Fantasy Book Review Archives - Tachyon Publications

Fantasy Book Review

April 6, 2020

Jacob Weisman and David Sandner excel as both writers and editors

Rick Klaw blog Charles de Lint, David Sandner, fairwood press, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantasy Book Review, flogging babel, jacob weisman, michael swanwick, mingus fingers, review, the treasury of the fantastic 0

David Sandner and Jacob Weisman
Photo by James Patrick Kelly

For THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION (March/April 2020), Charles de Lint praises Jacob Weisman and David Sandner’s novelette Mingus Fingers.

Mingus Fingers is one of those rare stories that gets everything right. What it feels like to be a black man in 1940s San Francisco, to box, to play jazz, to understand what it takes to be the best at either but know you’ll never be able to pull it off. The narrator’s voice is matter-of-fact but also soars, so that you’re immersed in the sweat of the ring, the smoke of the jazz club, the indescribable joy of when the music really swings.

You don’t have to know Mingus’s music to appreciate what the authors have pulled off, but if you do, the story will resonate that much more deeply for you. And really, you could do worse than listening to some Mingus.

It’s because of stories like this that it’s so important for us to support our small presses. Sure, Mingus Fingers might have appeared in some anthology or collection, but it wouldn’t be the perfect little package that this is.

I loved it so much that a few weeks after reading it I went back and read it again. I think I might have enjoyed it even more the second time.
Highly recommended.

Cover design by Patrick Swenson and Elizabeth Story

Michaeal Swanwick on his FLOGGING BABEL blog feels much the same.

Take my word for it, it’s tough to donkey up the knowledge to convincingly portray a jazz musician or a boxer. Doing both in one story? It’s a recipe for disaster.

Yet Mingus Fingers is not a disaster. Rather, it’s a graceful and touching portrayal of a man with the odds loaded against him who gives his all for a child who has a shot at something more than he ever had.

This is a slim $8.00 single-story paperback from Fairwood Press. It’s nicely made, too.

The editing duo of Weisman and Sandner’s anthology THE TREASURY OF THE FANTASTIC ranks among FANTASY BOOK REVIEW’s Top 100 Fantasy Books.

Ryan: The Treasury of the Fantastic is an amazing collection of 44 poems, short stories and novellas, all fantasy related, all published before 1923. The anthology editors, David Sandner and Jacob Weisman, should be congratulated for managing to collect the rights to so many amazing stories. At the start of the book they openly provide the criteria they used for putting together this anthology. Unfortunately their criteria mean we miss out on a few great authors who were producing their best work right around the cut-off data, authors like Lovecraft and Howard, but that barely takes away from the excellent 44 stories that made the cut and are celebrated in this anthology.

Published: 2013
Score: 95
Our rating: 9.5/10 (read the review) |

June 7, 2016

CENTRAL STATION is a wondrous thought-provoking book

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized central station, Fantasy Book Review, final blow joe, lavie tidhar, niall alexander, review, Ryan Lawler, sarah anne langton, the speculative scotsman, youtube

Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013

For FANTASY BOOK REVIEW, Ryan Lawler awards Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION an 8.5/10.

CENTRAL STATION by Lavie Tidhar is a far future sci-fi that imagines a space-faring humanity, a vastly changed earth, and the full integration of technology into society. It is a collection of short stories that are all tied together with an overarching plot, and it touches on things like faith, evolution, discrimination, and more.

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The characters here have a lot of depth, flowing back and forth between multiple shades of grey. You get the feeling that for a lot of the population they are simply existing, going through the motions of life in a guarded way so they don’t get too hurt. It’s quite a clever mechanic as it makes the scenes of high emotion all the more powerful by contrast. Tidhar even introduces nodes and symbiotic attachments that allow people to express themselves using digital means along with their biological senses, allowing robots and digital beings to interact emotionally with biological beings. There is so much creativity and original thought here being used to tell a story on multiple levels, which is highly impressive.

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CENTRAL STATION is a wondrous thought-provoking book, as you would expect from someone as highly credentialed as Lavie Tidhar. This is a book that asks you to question what you think humanity is, what you think consciousness is, and what you think faith is. It is not a book for everyone, but for those who like literary-style sci-fi that explores complex themes in depth, I think you will love this book.

FinalBlowJoe reviews the book on YouTube.

Here’s an excerpt from his review:

All the stories are interconnecting to greater and lesser degrees with various others. They also work on their own, they were published that way originally, but together they form something much greater than the sum of their parts. May sound cliche but still true here. The stories are wide ranging in scope and ideas but they all manage to create a very personal feel which is something you don’t come across often but it’s remarkable when you do.

Humanity has spread to the stars and technology is suitably advanced. Most people have nodes implanted in them which allows them access to what is essentially universal Wi-Fi Internet; among other things. The world feels alien in some ways due to the technological and sociological changes but still manages to feel very familiar and everyday.

In Summary:

I’d say this is a book with great characters, setting, ideas with a remarkable emotional and intellectual connection.

At THE SPECULATIVE SCOTSMAN, Niall Alexander reviews CENTRAL STATION.

World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar rewrites the rules of the short story collection in CENTRAL STATION, an ambitious assemblage of thirteen tales tall but indubitably true that are all the more remarkable when read together.

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Fulfilling that awesome promise—leaving Neve Sha’anan at last—is not nearly so easy for our unfortunate few; nor, indeed, was bidding goodbye to this exceptional collection an elementary experience for me. With each transmuted tale “a node linking the whole into something greater than its parts,” (p.64) CENTRAL STATION is without question the best assemblage of short stories I’ve read in recent memory.

Sublimely sensual, emotionally moreish, and composed with crystalline clarity irrespective of its incredible complexity, if this is “what SF is going to look like in the next decade,” as editor extraordinaire Gardner Dozois declares, then readers: the next ten years will be olsem diffren indeed—which is to say the same, but different, in asteroid pidgin.

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton