review

January 18, 2018

Tachyon tidbits featuring Jo Walton, Nalo Hopkinson, and Lavie Tidhar

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized central station, chuma hill, dejeuner sous la pluie, elizabeth story, falling in love with hominids, french, jo walton, lavie tidhar, maureen kincaid speller, nalo hopkinson, read well, review, sarah anne langton, starlings, suncerae smith

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

Jo Walton, Nalo Hopkinson (photo: David Findlay), and Lavie Tidhar (Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013)

At READ WELL, Suncerae Smith praises Jo Walton’s STARLINGS.

Multiple award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Jo Walton’s first short fiction collection is a captivating array of fairy tales, mythology, space fiction, machine sentience, alien encounters, heaven, and more. Easily a third of the stories in this collection are 5-star worthy.

Even the stories that aren’t my favorites are quite memorable, lingering because of their unique subjects. Interestingly, in the introduction Jo Walton mentions that the art of short fiction did not come naturally to her like novel writing. I understand what she means—she has a wide range of intriguing ideas, and she presents them in new and unusual formats, but often the final stroke, the proverbial period at the end of the sentence, does not pack the punch I expect from the set up. In fact, I often wonder if I missed something, that maybe I didn’t quite get it.

It’s a mix, but one I highly recommend. Specifically recommended for fans of literary scifi and fantasy!

The French site DEJEUNER SOUS LA
PLUIE enjoys their discovery of Nalo Hopkinson and her collection FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS.

I did not know at all Nalo Hopkinson, who has already received several awards in the US (but it seems to me that few of his books are translated into French). And I was conquered from the preface, in which she says that she had to think about what bound the news, written about ten years and for different publishers, and that she realized that it illustrates the progression she has made, from the disillusioned teenager to the adult who decides to believe in man. It is perfectly legible in the collection, which depicts a host of characters, deeply human, in their good and bad, with a dimension of hope and benevolence despite the galleys.

In fact, my favorite is the very first, “The Easthound”, the one that made me immediately adore his style and the construction of his scenarios. I will not risk to make summaries to you, considering the size of the texts, but throughout the collection we bathe in fantastic varied enough, with often Jamaican references (where Nalo originates), a mixture which m has been much appreciated. Of course, the quality is not the same in all news, but overall I am quite impressed with the intelligence of its intrigues and the speed with which it embarks us in his universe.

Another very nice point is the small introductions she put before each of her news, to introduce the context and the reasons that led him to write them. This is a real added value, and a very effective way to get into the story from the first lines. I really like her way of thinking and the ideas she conveys smoothly over the pages.

In the end, I took this collection slowly, without hurry, reading a new one at a time not to change too often atmosphere, and I recommend you to do the same if you have the same problem as me. What is certain is that I really want to discover it in longer texts, because to succeed to convince me just with news is a tour de force and it augurs very beautiful things for the rest of his bibliography! So if you have already read some of his titles or you’ve heard good, I’m taking!

(Translation from French courtesy of Google)

In STRANGE HORIZONS year in review, Maureen Kincaid Speller recommends Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION.

Aliya Whiteley’s The Arrival of Missives was a fascinating piece of fiction, and I should also recommend Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION, a clever and thoughtful riff on more traditional sf, and Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, which provided a much-needed antidote to too much Lovecraft.

For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

For more information on FALLING IN LOVE WITH HOMINIDS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Chuma Hill

Design by Elizabeth Story

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

January 17, 2018

Tachyon tidbits featuring Brandon Sanderson, Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Alastair Reynolds

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alastair reynolds, alexander nanitchkov, brandon sanderson, bruce sterling, elizabeth story, hannu rajaniemi, john coulthart, lauren beukes, maestoso, nature, pirate utopia, review, señor salme, the emperor's soul

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

Brandon Sanderson (credit: Ceridwen via Wikimedia Commons), Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Alastair Reynolds (Barbara Bella)

MAESTOSO praises Brandon Sanderson’s Hugo Award winner THE EMPEROR’S SOUL and Bruce Sterling’s Sidewise Award-nominated PIRATE UTOPIA.

A very quick and flowing read, and one filled with a deceptively rich world (no easy feat for a book that I polished off in one sitting!) and intricate laws of magic that capture the imagination. Shai is a delightfully unreliable narrator, and I feel as beguiled and enchanted by her as I’m sure Gaotona did. A solid work of fantasy fiction.

Goodreads Rating: 4/5 stars

My favorite read of 2017, and my only regret is that I hadn’t read this sooner. Phenomenal world-building, good pulpy rewrites (or reimagining) of real historical events, and all the dieselpunk to last me years. Post-WWI Italy lends itself well to this sort of fantastic non-fantasy writing, and Pirate Utopia does not disappoint with its surging factions, its larger-than-life characters, and its complete disregard for what is real and what is merely possible.

Goodreads Rating: 5/5 stars

Illustration by Señor Salme

Lauren Beukes, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Alastair Reynolds contribute to NATURE’s “Science fiction when the future is now.”

AlphaGo, fake news, cyberwar: 2017 has felt science-fictional in the here and now. Space settlement and sea-steading seem just around the bend; so, at times, do nuclear war and pandemic. With technological change cranked up to warp speed and day-to-day life smacking of dystopia, where does science fiction go? Has mainstream fiction taken up the baton?

Nature asked six prominent sci-fi writers — Lauren Beukes, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds and Aliette de Bodard — to reflect on what the genre has to offer at the end of an extraordinary year.

LAUREN BEUKES: The power of Afrofuturism

Is science fiction relevant in an age of catastrophic climate change, the refugee crisis and the rise of the far right? Yes: not for what it predicts about the future of the world, but for how it unpacks who we are in it.

In her 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about a fictional utopia that came at a terrible cost everyone knew about: a single child tortured in a room underneath the city, in the filth and the dark, to pay for their happiness.

For me, Omelas is a compelling way of understanding the world I grew up in, as a white South African under apartheid. White people make up only around 9% of the population, but, until 1994, they held the rest of the country hostage under a racist, inhumane and violent regime that forced people of colour into indentured labour and inferior schools, and responded to resistance with tear gas and shootings, hit squads and torture farms.

Science fiction allows us the distance to circumvent issue fatigue in our very troubled times. We can play out ideas and scenarios because we are creatures of parable and myth and allegory, TED talks and ethical trolley problems. Fiction is how we grapple with ourselves. By imagining the unimaginable, it’s possible to make reality more bearable.

Illustration by Señor Salme

HANNU RAJANIEMI: Making stranger worlds

In the Netflix programme Stranger Things, a nostalgia-tinged small town in 1980s America is attacked by supernatural forces. To make sense of what is happening, the preteen protagonists turn to the classic game Dungeons & Dragons and name the invading monsters after creatures from it.

Our world, too, is undergoing an invasion of the strange. An algorithm became capable of defeating the best human players of 2,500-year-old board game Go after three days of playing itself. Gene drives may soon spread population-suppressing genes to malaria-carrying mosquitoes. And at least one Silicon Valley plutocrat has a good chance of being buried on Mars. It’s not surprising that the media calls on iconic sci‑fi figures to describe these developments — a recurring cast that includes the Terminator, Frankenstein and Iron Man.

Working scientists scoff at such comparisons, knowing how fragile early experiments and nascent technologies can be. Some scientists I’ve come to know in both my academic and biotechnology start-up careers develop a gag reflex to science fiction, weary of trying to describe their work against a backdrop of preconceived notions. Yet science fiction can help both scientists and non-scientists to comprehend each other and make sense of our topsy-turvy era.

To understand how, we must look beyond sci-fi’s worn tropes, to how we read it. In science fiction, as in all fiction, you get to be someone else — but the imaginary world around you is also unfamiliar, inviting you to learn its rules from the inside. The reader has to engage in active sense-making, with the author’s implicit assurance that there is a discoverable underlying order. When that happens, there is often a transcendent, goosebumpy moment that opens still greater vistas beyond the page, in the reader’s imagination.

Illustration by Señor Salme

ALASTAIR REYNOLDS: The bards of turbulence

In a science-fictional present, thinking about futures can feel difficult. This year, when the AlphaGo algorithm designed by Google’s DeepMind beat the world’s best human Go player — something long assumed to be beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence — it was hard not to feel that a corner had been turned. And so much else has become normalized: human–pig hybrid embryos, commercial spaceflight, neuroprosthetics, cyberwarfare. Not far off loom wild cards from global pandemics to head transplants, hyperloops and sea-steading.With a present this intractable, some might say that science fiction as a serious speculative enterprise has had its day.

Consider, however, the science-fiction writer of a century ago, surveying her world at the cusp of 1918 and trying to think cogently about the coming era. The preceding decades would have felt to her like an ever-accelerating stampede of scientific, technological and sociological upheavals.Within living memory, steam power had vanquished the ‘age of fighting sail’. Electricity had begun to supplant gas as the means of lighting cities. Cars and trucks were displacing horses; mechanized warfare was taking over on the battlefield (the tank first saw service in 1916). A transatlantic telegraph system — the first piece of global telecommunications infrastructure — had existed since 1858. But it was already looking old-fashioned next to the wireless telegraphy and radio developed by Guglielmo Marconi and others, including Reginald Fessenden, who first demonstrated wireless voice transmission in 1900. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity would shortly pass its first experimental test, even as the quantum revolution gathered pace.

The writer would have been aware of other discoveries with daunting ramifications. Among these were subatomic structure, evidence of 500-million-year-old ecosystems in the Canadian Burgess Shale fossils, and chemist Fritz Haber’s experiments in nitrogen fixation — as well as Thomas Hunt Morgan’s explorations of genes as unique units of inheritance in fruit flies, and Alfred Wegener’s revelation of continental drift. News on each emerged in dizzying succession.

The future could hardly have looked less assured, the present less tractable. Yet it is precisely this period of change and uncertainty that gave birth to science fiction as a mass cultural phenomenon.

For more on THE EMPEROR’S SOUL, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Alexander Nanitchkov

Design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on PIRATE UTOPIA, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by John Coulthart

January 16, 2018

Jane Yolen’s delightful THE EMERALD CIRCUS is one of the best short story collections ever

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized arcadia wildlife sanctuary, bookskill, connecticut river valley sanctuaries, easthampton, elizabeth story, interview, Jane Yolen, mapping the bones, massachusetts, nora m. mulligan, owl moon, podcast, review, shadow puppet, the coode street podcast, the emerald circus, writing excuses

Starting at about 10:10, WRITING EXCUSES (episode 13.1) podcast praises Jane Yolen’s THE EMERALD CIRCUS.

This is one of the
best short story collections I’ve ever read. It’s been years since
I read something as good as this.

Photo: Jason Stemple

At BOOKSKILL, Nora M. Mulligan enjoys the collection.

It takes a good writer, like Jane Yolen, to take a collection of stories written over a period of years and turn it into a delight like THE EMERALD CIRCUS. When you consider how many of the stories in this book are based on famous works of literature we’re all fairly familiar with, her achievement is all the more impressive.

<snip>

If you don’t have a lot of time to devote to a book, if you’re a fan of short stories in general, or if you’ve got a taste for fantasy with a feminist twist, then by all means check out THE EMERALD CIRCUS.

THE COODE STREET PODCAST interviews Yolen.

The Coode Street Podcast returns for 2018 with a very special opening episode. Today Gary and Jonathan sat down to talk with SFWA Grand Master, World Fantasy Award Lifetime Achievement recipient, and Nebula Award winner Jane Yolen to talk to her about her life as a storyteller, her new collection THE EMERALD CIRCUS, her forthcoming Holocaust novel Mapping the Bones, and what it means to have multiple careers as an author of children’s picture books, young adult novels, historical fiction, SF and fantasy, and poetry.

Connecticut River Valley Sanctuaries presents “Owl Moon,” on Saturday, Jan. 20 at Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton, MA.

Come see a magical shadow puppet presentation of Jane Yolen’s classic book “Owl Moon,” and learn about the seven native owl species in Massachusetts. After the show, take a walk in the dark, brisk winter woods to call for owls. After the walk, you will return indoors to warm up with a cup of hot chocolate and a snack. Dress to be outdoors for half of this program. Registration is required, call 413-584-3009. Cost is $8 adults and children members; nonmembers $10 adult and children.

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

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

January 10, 2018

THE OVERNEATH finds Peter S. Beagle operating at the height of his powers

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized benjamin wald, best of 2017, elizabeth story, peter s beagle, review, stephen case, strange horizons, the arched doorway, the overneath

Benjamin Wald for SFREVU praises Peter S. Beagle’s THE OVERNEATH.

There is a distinct pleasure to be found in reading a true master of the craft of writing. You can relax with the knowledge that you are in good hands, and savour the facility with language and character that shines from every page. Reading Peter S. Beagle provides exactly this variety of pleasure, and his newest collection of short fiction, THE OVERNEATH, will not disappoint. Beagle is a master of prose and his every sentence delights. In addition, he combines aa shrewd appreciation of character and human nature with a warmth and sympathy that makes even his least impressive characters instantly sympathetic. While best known for the deservedly beloved The Last Unicorn, Beagle has lost none of his skill in the intervening five decades of writing and his work remains one of the jewels of the genre.

<snip>

Overall, this is an excellent collection from an accomplished fantasist operating at the height of his powers. Pull up a chair, open the cover, and relax. You are in good hands.

Photo: Rina Weisman

At STRANGE HORIZONS, Stephen Case chose the collection as one of his genre favorites of 2017.

My first was Peter S. Beagle’s collection THE OVERNEATH, which besides some excellent urban fantasy revisited a character from The Last Unicorn and offered a sequence of stories featuring unicorns in various settings (including Colonial America) without being trite. In fact, this whole collection pretty much nailed it, showing Beagle at his wry and whimsical best.

THE ARCHED DOORWAY includes the book, without comment on their 15 Books We Enjoyed In 2017.

For more info on THE OVERNEATH, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

January 10, 2018

Ellen Klages’ WICKED WONDERS is definitely worth a read

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized andy duncan, best of 2017, convergence book reviews, elizabeth story, ellen klages, jonathan hatfull, passing strange, review, scifinow, She Treads Softly, wicked wonders

More accolades for Ellen Klages’ WICKED WONDERS.

CONVERGENCE BOOKS REVIEWS praises the collection.

Rating: 4 stars (★★★★☆)

I don’t think it’s at all an exaggeration to say that this anthology honestly has something for everyone. Fantasy, science fiction, fairy tale, you name it–it’s here. And to top it off, every one of these stories is well written and kept me engaged from beginning to end. This was my first experience reading anything by Ellen Klages, and I am glad I picked this up. This is an author who demonstrates great skill in both creating richly-developed worlds and unique, three-dimensional characters over and over again in short stories. It’s no small feat, and she does it so very well. Definitely worth a read!

Jonathan Hatfull at SCIFINOW includes the book among 35 BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE READ IN 2017.

We love a good short story collection, and this second set of tales from Ellen Klages is further proof that she needs to be on your to-read list. Whether it’s two young girls sharing their last moments together before one leaves the Earth for good, two women dividing a slice of cake into ever-tinier pieces, or (our personal favourite) a woman inheriting a ghostly companion along with a penny arcade, the incredible range, wit and warmth of the stories on display here means that there’s something for everyone.

Photo: Scott R. Kline

On his BELUTHAHATCHIE blog, Andy Duncan recommends not only WICKED WONDERS but the Klages novella PASSING STRANGE.

SHE TREADS SOFTLY includes the collection among the best books of 2017.

For more info on WICKED WONDERS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

January 10, 2018

Excitement builds for Jo Walton’s beautiful STARLINGS

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized andrew liptak, book riot, chicago tribune, elizabeth story, gary k wolfe, jo walton, ready set hold, review, starlings, the verge, you tube

With less than a month before publication, the Internet is abuzz about Jo Walton’s STARLINGS.

At CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Gary K. Wolfe calls it a new short story collection worth reading.

Jo Walton has won just about every major award in the field for her humane and literate novels, but her short fiction has been comparatively sparse. She acknowledges that she’s among those writers not especially comfortable with short forms, and so the stories and poems collected here (along with one play) show a fair amount of experimentation. One of the best stories concerns a TV producer and possible Cold War Soviet spy resurrected as a simulation by a future biographer who wants to interview him, while another describes a technology that enables patients suffering chronic pain to temporarily offload their pain to others willing to share the burden, in this case a young woman’s parents.

<snip>

That sense of the comic infuses what Walton calls extended jokes, some of which play with point of view. One story is actually narrated by Google, another by Snow White’s mirror, and in another Jane Austen’s letter to her sister Cassandra somehow gets delivered to the Cassandra of Greek myth. But for all her playfulness, Walton offers a beautiful, original fairy tale in three elegantly interwoven stories of a man made of moonlight and his magical effect on the denizens of a village inn.

Andrew Liptak on THE VERGE recommends the book.

Noted author and commentator Jo Walton collects some of her works, including a play, poetry, and short fiction, alongside extended commentary on each entry. Alongside stories of sentient search engines, generation ships, and fantastic quests, Walton musts on the nature of writing and storytelling. Kirkus Reviews calls the book an “intriguing peek inside a fertile mind.”

For BOOK RIOT, Rincey discusses the volume in Ready, Set, Hold: February 2018 (starting at 4:12).

For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

January 9, 2018

Patricia A. McKillip’s fantastic THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD has a real edge to it, some bite

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized best of 2017, bookish academy awards, bookstooge's reviews on the road, cupcakes and popcorn, patricia a mckillip, review, the forgotten beasts of eld, the little book owl, Thomas Canty

Photo: Stephen Gold/Wikimedia Commons

THE LITTLE BOOK OWL gives Patricia A. McKillip a Bookish Academy Award 2017 for THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD.

Best Picture: (Best Stand-Alone)

The best stand alone is probably THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD, which I loved. I picked it up on a bit of a whim and I am so glad I did – it was fantastic. I did also really enjoy Artemis by Andy Weir, which is another great standalone.

The book really impressed CUPCAKES AND POPCORN.

So, let’s see… The books that really made an impression on me – and mind you, some of those authors you’ve seen me praising countless times but it’s just how it is for me, I’m a loyal fangirl – in no particular order are:

Against the Sky (The Brodies of Alaska #2) by Kat Martin
The Angel’s Hunger (Masters of Maria #2) by Holley Trent (review is soon to be posted for this one, I’ve been neglectful in my duties, I know!)
Finding the Dream (Dream Trilogy #3) by Nora Roberts
THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD by Patricia A. McKillip
Sins of the Heart (The Sins Series #1) by Eve Langlais
Curse of the Healer (The Derbfine Series #1) by Ashley York
Legacy of Lies (Hell’s Valley #1) & Legacy Lost (Hell’s Valley #2) by Jillian David
Locke and Key (Titan #8) by Cristin Harber

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

Cover by Thomas Canty

January 3, 2018

Tachyon tidbits featuring Jo Walton, Lavie Tidhar, Peter S. Beagle, Jacob Weisman, and Michael Swanwick

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized andrew wheeler, b&n sci-fi & fantasy blog, camilla andré, central station, elizabeth story, fantasy literature, jacob weisman, jeff somers, jo walton, lavie tidhar, michael swanwick, not so much said the cat, peter s beagle, review, sarah anne langton, starlings, tadiana jones, the antick musings of g.b.h. hornswoggler gent., the new voices of fantasy

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

Jo Walton, Lavie Tidhar (photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013), Jacob Weisman & Peter S. Beagle (Jill Roberts), and Michael Swanwick (Beth Gwynn)

On B&N SCI-FI & FANTASY BLOG, Jeff Somers mentions Jo Walton’s STARLINGS in The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of January 2018.

Fans of Walton will rejoice at the variety on display in this collection (though we’d expect nothing less from an author who seems determined to never write the same book twice). She offers up short stories, poetry, and plays that explore many of her favorite themes in new and interesting ways. From a tale that follows a gold coin as it changes hands on a space station to a story about a phone app that allows you to share in a loved one’s pain and loss, Walton’s lively imagination is the main selling point, as she deluges the reader with ideas. Other standouts include a story about a biographer interviewing a simulation of a 20th century subject, three brief vignettes set at a weary inn, and, oh, the poems, which are wonderful whether or not you consider yourself a fan of the form.

Tadiana Jones delivers FANTASY LITERATURE’s third review of Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winner CENTRAL STATION.

CENTRAL STATION is a brilliantly imagined, vividly detailed world, where Lavie Tidhar stitches together concepts about scientific developments, the future of humanity, community and family, love, religion and individual choice, all at the same time. It’s an impressive and beautiful patchwork quilt; it’s just that there isn’t a whole lot of plot to it. CENTRAL STATION is more focused on the ideas and the characters. But what scintillating ideas, and what fascinating characters!

I think my favorite creation was Carmel, the data vampire, inflicted with the Nosferatu Virus, driven to suck data from the necks of humans who have the ubiquitous data node. Like the Shambleau of old, she is feared and hunted down by humans, but the digital Others have a particular role in mind for her.

Tidhar’s rich, allusive writing contains a wealth of ideas and a breathtaking vision for what humanity may become. In the vast differences between the various types of characters, it becomes clear that it’s the similarities that are most important, connecting people in all our diversity. While I would have like a more fully developed plot, in the end I felt like I had gained in insight and compassion by being immersed in the day-to-day world of the people of CENTRAL STATION.

For THE ANTICK MUSINGS OF G. B. H. HORNSWOGGLER, GENT., Andrew Wheeler recounts the past year with mentions of Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman’s THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY and Michael Swanwick’s NOT SO MUCH SAID THE CAT.

Every year, I do this post for New Year’s Day, linking the first and last (with some wiggle room for comprehensibility) sentences of each month of the past year to the posts where those sentences appeared.

Yes, it was once a meme. No one else does it anymore, which means it belong to me, now. Surely adverse possession can happen virtually as well?

August

You can get this book from Tachyon Press – well, more likely from an intermediary – and it was released on August 22nd, so you can get it right away.

December

Michael Swanwick’s last big collection of short stories was 2007’s The Dog Said Bow-Wow, which somewhat explains the title of last year’s NOT SO MUCH SAID THE CAT.

For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Camille André

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on NOT SO MUCH, SAID THE CAT, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

December 28, 2017

Tachyon tidbits featuring Peter S. Beagle

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized Ann Monn, camille andre, elizabeth story, in cal, nciba, peter s beagle, review, rs mccoy, seneca, the new voices of fantasy, the secret history of fantasy

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

Photo: Rina Weisman

Peter S. Beagle’s IN CALABRIA was named a finalist for the NCIBA Book Award.

FICTION

A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Counterpoint, 9781619029224
Sourdough by Robin Sloan, MCD, Macmillan, 9790374203108
Autonomous by Analee Newitz, Tor Books, 9780765392077
Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory, Knopf, 9781524731823
IN CALABRIA by Peter S. Beagle, Tachyon Publications, 9781616962487
In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende, Atria Books, 9781501178139

Congrats to all the finalists.

RS McCoy on her eponymous site reviews Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman’s THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY.

(Side note: This cover is super stunning and I love, love, love this alien leaf girl and I want a poster to put in my room!)

THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY is my attempt to get ahead of the fantasy genre and see who are the up-and-coming names. While the editors do a great job of indicating which authors won which awards (of which there are many), I had honestly not heard of a single author in the collection before cracking it open. I call that a win!

Overall, I thought the collection was well done. The cover is stunning. I didn’t find a single typo in the whole dang thing, and never did a read a story that I felt needed another pass at editing. One of the cleanest and most polished collaborations I’ve ever read.

Like all collections, it had a few stand out stars and a few that didn’t resonate for me, but that’s the reality of these collections. It’s nearly impossible to put together a group of stories in which every reader loves every piece. It’s just not feasible. But The New Voice of Fantasy accomplished its mission of introducing this fantasy lover to new voices in the genre and giving me some fodder for the Christmas list.

Overall Rating: 7/10

At Seneca College, THE SECRET HISTORY OF FANTASY is a Prescribed Text for the Winter, 2018 class Fantasy Literature.

For more info about IN CALABRIA, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Camille André

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on THE SECRET HISTORY OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn

December 21, 2017

Tachyon tidbits featuring Jo Walton, Kameron Hurley, Peter Watts, and Charles Vess

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized apocalypse nyx, beyond the rift, cbr, Charles de Lint, charles vess, elizabeth story, Hugh Sicotte, interview, jo walton, kameron hurley, kristen reads too much, Marty Halpern, medicine road, More Red Ink, Peter Watts, review, scifi.bg, starlings, the book of ballads, the freeze frame revolution, wadim kashin

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

Jo Walton, Kameron Hurley, Peter Watts (by Johan Angelmark [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons), and Charles Vess (Wildwose [GFDL via Wikimedia Commons])

KRISTEN READS TOO MUCH enjoys Jo Walton’s forthcoming STARLINGS.

This set of stories was very diverse. Some are fantasy-ish, and some are a little more sci-fi. There’s poetry too, which I don’t normally go in for, but liked nonetheless.

There’s even a letter in the style of Jane Austen writing to her older sister Cassandra, only in this case, the mail gets rerouted accidentally and sent to Cassandra, the daughter of Priam of Troy in the Iliad, and she writes back. Really fascinating idea there.

There was a pretty cool experimental story, which is a little like the beginning of Snow White as told from the POV of the mirror, which I thought was great. There’s a play based on the Irish myth of the Sons of Tuireann, there’s a story about a zero gravity ballet dancer, there’s a really interesting sort of Noir detective story that takes place in a world where we’ve cloned Jesus, and now being Jesus is like an ethnicity in itself. Jesus as a private eye was really unique.

My favorite story overall though was The Panda Coin, which was a really interesting sci-fi story that takes place on a space station. The station is divided into twelve sections, each named after a month of the year, with weather to match. It’s a really interesting world, and we see bits of it as this coin changes hands. As it does, the POV changes with it, so we meet the people of the station, whether they be simple human miners, androids or AIs. I liked the idea quite a lot!

All told, I really liked this collection. It’s one of the most diverse group of stories and poems in different styles and forms that I’ve ever read. Really fun!

Marty Halpern at MORE RED INK discusses Kameron Hurley and the forthcoming APOCALYPSE NYX.

What I can write about is my latest project: Back in the day, between 2010 and 2012, I had the opportunity to work on three very unique novels – God’s War(a 2012 Nebula Award nominee for best novel), Infidel, and Rapture: the Bel Dame Apocrypha Trilogy, by new author Kameron Hurley. The three books were published by the original Night Shade Books (NSB) – one of the best (though far from the brightest) indie publishers at the time. NSB was known, and recognized, for publishing new authors, who indeed were the best and the brightest: in addition to Ms. Hurley, other authors included Paolo Bacigalupi, Laird Barron, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Courtney Schafer, and Catherynne M. Valente, just to name five that immediately come to mind.

In 2014, Kameron Hurley sold her trilogy to British publisher DelReyUK. As part of the promotion for the release of these books, she wrote a new, original Nyx story (Nyxnissa so Dasheem, aka Nyx, is the protagonist in all three volumes), which DelReyUK published exclusively on their website. The story, “The Body Project,” was my first opportunity to work with Kameron post-NSB. I wrote about the story in a blog post dated January 22, 2014. I don’t know how long DelReyUK allowed the story to remain online (the link is no longer valid), but if you are a fan of Kameron’s writing and haven’t read this bold, new story, then you’ll have another chance to snag it in the new year.

“The Body Project” is one of five stories that will be included in APOCALYPSE NYX, Kameron Hurley’s story collection, forthcoming from Tachyon Publications in July 2018. The other four stories: “The Heart Is Eaten Last,” “Soulbound,” “Crossroads at Jannah,” and “Paint It Red” were originally published online on Ms. Hurley’s Patreon.

If you’ve read the trilogy, then you are familiar with the members of Nyx’s team: Rhys the magician (sometimes of questionable skills), Taite the com tech, and Anneke (Anneke likes guns, lots of guns) – and they’re present in all of these stories as well. You’ll also meet the newest member of the team: Khos, a shape shifter.

I’ve used a couple blah adjectives like “unique” and “bold” to describe these stories because the stories are so different that I just don’t have the words to describe them!

The Bulgarian site SCIFI.BG delivers a lengthy English language interview with Peter Watts.

And which among the short stories in BEYOND THE RIFT would you recommend the most?

Oh, geez, uhm… ‘The Things’ was another story that I didn’t know if it worked when I first released it and then it really kind of took off. Let’s say ‘The Things’. ‘The Island’ I think is cool, because it’s my first attempt to get into far future deep space opera, but kind of a gritty „Hey, all you lazy assholes who invoke Stargates and stuff, this is what it would really be like“. It’s a good story and I think it does a lot of really excellent world building and it won a Hugo… But ‘The Things’ works on a bunch of different levels. In the first place, the sheer arrogance of trying to retell the story of a movie from the point of view of something that doesn’t actually have a point of view, because it’s continually splitting into different things, right? Just the writing challenge of that was amazing. But it was also fan fiction, because I really love that movie.

So it was an homage to my favorite movie and then halfway through I realized that what it really is, is an allegory on the missionary impulse. The Thing is pretty horrific, what it does to us is pretty horrific, but it thinks it’s doing the right thing, it thinks it’s saving us. It’s faux, it absorbs us and it calls it ‘taking communion’, because it’s communing with us, it’s gifting us with its ability to adapt to new environments. It doesn’t understand the concept of an individual. And that idea of well intentioned evil really, really sums up the whole missionary impulse – that we’re going to beat God into you, we are going to save your soul by essentially conquering you and forcing you into doing these things that you don’t want to do, and we’re all gonna do it for God. That’s pretty close to what the Thing was doing in my interpretation of it.

So what projects are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished up THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION, which is the novella for tachyon that’s set in ‘The Sunflower’s universe. After that I have to write a quick short story for the X-prize project, because I’m now in the X-prize science fiction committee. And after that I’m basically beginning ‘Intelligent Design’, which is my next novel, a near-future techno thriller.

Ok, my questions are nearly over. Is there anything you would like to say to the readers of SciFi.bg, to your Bulgarian fans?

If I have Bulgarian fans, thank you for being Bulgarian fans! Give away all your copies of my books to your friends and BUY MORE! [laughs] Good enough?

Alex Dueben of CBR interviews Charles Vess about The Book of Ballads: The Original Art Edition.

In comics, he’s best known for his many collaborations with Neil Gaiman including two key issues of Sandman, the series finale #75, and the World Fantasy Award-winning #19 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The two have also collaborated on picture books and the beloved, heavily illustrated novel Stardust. Vess drew Rose, the Jeff Smith-written prequel to Bone. Vess has had lengthy collaborations with Charles de Lint [including MEDICINE ROAD], and others. In 2009, Dark Horse published Drawing Down the Moon, an art book celebrating his work.

One of Vess’ most personal project was The Book of Ballads. Originally a series of black and white comics, Gaiman, Smith and De Lint, along with Jane Yolen, Elaine Lee and others, adapted classic ballads to the comics format, illustrated by Vess. This month, Titan Comics has published an The Book of Ballads: The Original Art Edition. The art is presented in an oversize format, in its original black and white (similar to IDW Publishing’s Artist’s Editions).

Vess spoke to CBR about the project, his recent book readers may have missed and how his original art ended up in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.

CBR: How did this Original Art Edition come about?

Charles Vess: Titan editor Steve Saffel asked. Then we had to get permission from the Library of Congress, where all the art resides in their permanent collection. Martha Kennedy, the head of their Prints and Drawings Division, suggested that Steve come down to Washington D.C. for a few days and scan all the original pages himself, and he did. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there but the holding of the Library of Congress are vast and exciting to see — so I believe that he enjoyed himself, when he wasn’t overseeing the scanning.

I have to ask, how did your original art end up in the Library of Congress?

I had this rather large selection of art, scripts and pencil breakdowns that I knew would be diminished if I were ever to break them up and sell off or give away individual pages. For a number of years I’d been looking for a home for them. I’ve given quite a lot of my art and book/GN collection to my alma mater, Virginia Commonwealth University, but for this particular body of work I was looking for a institution where people interested in art or music or ballads themselves could study the work.

I was complaining to two friends of mine who work in the Folklife section of the Library of Congress about my problem, and they looked at each other and said, “How about us?” The thought had never entered my mind before. Have work of mine in the Library of the American People? But it was a perfect fit, and I’m still very chuffed that those pages have a nice home.

For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

For more info on APOCALYPSE NYX, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Wadim Kashin

Design bv Elizabeth Story

For more info about BEYOND THE RIFT, visit the Tachyon page

Cover art by Hugh Sicotte

Design by Elizabeth Story

THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION cover by Elizabeth Story

For more info about MEDICINE ROAD, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Charles Vess

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