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

THE BIBLIOSANCTUM is intrigued by Kimberly Unger’s forthcoming NUCLEATION (not due until November, but available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller or direct from Tachyon and for reviewers via EDELWEISS and NETGALLEY).

With thanks to Tachyon Publications I also received NUCLEATION by Kimberly Unger, a debut author and game designer who has written a sci-fi techno-thriller involving VR, nanites, corporate espionage, a murder mystery and more. Whew, that’s a lot! But it’s certainly hooked my interest.

On the Tachyon Publications Channel, meet the publisher Jacob Weisman.

Arley Sorg, for CLARKESWORLD, interviews Kate Elliott about her new novel Unconquerable Sun.

Unconquerable Sun marks a return to space opera at novel length. Is the timing purely about the whims of the creative muse, or are there other aspects to it? Why space opera and why now?

Unconquerable Sun will be my twenty-seventh published novel. Since seven of my first eight published novels were science fiction, I started out thinking of myself as an SF writer more than as a fantasy writer. After this beginning, however, I became best known for the Crown of Stars epic fantasy series. Its success kept me in fantasy for quite a while longer. To be clear, I love both SF and F; to me they all nestle under the larger umbrella of speculative fiction. So, writing space opera now is really me going back to my roots in SF.

Rick Klaw participates in American Sci-Fi Classics Roll-A-Panel: Movies From 1990, 1995, 2000.

FIRESIDE publishes, in both text and audio format, “The Liberation of Ghost Story” by Elly Bangs. Watch for Bangs’ first novel UNITY, coming from Tachyon in Spring 2021.

Let me go,” the condemned woman sighed, “or I’ll have no choice but to end the world.”

Responses to her ultimatum were mixed. An anonymous laugh barked out over the sea of frayed coveralls and shock collars, over the empty, gray faces that had earned this prison its nickname. Officer Curdin spectated from the corner of the platform, leaning back against the steel armature and chewing on a ration cake. Near the front of the crowd stood the man whose jaw he’d cracked in half the week before, an inmate everybody called Scrimm, straining to hear and make any sense of the condemned’s last words.

“Listen!” she called out. “What were you before this? I mean, what is a ghost, really? Whatever happens next, ask yourself that.”

A few sneered or furrowed their brows or sighed long white breaths into the frigid air, but most, like Scrimm, remained stoic: trapped between sympathy for one more fellow inmate finally broken, and perverse envy for however much freedom her delusions offered. Curdin only chuckled and brushed away the crumbs.

“If all this ends, I don’t know what comes next,” she continued, twisting in her restraints to address the crowd, the guards, their stun batons, the trapdoor, and the inmates doggedly tying the knots and hauling up the weights. “Maybe it all disappears. Or it might become something else. I don’t know what. I only know it’s going to hurt like hell. Facing your baggage always does.”

“Don’t make this any harder,” the warden told her, tugging on his gloves, and Curdin knew the man’s mind: how much the entire staff was going to miss her brazen defiance, her weird little kindnesses to inmates and guards alike, and every other daily expression of whatever absurd hope had so armored her against every torment they’d devised. The charges were a formality. Everyone knew the only true capital offense here in Ghost City Prison was to earn the warden’s admiration.

“Okay then,” the condemned woman said. “Here’s the story. There used to be only one world, but people didn’t like it so much so they started building their own. Simulations — real to the people inside them — where they could write all their own rules, have and do anything they wanted. Eventually forget about the original world altogether.”

“What is this bullshit?” Curdin muttered.