Tachyon tidbits featuring Daniel Pinkwater, Peter S. Beagle, Nalo Hopkinson, Brandon Sanderson, Charlie Jane Anders, Michael Swanwick, and Cory Doctorow
The latest reviews and mentions of Tachyon titles and authors from around the web.
At KIDS BOOKBUZZ, Zara – Age 11 enjoys Daniel Pinkwater’s ADVENTURES OF A DWERGISH GIRL.
I think that people ages from seven to one hundred and one could read ADVENTURES OF A DWERGISH GIRL. It is a great book for everybody! Also, if you like fun adventure books, along with some humor and fun facts! I would definitely recommend this book, so go buy it!!
Design by Elizabeth Story
TIME’s The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time includes Peter S. Beagle, Nalo Hopkinson, Brandon Sanderson, and Charlie Jane Anders.
With a panel of leading fantasy authors—N.K. Jemisin, Neil Gaiman, Sabaa Tahir, Tomi Adeyemi, Diana Gabaldon, George R.R. Martin, Cassandra Clare and Marlon James—TIME presents the most engaging, inventive and influential works of fantasy fiction, in chronological order beginning in the 9th century
Tais Teng for MYTHAXIS REVIEW interviews Michael Swanwick.
TT: Some blockbuster fantasy writers are clearly paladins of Tolkien. I get the impression that you belong to a quite different tribe, harkening back to a time when each fantasy novel was one of a kind. Hope-in-the-Mist (which I read recently thanks to your glowing recommendation), The Night Lands, Gormenghast, A Voyage to Arcturus and The Gods of Pegana come to mind.
What are the novels and authors that inspired you when you just had started writing? Or better, when you yearned to become a writer but hadn’t sold a word yet?
MS: As a boy, I was determined to be a scientist. Nothing could be surer. Then, at age sixteen, Tolkien turned me into a writer. I read The Fellowship of the Ring over one long, sleepless night and that was it, I knew what I was going to be. This was before commercial fantasy was a genre, so I had to hunt out fantasy works, which were few and far between. So I read everything from E. R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses to John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian (very highly not recommended), the books you mention most definitely included. This imprinted on me the idea that great fantasy must necessarily be different from everything else and written in imitation of nobody.
I’ve never gotten over this conviction.
Also, back in the 1980s, I was on the Nebula Award Jury, which was, for reasons that made sense at the time, tasked with adding a single worthy but neglected work to every category on the final award ballot. We made a valiant but futile attempt to read everything published in genre that year and in so doing I read so much fantasy written in lockstep with the common expectation of what it should be that I developed a revulsion for it.
To sum it all up, I love fantasy the way you love your firstborn. You have such high expectations for it that any failure to live up to them is a disappointment. If it’s not astonishingly good, I’m not going to much like it.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story Cover by Ann Monn
For TORFORGE via YOUTUBE, Cory Doctorow discusses writing.