I’ve spent a lot of time – too much time – looking at books from small presses and the books that they produce. One that looks definitely to be on the improve, and expanding, is Jacob Weisman’s Tachyon. They’ve been around for a long time, but just in this last year have improved their production and design, increased their publication schedules, and produced some very interesting books by Leslie What, James Morrow, Eileen Gunn and others.

Their list of upcoming titles is impressive, and includes:

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr. (collection, 12/04)
I Live with You (and You Don’t Know It), Carol Emshwiller (collection, 04/05)
Strange Itineraries: The Collected Stories, Tim Powers (collection, 07/05)
Greetings, Terry Bisson (collection, 07/05)
Cultural Breaks, Brian Aldiss (collection, 08/05)

The best thing you can say about a small press (and the worst thing about mainstream publishing, is that the small press publisher is producing books they shouldn’t be able to produce because they’re coming out from majors. That’s true of this crop. The Tiptree is a staggeringly brilliant book, the Emshwiller, Powers and Bisson should be coming out from majors, and if the Aldiss actually is a career retrospective for his 80th birthday (as the description on the Tachyon site suggests), then it’s a major book that should be getting series coverage. Kudos to Jacob and the gang.

This isn’t quite a naked advertisement, but… I’ve long been a fan of the work published Gary Turner and his industrious colleague Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon. I thought the early books brought out by Jim Turner for the company were wonderful, and that the best of the books they’ve produced since are some of the best in the field. I was interested, therefore, to get one of Marty’s regular email updates outlining their publishing schedule through 2007. Just as some of their books appeal to me more than others, the same will no doubt be true for you, but they’re sure to be amongst the best books out there. So, check ’em out.

2005
38. Wild Galaxy, William F. Nolan (collection, April)
39. Live! From Planet Earth, George Alec Effinger (collection, May)
40. Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories, Gregory Frost (collection, June)
41. From the Files of the Time Rangers, Richard Bowes (fix-up, Fall)
42. The Fiction Factory, Jack Dann (collection, Fall)
43. The Cuckoo’s Boys, Robert Reed (collection, Fall)

2006
44. The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford (Collection)
45. Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts, George Zebrowski (Collection)
46. Sleeping Policemen, Dale Bailey & Jack Slay Jr. (covel)
47. Harvest of Changelings, Warren Rochelle (novel)
48. A Very Little Madness, M. Rickert (collection)
49. The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross, (novel)
50. The Golden Gryphon, Marty Halpern & Gary Turner eds. (anthology)

2007
51. Threshold Shift, Eric Brown, (collection)
52. California Somewhere, Lucius Shepard, (novel)

It’s not official yet, but things are looking good for me to edit a second volume of the “Best Short Novels” anthology series for the good people at The Science Fiction Book Club. Editing last year’s volume was a joy, and opening a box of copies of the first book I’d ever edited solo was a special thrill, so I’m really excited that this looks like happening.

Of course, because it’s a project I’m working on, it has to be done yesterday – I’m guessing it’ll have to be delivered in something like 50 days – so I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask readers of this blog to recommend any novellas (stories between 15k and 40k) that they thought were particularly good. You can make a recommendation using the comments feature below, the email address in the sidebar, or over at my Night Shade message board. There are a few restrictions. I am biased towards SF for the book, can’t take straight horror, and can’t consider any stories originally published by The SF Book Club during the year, but anything else is fair game.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen some great novellas this year, and think the book should be terrific.

When I was in my teens the shadow of Margaret Thatcher lay, like some fell spirit, across the United Kingdom, inciting its youth to anger and seeming to rob the nation of optimism as dole queues grew and coal mines closed. Or so it seemed to me, on the other side of the world.

That anger, and its accompanying frustration, inspired a lot of great music, some of the best coming from Matt Johnson’s The The. I never would have expected, with Thatcher and her government safely consigned to history, that Johnson’s lyrics would come to seem more relevant today, than possibly ever before.

What inspired this? Well, I was reading a news article on the newly re-elected Australian government’s determination to get all of those lazy, slacker disabled people into a job and off their disability pensions, when the lyrics to an old The The song from 1989, “The Beaten Generation“, began to echo through my mind. I wonder if, as they cast their eyes to the skylines of this once proud nation, the government can sense the fear and the hatred growing in the hearts of its population?

Some terms just don’t translate. I’ve struggled, not particularly diligently I admit, to explain to my beloved what an ‘anorak’ is and what it means. This useful page does the job much better than I.

My need to explain this grew out of my ongoing consideration of Rob Gerrand’s new anthology of Australian science fiction. I’ve put a lot of thought into considering the structure of the book, what it is about and what it appears to be about, SF scholarship in Australia, whig histories and many, many other things.

As I diligently worried away at these questions I began to wonder why? Why was I bothering? Who actually cared. I know I care whether an anthology is intelligently assembled, and that it makes some kind of argument. But who else does? Does anyone really care about the intrinsic integrity of a description of sf history, or am I alone?

And the word ‘anorak’ whispered itself in my ear. Only an anorak would care about the minutiae of sf history. Only an anorak would care about the argument made by an anthology. In fact, only an anorak would care about much of the central arguments about SF itself. What I’m coming to terms with – and this is a big thing that I need to work on am struggling with articulating – is that those of us who are fascinated with science fiction and who are committed to helping the centre hold, to defining things and to arguing about the central importance of some kind of core sf are wrong. The centre did not hold. No one really cares about that. The task we should be attempting is to describe the literary diaspora that is happening in the wake of sf’s centre failing to hold. It’s harder, but probably more important (I think), and almost certainly more rewarding. Of course, I may be wrong, or change my mind next week.

As to the Gerrand book: I looked at it for days, thinking over and over ‘who is this for’? It’s big, it’s serious looking, it’s a little pricey, and it’s mostly filled with writers you’ve never heard of. Who would want such a thing? And then the penny dropped: librarians. It appears to be a book for librarians to buy and feel good about. Maybe some anoraks too, but mostly librarians. And is it good? Well, I hope to provide a detailed answer to that in a book review, but I basically think it’s ok. It desperately need interstitial material to give it context, and the story selection is idiosyncratic, but it’s ok. I will say, though, that I can’t imagine a non-sf reader liking it. The book opens with a handful of stories – including an awful Norma Hemming piece – that are so dated and conceptually bland that might only appeal to the most hardened of anorak’s.