The 52nd World Fantasy Convention takes over the Oakland Marriott City Center from 22 to 25 October, and Tachyon Publications, the San Francisco indie Jacob Weisman founded in 1995, can practically get there on the BART. The press is treating the short hop as a home fixture. It will have a table in the Dealers Room from Thursday to Sunday, and its authors are spread across a programme whose Guests of Honour include Ted Chiang and Stephen Graham Jones.
Tachyon also has a better reason than most to stay for Sunday’s awards banquet. Two of the five Best Novel finalists at this year’s World Fantasy Awards are its books: Martin Cahill’s Audition for the Fox and Pat Murphy’s The Adventures of Mary Darling. For a small press sharing a shortlist with Orbit, Saga and Tor, that is a strong hand. The press release, with commendable modesty, forgot to mention it.
The real news for anyone who has never paid for a membership is Sunday. For the first time, the Dealers Room opens to the public as the World Fantasy Book Fair, from 10am to 5pm on 25 October at the Oakland Convention Center, 550 10th Street. World Fantasy has always been the most clubbable of cons, where editors, agents and authors talk shop and the bar does more trade than the panels. This is the drawbridge coming down, if only for an afternoon. Expect antiquarian dealers, specialist SF and fantasy booksellers, publishers and author groups, with enough signed and collectable stock to make a wallet whimper. Tickets are $5 through Eventbrite, roughly the price of a Bay Area coffee if you don’t ask for oat milk, and the proceeds go to Chapter510, an Oakland literacy charity for young writers.
On to the programme. Friday’s readings, 1.30pm to 3pm in Salon 3 & 4, include Auston Habershaw with In Her Exquisite Clutches. At 4pm the schedule forks. In Room 201, Ellen Datlow joins ‘Red Ink Is Our Medium: Editing as an Art Form’, moderated by Tachyon’s own Jaymee Goh, who is also one of the convention’s Special Guests. Datlow is there with Lovecraft’s Brood, nineteen tales of cosmic horror following 2014’s Lovecraft’s Monsters. Nobody has more right to sit on an editing panel; she was buying stories for Omni when some of today’s panellists were still in nappies. Next door in Room 202, Pulitzer winner Robert Olen Butler reads from Citizen Parrot alongside Claire Light and Paul Park. The novel continues his much-anthologised story ‘Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot’ and flaps from the American Civil War to the election frenzy of 2024, an itinerary only a bird of that temperament could survive.
Saturday at 10am forces an early choice. In Salon 3 & 4, Stephen Graham Jones is in conversation with Kasey Lansdale. In Room 208, Habershaw, Robin Hobb and Butler tackle ‘Transformation: Wouldn’t You Rather Have a Talking Frog?’ The man who reincarnated a jealous husband as a parrot should have firm views on the matter.
Sunday ends from 5pm to 7pm in Room 208 with ‘SF in SF: Science Fiction, San Francisco… in Oakland!’, a title that cheerfully owns up to the geography. Daryl Gregory represents Tachyon with The Porcelain Sisters, published on 27 October, two days after the con closes. Its heroine’s sister is a haunted porcelain doll with a vile temper, and their trip to Marseille involves an unkillable assassin, a clan of French witches and a demon crow that chain-smokes. Whether copies sneak onto the Tachyon table early is between Gregory and the warehouse.
The table itself will be open all weekend for browsing and hellos. That leaves only the question every World Fantasy veteran faces on Sunday afternoon: how many books fit in hand luggage? One fewer than you bought.
Join the conversation (0)