FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

You ordering a Wagyu burger, or what? Online delivery for my nearest McDonalds shows a hamburger combo meal would run about $12.

The Wagyu burger is as Burger King.

[DNSB]

The last time I paid over $30 Cdn per person for a burger meal was at Gordon Ramsay Burger when picking up some friends from the casino after they decided it was too late for transit and too little blood in their alcohol systems for driving. It was pretty decent but, IMNSHO, not worth the price.

I looked at the StoryBundle package and did not find much there to make the whole bundle worth purchasing. I had 2 of the 3 books in the base set and did not find either of them making me want to purchase more for ~$46 Cdn.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

$33 for 29 books is quite a modest price, IMO, if you want the books. If you don't want the books, $3 would be too much.

I got the bundle because there were about 8 books I wanted to replace print editions (which would have cost more than $33), and around another 6 or so where I have one in the trilogy.

So worth it on the grounds of cost.

[salty-horse]

Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me (Dark Lord Davi #2) by Django Wexler is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Sequel to How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying.

[Fbone]

Dragon Keeper (Rain Wilds Chronicles, Vol. 1) by Robin Hobb is available in Prime Reading.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...0908026&sr=1-1

The Poppy War by R. F Kuang is also available in Prime Reading

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072L58JW6..._ov_kndl_dp_rw

[salty-horse]

The Big Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Ellen Datlow is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Previously published in 2008 as The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Includes some horror stories.
Contents: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?249954

It's funny, because I was just thinking of Shira a few hours ago.

[Cactus Chef]

The Majipoor Cycle (The Majipoor Cycle) by Robert Silverberg is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

The first three novels in the acclaimed sci-fi fantasy series from the award-winning author: "An imaginative fusion of action, sorcery, and science fiction" ( The New York Times Book Review).

In the first three books of the Majipoor Cycle, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Robert Silverberg delivered a vast and vividly imagined world full of epic adventure, court intrigue, and high drama.

In Lord Valentine's Castle, an amnesiac wanderer receives dreams of his true destiny as ruler of the planet Majipoor. In Majipoor Chronicles, the planet's bloodthirsty history is revealed through tales of rulers and thieves. And in the final novel, Valentine Pontifex, Valentine faces the threat of civil war as well as conspiracy within his court.

The Kobo statistics for this bundle raised an eyebrow:

About This Book
200 Pages
36 - 39 Hours to read
447k Total words

They must be very long pages!

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

The Majipoor Cycle (The Majipoor Cycle) by Robert Silverberg is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)


The Kobo statistics for this bundle raised an eyebrow:

About This Book
200 Pages
36 - 39 Hours to read
447k Total words

They must be very long pages!

I think the paperback Lord Valentine's Castle was 400+ pages.
Apache

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Apache

I think the paperback Lord Valentine's Castle was 400+ pages.
Apache

Lord Valentine's Castle is about 550 ADE pages. So there's no way this omnibus can be only 200 pages.

[salty-horse]

Greedy Pigs (Sin du Jour Affair #5) by Matt Wallace is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

The Sin du Jour crew caters to the Shadow Government in Greedy Pigs, Matt Wallace's fifth Sin du Jour Affair

"I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."
Politics is a dirty game. When the team at Sin du Jour accidentally caters a meal for the President of the United States and his entourage, they discover a conspiracy that has been in place since before living memory. Meanwhile, the Shadow Government that oversees the co-existence of the natural and supernatural worlds is under threat from the most unlikely of sources.
It's up to one member of the Sin du Jour staff to prevent war on an unimaginable scale.
Between courses, naturally.

[salty-horse]

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Award-winning author Guy Gavriel Kay evokes the dazzling Tang Dynasty of 8th-century China in an masterful story of honor and power.

It begins simply. Shen Tai, son of an illustrious general serving the Emperor of Kitai, has spent two years honoring the memory of his late father by burying the bones of the dead from both armies at the site of one of his father's last great battles. In recognition of his labors and his filial piety, an unlikely source has sent him a dangerous gift: 250 Sardian horses.

You give a man one of the famed Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You give him four or five to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank, and earn him jealousy, possibly mortal jealousy. Two hundred and fifty is an unthinkable gift, a gift to overwhelm an emperor.

Wisely, the gift comes with the stipulation that Tai must claim the horses in person. Otherwise he would probably be dead already...

[salty-horse]

The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Jo Walton on the book:

The Chronoliths is a character story that also gives us a lot to think about—exactly what science fiction ought to do.

I read this in one gulp, barely setting it down at all, and I think I remember doing the same the first time I read it. So you might want to clear some time in your schedule for this one.

Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past--and soon to be haunted by the future.
In early-twenty-first-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory--sixteen years in the future.
Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok--obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note?
Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel and the winner of the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

[salty-horse]

The Court of Broken Knives (Empires of Dust #1) by Anna Smith Spark is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

" Gritty and glorious" this grimdark fantasy featuring the overthrow of a rival kingdom and a secret prince ready to claim the throne is a "great read" (Miles Cameron, author of The Traitor Son cycle)
It is the richest empire the world has ever known, and it is also doomed—but only one man can see it.
Haunted by prophetic dreams, Orhan has hired a company of soldiers to cross the desert to reach the capital city. Once they enter the palace, they have one mission: kill the emperor, then all those who remain. Only from the ashes can a new empire be built.
The company is a group of good, ordinary soldiers for whom this is a mission like any other. But the strange boy Marith who walks among them is no ordinary soldier. Though he is young, ambitious, and impossibly charming, something dark hides in Marith's past—and in his blood.
Dive into this new fantasy series for readers looking for epic battle scenes, gritty heroes, and blood-soaked revenge.

[salty-horse]

Cross-posting to Horror.
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Today only! High on my wishlist.

Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s sure hands, every uncovered secret is fraught with intrigue and creeping horror.”—Tananarive Due, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Reformatory

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.

[salty-horse]

A Language of Dragons by S. F. Williamson is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
Young adult fantasy, first in series.

EVERY FIRE STARTS WITH A SINGLE SPARK.

Welcome to Bletchley Park… with dragons.

London, 1923. Dragons soar through the skies and protests erupt on the streets, but Vivien Featherswallow isn’t worried. She’s going to follow the rules, get an internship studying dragon languages, and make sure her little sister never has to risk growing up Third Class. By midnight, Viv has started a civil war.

With her parents arrested and her sister missing, all the safety Viv has worked for is collapsing around her. So when a lifeline is offered in the form of a mysterious ‘job’, she grabs it. Arriving at Bletchley Park, Viv discovers that she has been recruited as a codebreaker helping the war effort – if she succeeds, she and her family can all go home again. If she doesn’t, they’ll all die.

At first Viv believes that her challenge, of discovering the secrets of a hidden dragon language, is doable. But the more she learns, the more she realises that the bubble she’s grown up in isn’t as safe as she thought, and eventually Viv must decide: What war is she really fighting?

An epic, sweeping fantasy with an incredible Dark Academia setting, a clandestine, slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance, and an unputdownable story, filled with twists and turns, betrayals and secret identities, A Language of Dragons is the unmissable debut of 2025, from an extraordinary new voice.[/I]