A few days back, Heyne Verlag (a Random House division) published a German translation of Year Zero under the very un-Germanic title “Galaxy Tunes.”

The way the alien critter is centered directly under my name kind of makes it seem like it’s a portrait of me.  IT IS NOT.  After spending hundreds of hours in the gym for the express purpose of developing calves like those, I hoisted the white flag some years back.  Apparently the artist was aware of this, and the non-portrait is some kind of a cruel parody…

In all seriousness, at first I wished that they’d used the US cover – the fun mash-up of the Roswell alien head, the Listen.com/Rhapsody logo, and the Napster logo:

But the German cover is turning out to be pretty popular with people, and I’m coming around to it.  First of all, the Apple ear buds are a fabulous touch.  The background is also a damn lovely shade of blue.  And then there’s those calves…

A reader on my Facebook author page shared a link to this early review.  I don’t speak a word of German, but Google Translate came through with a delightfully wooden translation (“a humorous space opera that stops at nothing and no one stop”).

And here it is at Amazon Germany.  There is only one reader review up there as I write this.  But it is very kind, saying Google Translated things like “Galaxy Tunes was for me a real discovery of gold. I laughed so hard for a long time not more than a book and chuckled – sometimes I had to put down the book to laugh easily.”

This is the first foreign edition of the book.  Korean and Spanish versions are both in the near-term pipeline…