I’m very pleased I can now announce this… The excellent Salò Press will publish my story ‘Echec!’ as a chapbook next month. It’s one of my Great Robots of History stories, about the chess-playing automaton known as the Mechanical Turk. It’s a bit of a departure for me, being a comedy (sort of) and presented as a play script.

I’ll show the people a true spectacle.

For years, Schlumberger has operated the chess-playing automaton known as the Mechanical Turk… and it’s killing him. Tonight, trapped together in the backstage area of a Cuban theatre, it’s time for their final game.

Some excellent writers have said some very kind things about it:

As box-cutter-sharp as Ellison and as wickedly deadpan as Douglas Adams at his finest, Tim Major’s Echec! is a true science-fiction masterclass. – Chris Kelso, author of Voidheads

Tim Major’s bold tour de force reanimates Johann Nepomuk Mälzel’s Mechanical Turk for the AI age, with a lightness of touch that we’ve come to expect from the grand master. Checkmate! – Dan Coxon, editor of Writing the Uncanny

The chapbook is pre-orderable now from the Salò Press website and will be shipped in early March.