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

George Saunders (photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/AFP/Getty Images), Bruce Sterling, Lavie Tidhar (Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013), and Peter Watts (Johan Angelmark [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

George Saunders, whose short story “Escape from Spiderhead” appeared in Jacob Weisman’s acclaimed INVADERS: 22 TALES FROM THE OUTER LIMITS OF LITERATURE, has won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln In The Bardo.

On the Portuguese site RASCUNHOS, Cristina Alves praises Bruce Sterling’s Sidewise Award-nominated PIRATE UTOPIA.

Brutal graphic appearance and fantastic premise – what could fail? The embodiment. PIRATE UTOPIA presents an alternate reality within the genre Dieselpunk, where pirates, anarchist warriors, build their own world by hating fascists and communists alike.

The original atmosphere is delightful, with hordes of rough men watching a delicate film in which there are unlikely relationships (and far more platonic than we anticipate).

Translation from Portuguese courtesy of Google.

Zeno Agency reports that תחנה מרכזית from Yaniv Publishing, the Hebrew edition of Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winning CENTRAL STATION, is now available.

TOR.COM reprints Peter Watts’ “ZeroS” from Infinity Wars, the latest Infinity Project anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan.

From the author:

In my last novel, a grizzled old soldier reminisces bitterly about the early days of the military zombie program, of which he was an early recruit. He wasn’t the first recruit, though. The first recruits, some of them at least, were corpses scraped off various battlefields, booted temporarily back to awareness with jumper cables to the brain, and told Hey, you’re actually dead, but we can bring you back to life so long as you’re willing to work for us for a few years. Or if you’d rather, we could just unplug these cables and leave you the way we found you. As contracts go it’s pretty take-it-or-leave-it, but given the alternative would you walk away? […] “ZeroS” is the story of one of those first recruits.

ZeroS

Asante goes out screaming. Hell is an echo chamber, full of shouts and seawater and clanking metal. Monstrous shadows move along the bulkheads; meshes of green light writhe on every surface. The Sāḥilites rise from the moon pool like creatures from some bright lagoon, firing as they emerge; Rashida’s middle explodes in dark mist and her top half topples onto the deck. Kito’s still dragging himself toward the speargun on the drying rack— as though some antique fish-sticker could ever fend off these monsters with their guns and their pneumatics and their little cartridges that bury themselves deep in your flesh before showing you what five hundred unleashed atmospheres do to your insides.

It’s more than Asante’s got. All he’s got is his fists.

He uses them. Launches himself at the nearest Sāḥilite as she lines up Kito in her sights, swings wildly as the deck groans and drops and cants sideways. Seawater breaches the lip of the moon pool, cascades across the plating. Asante flails at the intruder on his way down. Her shot goes wide. A spiderweb blooms across the viewport; a thin gout of water erupts from its center even as the glass tries to heal itself from the edges in.

The last thing Asante sees is the desert hammer icon on the Sāḥilite’s diveskin before she blows him away.

For more info on PIRATE UTOPIA, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover and image by John Coulthart