for people to actually, you know, pick it up! So I’m still in a bit of a shock.

I think it does, you know, play with a lot of the older kind of science fiction, it corresponds with it. But it does it from an outsider’s perspective. From someone who was very obviously not included in those American SF stories. The other major influence on it, I think, is very different — it’s V.S. Naipaul’s MIGUEL STREET. I wanted to write a story that wasn’t at all based on the pulp formula, on action, adventure, violence. My other novels are very interested in violence and plot. What I wanted was to write sort of slice-of-life science fiction. Domestic science fiction. About people who are just people, even if they live against the big shiny science fictional future.

So it’s been… on a personal level it was very satisfying to work on, and then for Tachyon to pick it up, and for people to seem to so far respond pretty well to it, that’s very rewarding — if, as I said, more than a little surprising to me!

Over at REDDIT, eliotpeper asks What do you guys think about Central Station by Lavie Tidhar?

I’m interviewing him about the book and would love to get your perspective on it.

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Lavie Tidhar writes really beautifully. His descriptions of Central Station and Tel Aviv are lovely, but not overdone.

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It reminded me quite a lot of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, though that seems a very on the nose and slightly superficial comparison. And where Central Station is, at its heart, a family drama–very soapy, honestly, with its fraught relationships–The Martian Chronicles is more meta. Tidhar is concerned much more with imagining and examining a plausible future predicated on our present, whereas Bradbury was interested in picking apart the ways in which we mythologize our past and future trajectories. Still, there’s an interesting comparison to be made between the ways each author thinks about stories and storytelling, and both books have a similar origins, beginning as short stories later collected and edited with new material for a more cohesive narrative.

For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover and poster by Sarah Anne Langton