If you don't already have it and were waiting for a price-drop,
The Fuller Memorandum, 3rd in Charles Stross' Laundry Files series, is currently just £1.99.
And there's some Barbara Hambly sequels to her Darwath trilogy (which IIRC you re-read at some point) out from Voyager at the £3.99 mark (not a special offer, but this is the lowest I've seen them priced in the UK or North America from Del Rey over the past couple of years, though it's possible they might go on sale at some point): #4
Mother of Winter, and #5
Icefalcon's Quest. They're not as good as the original trilogy, and frankly a bit of a grimdark downer at certain points, but I also found them an interesting expansion of the world and exploration of certain ideas, even if I disagreed with some of the ways the stories played out; so maybe worth a look if you want to find out what happened next in that setting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I don't think I've read anything by Tanya Huff or by Maureen Jennings but those series do sound fun.
I'll have a look at the Titian offers. I'm not so sure about the non-fiction.
I read a short by Liu Cixin and wasn't thrilled, so I'm reluctant to jump into the novels. Translated works are tricky - one never knows if it's the author or the translator that's the problem.
|
IMHO, Tanya Huff is one of Canada's best sf/fantasy authors and very readable indeed; I'll usually take a look at her works, even if I end up not caring for some particular series. If you end up liking her, she's got a rich back catalogue of works to enjoy (admittedly, most of them don't seem to be available in the UK). I've heard that Maureen Jennings' original Murdoch Mysteries books are a bit more sober than the TV adaptation, which is known for its light-hearted humour, but still quite good in a more serious way.
If you need more material to evaluate Peter Jones' classics stuff (apparently not a time-sensitive sale, since I bought mine at roughly the same price around October-ish) which is admittedly close enough to the "For Dummies, Now With Extra Trivia and Further Reading Pointers!" level that if you already know a fair amount about ancient Greece and Rome they may be completely redundant to your level of knowledge, I noticed that The Spectator now only allows reading of 5 articles for "free".
Sadly, the old Friends of the Classics site which had a more extensive archive of them is down, but there's two mirrors of his older columns over
here and
here, covering roughly 2001-2003 & 2010-2012. He does seem to have a bit of a relatively conservative viewpoint for the UK (I guess that's only to be expected for some old-school Oxbridge guy in his mid-60s), but I find he's usually pretty insightful and informative and entertaining enough to offset the occasional bit of "you kids, get off my lawn!" cane-shaking feel that sometimes comes through, and he's very committed to encouraging education at all levels. But then I live an ocean and a continent away, so YMMV.
As for Liu Cixin, several years ago we did get quite a number of stories of his for free via the KDP Select program (I found about a half-dozen collections of his shorts in my Kindle library from that period), so maybe it'd be worth trying to read a few more to see, maybe not. In any case, the entire trilogy will likely go on special offer again and again throughout the years, now that there's the Hugo Award prestige attached to it. I really like Ken Liu's original short stories, but I'm not sure his translation work is doing it for me, either. But the unusual setting and the ideas were interesting enough to keep me going when I started reading the 1st for the Hugo voting last year.