Tachyon tidbits featuring Peter Watts, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Moorcock, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Thomas M. Disch

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

image

Peter Watts, Jeff VanderMeer (photo: Kyle Cassiday), Michael Moorcock (A.V. CLUB), Caitlín R. Kiernan (Kyle Cassiday), and Thomas M. Disch (Houari Boumedienne/Wikimedia Commons)

At UNBOUND WORLDS, Matt Staggs penned 6 Writers You Didn’t Know Wrote Spin-Off Novels. Astoundingly, five of the six were Tachyon authors.

Call them franchise fiction, spin-offs, or novelizations: They’re the books that make your favorite video game, television shows, and movies must-reads. Many writers have taken a shot at writing franchise fiction. Some stick with it. Others don’t. Here are five celebrated authors who wrote only one spin-off novel.

Crysis:Legion

by PETER WATTS

You might know former marine biologist turned writer Peter Watts best for his novels Starfish and Blindsight: two thought-provoking works that draw heavily from his scientific education. Hardcore gamers, on the other hand, will probably recognize him as the author of Crysis: Legion: a 2011 adaptation of the video game “Crysis 2”. “Crysis 2” pits a nano-tech equipped human warrior against hordes of alien invaders. Watts’s novel follows the plot of the game, but fleshes it out with plot elements that cast the story in a new light.

image


Predator: South China Sea

by JEFF VANDERMEER

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the Southern Reach trilogy, the source for the 2018 Alex Garland film “Annihilation”, as well as Finch, City of Saints and Madmen, and several other works of well regarded fiction. He’s also the author of the 2008 book Predator: South China Sea: a novel set in the expanded universe of the “Predator film” franchise. VanderMeer’s novel finds a cast of dangerous men and women — arms dealers, secret agents, pirates, and others — squaring off against the franchise’s alien hunter on a remote island stocked with exotic animals.

image

The Coming of the Terraphiles

by MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Michael Moorcock is a legend in the history of science fiction and fantasy literature: a prolific novelist who, among other things, created the Eternal Champions Elric of Melniboné, Dorian Hawkmoon, and Jerry Cornelius, and also wrote song lyrics for the hard rock/proto-metal band Hawkwind. In 2010, BBC Books published Moorcock’s The Coming of the Terraphiles, a Doctor Who novel that finds the Doctor squaring off against Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius in a contest for the Arrow of Law. Truly, Moorcock took the Doctor’s world and made it (one of) his own.

image

Beowulf

by CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Caitlín R. Kiernan is well known for her award-winning dark fantasy and science fiction novels (The Red Tree, The Drowning Girl, Agents of Dreamland, etc.), and comic books (The Dreaming, Alabaster Wolves). She also wrote Beowulf— or rather, the novelization of the 2007 film based on the epic Anglo Saxon saga. While you’re probably familiar with the plot already — legendary warrior called to defend a kingdom against a horrid monster and its mom — experiencing it again through Kiernan’s unique lens is a lot of fun.

image

The Prisoner

by THOMAS M. DISCH

Thomas M. Disch, along with Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, and others was part of the New Wave of science fiction: a movement that saw writers abandoning the straight forward, hard science focus of fifties SF in favor of experimental, prose with a distinctly literary sensibility. His novels, among them Camp Concentration, and The Genocides, are just as challenging today as they ever were. In 1967, Disch turned his talents to franchise fiction with The Prisoner: a novel based on the cult BBC series about a man imprisoned in a mysterious village by captors determined to psychologically destroy him.

image