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

Andrew Wheeler on his The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent. praises Lavie Tidhar’s NEOM.

This is a smart, open-hearted, short SF novel deeply steeped in the history of the robot and mechanical man in SF, and that has plenty of its own changes to ring on those ideas, set, as I said, in a deep, complex, interesting universe of its own.

The LAPL Blog interviews Tidhar.

What was your inspiration for Neom?

It was really, I think, our second lockdown over here, in the middle of winter, and I was supposed to be writing this big historical epic, Maror, which is out now in the UK…But I just couldn’t concentrate. And I had this image that came into my mind, of a robot holding a flower. I didn’t know anything else about it, so I wrote what I thought was a small story about the robot, and then realised I had no idea what it was doing, so wrote more to find out, and eventually realised I was writing a novel! The city I explored earlier in a short story, “Neom,” that is more or less the first chapter here, and the whole idea of the Ghost Coast and the Green Caravanserai came from a visit to the Sinai quite a long time ago, when the whole coastal area seemed half-built and abandoned. And I woke up for the sunrise as it emerged from behind the Saudi mountains on the other side of the Red Sea, and I thought, you know, I’d love to go there. So I did, even if it’s in the far future of my own imagination.

Kate Sherrod on Kate of Mind enjoys THE PECULIARITIES by David Liss.

I would read many more volumes of stuff set in this world, whether the hero be Thomas, Esther, Ruby (a wolf-girl who helps them quite a bit) or even some brand new characters. Like the aforementioned Tim Powers, Liss has created a truly original and intriguing magical system and thus a world with room for many more cool adventures. Crossing my fingers for more of this!

On his feuilleton journal, book designer John Coulhart discusses THINGS GET UGLY: THE BEST CRIMES STORIES OF JOE R. LANSDALE.

The stories may be described as crime but quite a few of them are dark enough to be included in horror collections. Things do, indeed, get ugly. The intersection between crime and horror fiction isn’t exactly new, the two genres have been entangled since The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the boundaries remain permeable to this day. The most well-known piece in the new collection is Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, a story that was filmed for TV by Don Coscarelli for the Masters of Horror series, and which also opened the first season in 2005. Coscarelli’s adaptation is even nastier than its source but not everything in the collection is unrelentingly grim. Lansdale has a flair for black comedy which is to the fore in another story, Driving to Geromino’s Grave, in which two Depression-era children have to bring home the rotting body of their deceased uncle. This may not be everybody’s idea of an amusing read but the witty dialogue made me laugh.

David Sandner and Jacob Weisman talk about Hellhounds for My Favorite Bit.

Jacob:

Hellhounds is part of a larger collaborative project between David Sandner and myself. The larger story cycle follows the adventures of two brothers, Kenny – also known as The Prophet — and his older brother Lamond.

There’s two of us involved with this story, and while David may have a favorite bit all his own, I suspect we share the same favorite, and that is the character of Lamond that we discovered while writing this story.