Bargain @ 99 cents for today only (Nov 10th) according to the newsletter from Open Road Media (couponable @ Kobo, should be in all the standard stores, price good for Canada & US, may or may not be matched in other regions, etc.):
West of January by Scottish & Canadian sf/fantasy author Dave Duncan (
ISFDB,
Wikipedia), a science fiction space opera adventure of the "planetary romance" type (
Wikipedia) set in an unusual solar system, originally out from Ballantine's Del Rey imprint in 1989. This won the 1990 Aurora Award (our top national sf/fantasy prize) for Best Long-Form Work in English.
Linkage to both
Kobo and
Amazon, since it's pretty late in the day for this deal. This has been on my wishlist since the Fictionwise days and I've enjoyed others of Duncan's works in the past (especially his Italian Renaissance alchemist trilogy featuring a relation of Nostradamus), so I will be snapping this up shortly.
NB: Kobo's pricing is good until 9 PM Pacific Time, but starts to fluctuate in the listings after 8. However, you can actually add something that looks full price to your cart and take it through to the checkout and see the price drop to the sale bargain (and apply a coupon, while you're at it) and successfully get it cheaply until then. Just as long as you still see the price you want on the actual checkout screen (it will not magically change upon clicking the Buy confirmation button). Amazon's pricing switches over sometime between 12:30 AM and 1 Pacific Time. In both cases, I'd still take a screenshot and check my receipts if I were buying anywhere within 20 minutes of the standard server change time, if I were you.
Set on a distant planet, far in the future, West of January tells the story of a world in which the sun moves across the sky with agonizing slowness.
It takes lifetimes for a region to experience dawn, midday, and dusk, and because of this the planet’s population does not remember the catastrophes that occur as the sun moves across the sky—entire civilizations have been scorched into oblivion. The only people who remember the dangers of the past are the planet’s “angels”—a people who have tried to preserve past technologies and ancient knowledge, and who work to try to save the other people from the destruction that threatens them when the sun moves.
The hero of this book, Knobil, was born among the herdsmen, a primitive civilization in which the men kill one another and exile their sons so that each man can have as many women and children as possible. Knobil, however, is the son of an angel, and his destiny leads him to move among all the other peoples of his world—the beautiful but unthinking seafolk, the cruel slavers, the manipulative traders, and, worst of them all, the spinsters whose deadly secret he discovers nearly too late.
This action-filled story of a very strange planet showcases Duncan’s remarkable ability to create unique worlds.