#Julie McGalliard

[osmiumpenguin]

It's the solstice tonight, and a good time to reflect on my favourite books from the past year.

I'm making very little attempt to rank these titles. They're simply the books that I enjoyed most, and they're presented in the order I read them. • "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet," by Becky Chambers (2014) • "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within," by Becky Chambers (2021) • "Locklands," by Robert Jackson Bennett (2022) • "Beloved," by Toni Morrison (1987) • "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang (2019) • "Fugitive Telemetry," by Martha Wells (2021) • "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future," by Patty Krawec (2022) • "The Vanished Birds," by Simon Jimenez (2020) • "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family," by Joshua Cohen (2021) • "Utopia Avenue," by by David Mitchell (2020) • "The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery," by Amitav Ghosh (1995) • "Moon of the Crusted Snow," by Waubgeshig Rice (2018) • "Bea Wolf," by Zach Weinersmith; illustrated by Boulet (2023) • "Fighting the Moon," by Julie McGalliard (2021) • "The Empress of Salt and Fortune," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Glass Hotel," by Emily St. John Mandel (2020) • "New York 2140," by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017) • "When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Omnibus," by Ryan North et al; illustrated by Erica Henderson & Derek Charm & Jacob Chabot & Naomi Franquiz & Tom Fowler & Rico Renzi et al (2022) • "Buffalo Is the New Buffalo: Stories," by Chelsea Vowel (2022) • "Greenwood: A Novel," by Michael Christie (2019) • "The House of Rust," by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (2021) • "Children of Memory," by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2022) • "Jade Legacy," by Fonda Lee (2021) • "A Deadly Education: A Novel: Lesson One of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2020) • "The Last Graduate: A Novel: Lesson Two of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2021) • "The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2022) • "To Be Taught if Fortunate," by Becky Chambers (2019) • "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution," by Carlo Rovelli (2020), translated by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell (2021) • "A Psalm for the Wild-Built," by Becky Chambers (2021) Ah, but I said I'd make "very little attempt" to rank them, not "no attempt." So here is that attempt: my favourite five books from the last solar orbit — the five I enjoyed even more than those other thirty — also presented in the order I read them.

• "Nona the Ninth," by Tamsyn Muir (2022) • "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," by Kate Beaton (2022) • "Record of a Spaceborn Few," by Becky Chambers (2018) • "Briar Rose," by Jane Yolen (1992) • "Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution," by R.F. Kuang (2022)

[tachyonpub]

Tachyon tidbits featuring Jo Walton, James Morrow, Nancy Kress, Nalo Hopkinson, and Jacob Weisman

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

Jo Walton (photo: Ada Palmer), James Morrow, Nancy Kress (Ellen Datlow), Nalo Hopkinson (David Findlay), and Jacob Weisman

On her eponymous site, the French author Hélène Louise praises Jo Walton’s STARLINGS.

I really loved this book, which I found astonishingly easy and entertaining to read. (I did not read all the poetry, however, but I did not learn to read poetry in this language. Of course I preferred some stories, but all were good, or very good. And the very good ones were absolutely fantastic! I loved how the characters were immediately likeable and perfectly characterized. As a lot of ideas have been astonishing and frequently funny (even irreverently so!), I've been deliciously entertained while reading them from their very beginning and spending some time after their end thinking about them - which is a sure sign of quality stories!

I thank again Netgalley for giving me this opportunity to read a book that I would not have anything spontaneously, even knowing how to author the previously, because of my mistrust of collection of short stories. I very likely will buy the paper book at the first opportunity to re read it. I warmly recommend it to all passionate readers of science-fi and fantasy.

(Translation from French, courtesy of Google)

The winners for the 2018 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, given to the best science fiction published in French, were recently announced. Tachyon authors James Morrow’s L'Arche de Darwin (Darwin's Ark) and Nancy Kress’s Danses aériennes both brought home awards. 

Congratulations to all the winners.

At TOR.COM in her History of Black Science Fiction series, Nisi Shawl discusses Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber.

Using variant speech patterns—the multiple patois of the many different Caribbean islands in her background—Hopkinson creates a honeyed symphony of words redolent of the newly settled world of Toussaint’s imported Island culture. Days after finishing the book, its phrases still ring in my mind: “Born bassourdie…What a way things does grow…Music too sweet!” As the prefacing poem by David Findlay declares, for colonized peoples, telling stories in any form of English is a way of appropriating one of our colonizers’ primary tools of oppression. Telling stories that deprivilege the status quo is a doubly subversive tactic, and that’s how Midnight Robber’s heroine, Tan-Tan, overcomes the awful odds against her.

Cover by Leo and Diane Dillon

Hopkinson accomplishes so many wonders with this novel that it’s worth taking time to enumerate them. First, in case you missed what I said earlier, I’ll mention again the sheer beauty of Hopkinson’s prose. Combining the dancing polyrhythms of a panoply of Caribbean vernaculars with thoughtfully interpolated standard English, her dialogue and her vivid descriptions of character, settings, and action move, groove, charm, and chime together in deepest harmony. The story is sometimes funny, sometimes tense, sometimes tragic, and always utterly involving. My favorite passage in Midnight Robber is when Tan-Tan, tired of the live food and alien housekeeping protocols of a douen village, snarks at her reluctant hosts: “Oonuh keeping well this fine hot day? The maggots growing good in the shit? Eh? It have plenty lizards climbing in your food? Good. I glad.”

LOCUS offers photographic evidence that Tachyon publisher and editor Jacob Weisman attended the annual Rainforest Writers Village retreat on Feb 21-25.

Session One (l to r): back: Manny Frishberg, Patrick Swenson, James Van Pelt, Vickie Saunders, Louise Marley, Di Francis, John Pitts, Charles Walbridge, Lee Hallison, Devon Monk, Bob Brown, Julie McGalliard, Che Gilson, Jacob Weisman; front: Kayt Huggans, Elizabeth Stephan, Debora Reinert, Fonda Lee, Honna Swenson, Barb Galler-Smith, Jayne Fury, David Levine, Julianna Hinckley, Barbara Ferrer; not pictured: Kathy Klein, Alexandra Tillson, Uwanna Thomas, Camille Hansen, Laura Staley, Jennifer Brozek. Photo by Patrick Swenson

For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

[bolthy]

Norwescon 2017 Schedule

I’ll be at Norwescon, selling books at sitting on panels. My schedule is below. 

Friday, April 14 Choosing the Right Game for My Group 11:00am - 12:00pm @ Cascade 7&8 Ogre Whiteside (M), Donna Prior, Jeremy Zimmerman, Sar Surmick Saturday, April 15 Autograph Session 2 3:00pm - 4:00pm @ Grand 2 Why Do Villains Look Like That? 6:00pm - 7:00pm @ Cascade 5&6 Julie McGalliard (M), Jeremy Zimmerman, Jaym Gates, Erik Scott de Bie Creating the Socially Conscious Comic 8:00pm - 9:00pm @ Cascade 12 Mickey Schulz (M), Jeremy Zimmerman, Ogre Whiteside Sunday, April 16 Reading: Jeremy Zimmerman 11:00am - 11:30am @ Cascade 2 Jeremy Zimmerman (M) Tabletop RPG's: What's a Story Game? 3:00pm - 4:00pm @ Cascade 7&8 Ogre Whiteside (M), Jeremy Zimmerman, Scott Hamilton, Erik Scott de Bie