Tachyon tidbits featuring Ellen Datlow, Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Shelley, and Lavie Tidhar

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

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Ellen Datlow (photo: Scott Edelman), Jeff VanderMeer (Agave), Mary Shelley (Richard Rothwell), and Lavie Tidhar (Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013)


As part of their Women in Horror celebration, the HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION interviews Ellen Datlow.

Tell us a little about your Bram Stoker Award-winning work(s). Inspirations? Influences? Anecdotes about the writing or critical reaction?

ED: I’ve won twice for original anthologies: Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas) and Fearful Symmetries and twice for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (one of those with Terri Windling and one with Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link).

As an editor I’ve been inspired by three people:

Maxwell Perkins, the mainstream editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other American greats. He inspired me by his relationships with his authors-his nurturing and pushing them to create their best work.

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Judith Merril, the great sf/f editor (and writer) inspired me by being generous in her definition of science fiction and her perspicacity in embracing mainstream writers works of the fantastic in her Year’s Best Science Fiction reprint series.

Harlan Ellison (also, a brilliant writer) for his two seminal anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. They broke boundaries, they smashed taboos and many of the stories in those books have become classics.

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Credit: Lisa Larson-Walker/SLATE


As part of SLATE’s Trump Story Project, Jeff VanderMeer contributes the original tale “TRUMP LAND.”

Maybe it sounds like a joke. A slow, old joke, coming to you out of the past. Trump Land. But it wasn’t a joke. Not really. Even though you entered Trump Land through the ass—Trump’s asshole, to be clear. This was not metaphorical any more than Trump Land was metaphorical. But the place had a complicated history and there were good reasons why the people who came there visited through the back. Structural reasons. Ideological reasons. Reasons of state security. Reasons that changed over time.

I remember Trump Land because my dad worked as head of a construction crew, or as he sometimes put it, “deconstruction” on the site, and as the idea of the building waxed and waned due to people fighting about it far, far away, my young teen self would receive reports and updates and cursing. Lots of cursing.


THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER shares an exclusive image from Dakota Fanning’s forthcoming Mary Shelley biopic. 

Elle Fanning is searching for Gothic literary inspiration in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s exclusive first-look image from MARY SHELLEY.

The actress stars as the famed titular FRANKENSTEIN author in the drama, which was previously titled A STORM IN THE STARS. It is being directed by Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour, who rose to fame with her debut feature WADJDA.

Mary Shelley tells the story of the author’s early relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and also stars Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Maisie Williams, Joanne Froggatt and Tom Sturridge.

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Elle Fanning in MARY SHELLEY

Sci-Fi Reading Group of The English Bookshop in Uppsala, Sweden selects Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION for their February title.

Tuesday 21st February at 19:15
Price: 165 kr for the book + 60 kr for the tea, cake and company

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton