Tachyon tidbits featuring Nancy Kress, Jeff VanderMeer, Lavie Tidhar, and Caitlín R. Kiernan
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
Nancy Kress (photo: Ellen Datlow), Jeff VanderMeer (Kyle Cassidy), Lavie Tidhar (Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013), and Caitlín R. Kiernan (Kyle Cassidy/Wikimedia Commons)
At TOR.COM, James Davis Nicoll discusses Nancy Kress in Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, Part V.
Nancy Kress has been publishing and winning awards since the mid-1970s. Her best-known work may be Beggars in Spain: the 1991 novella version won the Hugo and the Nebula, while her novel-length expansion was nominated for the same awards.
At their site, LOCUS offers excerpts from their interview with Jeff VanderMeer in the April 2018 issue of the magazine.
“One of my first story sales was to Asimov’s when I was very young, so I’ve been writing professionally for 30 or 35 years. It’s a weird thing for me, because for seven years before Annihilation came out, I was a full-time writer, and I thought it was a big deal, because it’s hard to do that without being on the bestseller list. Now people are saying, ‘This cult novelist has finally made it big.’ I do understand that Area X is an order of magnitude different, and it’s very satisfying. You don’t often get that opportunity in your mid-forties. When my second novel, Shriek, came out, I had a day job that was very lucrative, and then I had all this royalty money coming in, and I kind of lost my mind. I literally did the thing where you buy 13 pairs of shoes and other stupid shit. It was a stupid year. The point of that is, when the Annihilation movie stuff hit, I had already had that stupid moment – that period of adjustment – including the period where you suddenly go from being in the small press to being published by a large commercial publisher, with a lot more reader interaction. That actually blocked me the first time. I’ve already gone through all of that stuff, though. When Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy hit big, it was just fun. Readers have been great because there’s enough ambiguity in the series that they bring their own fan art to it, and their own fan fiction. We have this imaginative play going on between readers and me online, which is really cool. With Borne, it’s even more so, because I gave everyone the go-ahead to do fan art and was encouraging them, so even before the book came out there were all these depictions of Borne and of the giant bear Mord, and that just proliferated when I was on book tour. It’s useful when thinking about the Annihilation film, because there have already been these visual translations of what I was doing that felt like they were mine, but also other people’s.”
Credit: Francesca Myman
Lavie Tidhar was interviewed at a BSFA event.
The British Science Fiction Association holds regular events in London, usually on the last Wednesday of the month, at the Artillery Arms near Old Street. These events are free, and open to members and non-members alike. Keep an eye on the BSFA website (www.bsfa.co.uk) for news of future events. In September 2017, award-winning author Lavie Tidhar was interviewed by critic and editor Konrad Walewski.
On her blog POSTCARDS FROM THE RED ROOM, Caitlín R. Kiernan gives an update on the forthcoming THE VERY BEST OF
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN.
Though I did also talk with Jacob Weisman at Tachyon and finalize the table of contents and story order for forthcoming THE VERY BEST OF
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN. I’ll share the ToC when I am told I may. Twenty stories. The book will be out in 2019.