FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

This is the seventh (& last?) in his Mistborn series.

It's the fourth and last in the Era 2 series Wax and Wayne. There are at least two more planned series.

[BetterRead]

Guards! Guards! A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett is currently on sale for $1.99.

https://www.amazon.com/Guards-Novel-.../dp/B000UVBT7M

Insurrection is in the air in the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to face off. Again.

It’s old news to Captain Sam Vimes of the city’s ramshackle Night Watch. But this time, something is different—the Have-Nots have found the key to a dormant, lethal weapon that even they can’t fully control, and they’re about to unleash a campaign of terror on the city.

Long believed extinct, a draco nobilis can now be seen patrolling the skies above Discworld's greatest city. Not only does this unwelcome visitor have a nasty habit of charbroiling everything in its path, but it’s also soon crowned King.

Can Vimes, Captain Carrot, and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch restore order (before it's burned to a crisp)?

Note: This is an excellent place to start with the Discworld. Although it was the 8th book written, it is the first title in the "City Watch" sub-series.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by BetterRead

Note: This is an excellent place to start with the Discworld. Although it was the 8th book written, it is the first title in the "City Watch" sub-series.

Moderator Notice

Any comments in this thread asserting that there is only one book which one "should" read first in a series will be deleted without warning.

[Manabi]

Originally Posted by BetterRead

Guards! Guards! A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett is currently on sale for $1.99.

https://www.amazon.com/Guards-Novel-.../dp/B000UVBT7M

Note: This is an excellent place to start with the Discworld. Although it was the 8th book written, it is the first title in the "City Watch" sub-series.

Indeed, it was the book that introduced me to the Discworld series after I forgot to send my card back when it was the monthly selection for the Science Fiction Book Club. (I'm not a big fantasy reader, so I usually declined all of those. Glad I missed that one, though!) Thanks to having a whole city watch there's a bunch of characters that receive development in it, and most of the new to readers (and Ankh-Morpork) species get introduced in it as well. Well worth grabbing at that price!

[DNSB]

I had read the previous books in the Discworld series and think Terry Pratchett really began to hit his stride in Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids compared to The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic and continued to improve in the City Watch books though I did love Nanny Ogg's Cookbook.

[salty-horse]

To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
First in a new series.

The remote island of Masquapaug has not seen a dragon in many generations—until fifteen-year-old Anequs finds a dragon’s egg and bonds with its hatchling. Her people are delighted, for all remember the tales of the days when dragons lived among them and danced away the storms of autumn, enabling the people to thrive. To them, Anequs is revered as Nampeshiweisit—a person in a unique relationship with a dragon.

Unfortunately for Anequs, the Anglish conquerors of her land have different opinions. They have a very specific idea of how a dragon should be raised, and who should be doing the raising—and Anequs does not meet any of their requirements. Only with great reluctance do they allow Anequs to enroll in a proper Anglish dragon school on the mainland. If she cannot succeed there, her dragon will be killed.

For a girl with no formal schooling, a non-Anglish upbringing, and a very different understanding of the history of her land, challenges abound—both socially and academically. But Anequs is smart, determined, and resolved to learn what she needs to help her dragon, even if it means teaching herself. The one thing she refuses to do, however, is become the meek Anglish miss that everyone expects.

Anequs and her dragon may be coming of age, but they’re also coming to power, and that brings an important realization: the world needs changing—and they might just be the ones to do it.

[salty-horse]

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan is $5 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Sequel to She Who Became the Sun.

The Hexologists by Josiah Bancroft is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
First in a new series of supernatural detective stories. Was on my wishlist.

The Hexologists, Iz and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney-wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. Well-acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.

But when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake—going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven—the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose to nose with a violent anti-royalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.

Armed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for a case that will test every spell, skill, and odd magical artifact in their considerable bag of tricks.

[lkmiller]

The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang is $3 in the US.

Kobo

Amazon

Inspired by a classic of martial arts literature, S. L. Huang's The Water Outlaws are bandits of devastating ruthlessness, unseemly femininity, dangerous philosophies, and ungovernable gender who are ready to make history—or tear it apart.

[salty-horse]

The Vorrh by Brian Catling is $2 in the US and "worldwide" (Kobo US, Kobo WW, Amazon)
Was high on my wishlist. Missed the previous sale. Technically the start of a trilogy, but you can read just the first if you want.
Part horror. VERY weird.
Books 2 and 3 are £3 in the UK.
Video review by SFF180

Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast—perhaps endless—forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Vorrh by Brian Catling is $2 in the US and "worldwide" (Kobo US, Kobo WW, Amazon)
Was high on my wishlist. Missed the previous sale. Technically the start of a trilogy, but you can read just the first if you want.
Part horror. VERY weird.
Books 2 and 3 are £3 in the UK.
Video review by SFF180

Bought all three! (I'll be reading them in this order: Vol.1, Vol.2, Vol.3)

THANK YOU! THESE LOOK GREAT!

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Bought all three! (I'll be reading them in this order: Vol.1, Vol.2, Vol.3)

THANK YOU! THESE LOOK GREAT!

Catling created a lot of cylcops art (including an illustration of Alan Moore).

[pdurrant]

Amazon UK's New Year Day's Kindle Big Deal is George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Or at least, as the books in the series written so far.

Oddly, book 3 and book 5 are divided into two parts, presumably as equivalents of newly published paper editions.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/b/?_encodin...ode=4725112031

£0.99 each.

[salty-horse]

The Mirage by Matt Ruff is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

A mind-bending novel in which an alternate history of 9/11 and its aftermath uncovers startling truths about America and the Middle East

11/9/2001: Christian fundamentalists hijack four jetliners. They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers.

The United Arab States declares a War on Terror. Arabian and Persian troops invade the Eastern Seaboard and establish a Green Zone in Washington, D.C. . . .

Summer, 2009: Arab Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi interrogates a captured suicide bomber. The prisoner claims that the world they are living in is a mirage—in the real world, America is a superpower, and the Arab states are just a collection of "backward third-world countries." A search of the bomber's apartment turns up a copy of The New York Times, dated September 12, 2001, that appears to support his claim. Other captured terrorists have been telling the same story. The president wants answers, but Mustafa soon discovers he's not the only interested party.

The gangster Saddam Hussein is conducting his own investigation. And the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee—a war hero named Osama bin Laden—will stop at nothing to hide the truth. As Mustafa and his colleagues venture deeper into the unsettling world of terrorism, politics, and espionage, they are confronted with questions without any rational answers, and the terrifying possibility that their world is not what it seems.

Matt Ruff has created a shadow world that is eerily recognizable but, at the same time, almost unimaginable. Gripping, subversive, and unexpectedly moving, The Mirage probes our deepest convictions and most arresting fears.

Secret Harmonies by Paul McAuley is $1 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Set in the same universe as the earlier Four Hundred Billion Stars (also available for cheap), but they're unrelated.

The planet Elysium should be a paradise.

Like Earth before the Age of Waste, it is both beautiful and bountiful, inhabited by peaceful aboriginals and human colonists. But in its chief city, Port of Plenty, the first colonists have kept the superior technology sent from Earth for themselves, governing the outlying settlements with an iron fist.

As unrest grows, two unlikely allies, Richard Florey, an employee of the city's university, and Miguel Lucas, a settler who has 'gone dingo', are caught up in a revolution that could awaken the alien aboriginals and change the balance of power on Elysium forever . . .

[SomeSteve]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Vorrh by Brian Catling is $2 in the US and "worldwide" ...
Was high on my wishlist. Missed the previous sale.

And I missed this one. Maybe next time.

Technically the start of a trilogy, but you can read just the first if you want.
Part horror. VERY weird.

Looks interesting, at least.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Amazon UK's New Year Day's Kindle Big Deal is George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Or at least, as the books in the series written so far.

Oddly, book 3 and book 5 are divided into two parts, presumably as equivalents of newly published paper editions.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/b/?_encodin...ode=4725112031

£0.99 each.

The original paperback releases were also split into 2 books (at least in the UK), so it's nothing to do with a new paperback release. I suspect it's to do with size.