Tag Archives: Tachyon Publications

Firing Slow Bullets

Slow Bullets
Alastair Reynolds
Tachyon Publications
Paperback, $14.95
ebook $9.99; audio $21.95

Slow Bullets is a short novel (180 pg) in an intriguing far future setting. I read it in one afternoon when I was in the mood for big idea space opera.

Scur is a soldier in an interstellar war. She’s captured by a notorious war criminal just after peace is established, who injects a slow bullet into her leg and leaves her to die a slow painful death. Slow bullets are little devices that are inserted in all soldiers. They not only contain biographical information from before the soldier entered the military. Insertion under normal conditions is quite painless.

What Scur is experiencing will kill her. She manages to cut the slow bullet out of he let, then passes out. When she wakes up, she’s coming out of hibernation on spaceship. The spaceship is carrying mostly war criminals, which for reasons Scur doesn’t know includes her.

Only there’s a problem. They are at their target planet, but hundreds if not thousands of years later than when they should be. The planet is now in an ice age.

That’s not the only problem. Continue reading →

Murder in Utopia: A Visit to Hollow World

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Hollow World
Michael J. Sullivan
Tachyon Publications
trade paper $15.95,
ebook $7.99 Kindle, Nook
audio $24.49

I’m a sucker for a time travel story. After space opera and hard science, it’s my favorite subgenre of science fiction. So when Michael J. Sullivan contacted me and asked if I’d like a review copy of his latest novel, which involves time travel, of course I said “Yes.” I’d like to thank Mr. Sullivan for providing me with an ARC of Hollow World.

This is the story of Ellis Rogers. He’s discovered the secret to time travel. There’s only one problem. It’s a one-way trip.

Rogers doesn’t have the most ideal life. His son committed suicide some years ago, and he and his wife have been estranged ever since. They share a house, but not really a life. He has a best friend he hangs out with, a buddy from high school.

Even so, he doesn’t want to take that one-way trip. Then he gets a double whammy. First, it’s a terminal diagnosis from his doctor. Shortly after that he discovers that his wife had an affair with his best friend just after his son died.

And suddenly that one-way trip doesn’t seem so bad. Rogers sets the machine for 200 years in the future and throws the switch. Only there’s a flaw in his math, and instead of traveling two hundred years, he travels two thousand.

The world he finds is one that’s mostly underground, called Hollow World. There are occasional forays to the surface to various historical sites. Rogers comes out near one and stumbles onto a murder. Continue reading →

Going Beyond the Rift

Beyond the Rift
Peter Watts
Tachyon Publications
trade paperback $14.95
ebook $9.95

I really enjoy well done science fiction, full of unusual ideas and fascinating characters, especially at short lengths. Unlike my taste in noir and fantasy, I generally prefer my science fiction to end on a fairly upbeat note. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy some of the darker stuff.

Case in point, Peter Watts’ latest collection from Tachyon Publications. This collection, consisting of a baker’s dozen short stories and an essay, is one of the best (and in many ways darkest) I’ve read in quite a while.

Some of the standouts for me were “The Things”. This is a retelling of the classic John W. Campbell story that was filmed more than once as The Thing. Watts tackles the tale from the point of view of the alien.

“The Island” is about a woman on a ship whose mission is to leave what are essentially stargates who is awaken to discover a son she never knew she had and a life form that completely surrounds a star. She and the AI guiding the ship, already enemies, gain new reason to hate each other as completing their mission in the system will result in the death of the organism.

“The Eyes of God” concerns a soldier of God whose zeal may hide a darker motivation. “Mayfly”, co-written with Derryl Murphy, tells what happens when a family uses an AI to try and recapture a daughter taken from them by death.

“A Niche” is a disturbing tale of two people in an underwater station, where one of them adpats to the environment and one doesn’t. The scary thing about this one is I can see it happening.

Watts concludes the volume with an essay on how his world view colors his fiction. He argues he’s really an optimist. He also spends a good deal of time telling his side of his encounter with Homeland Security a few years ago. I hadn’t heard his side of the events, so I found this informative.

My worldview doesn’t overlap much with that of Mr. Watts. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy his work. I do. He’s able to get into the heads of his characters in a way few other authors can. His protagonists are sympathetic even when they’re extremely flawed and not always pleasant people.

I’d only read “The Things” before I read Beyond the Rift. I’ll be reading more of his work, although I probably won’t read quite so much in such a short time period.

I read the epub version of the ebook. The formatting was professional, the text had been copy edited, and the interactive ToC worked perfectly, as did the footnotes in the essay.

I’d like to thank Tachyon Publications for the review copy. Tachycon has been producing quality books for quite some time now. They don’t produce a large number of titles in any given year, but I always take note of the ones they do. Tachyon Publications is one of the premiere small presses in the US at the moment.