FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Differently Morphous by Yahtzee Croshaw is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Humorous.

A magical serial killer is on the loose, and gelatinous, otherworldly creatures are infesting the English countryside. Which is making life for the Ministry of Occultism difficult, because magic is supposed to be their best kept secret.

After centuries in the shadows, the Ministry is forced to unmask, exposing the country's magical history--and magical citizens--to a brave new world of social media, government scrutiny, and public relations.

On the trail of the killer are the Ministry's top agents: a junior operative with a photographic memory (and not much else), a couple of overgrown schoolboys with godlike powers, and a demonstrably insane magician.

But as they struggle for results, their superiors at HQ must face the greatest threat the Ministry has ever known: the forces of political correctness . . .

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BionicGecko

William Gibson's The Peripheral is 99p today at Amazon UK (and £3.99 at Kobo UK, but should be eligible for their Price Match Guarantee).

The Peripheral is a really good series on Amazon Prime Video.

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The Peripheral is a really good series on Amazon Prime Video.

Very different from the book - both are weird in their own way.
Don't expect many action sequences when reading.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Differently Morphous by Yahtzee Croshaw is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Humorous.

I bought and read one of his previous novels, Will Save the Galaxy for Food. It was okay. If I bought this one it would probably be just to support his channel.

[Hollow Man]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Very different from the book - both are weird in their own way.
Don't expect many action sequences when reading.

Great book. Reading Agency now.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

I bought and read one of his previous novels, Will Save the Galaxy for Food. It was okay. If I bought this one it would probably be just to support his channel.

I've played his game many times. Yahtzee!

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've played his game many times. Yahtzee!

I know this a joke, but he is a game designer and has made several games (mostly of the adventure genre)
http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/games.htm

I highly recommend the Chzo Mythos/John DeFoe series of horror mystery games (which didn't start out as a series), starting with 5 Days A Stranger. They play around with genre. The second game is set on a space ship in the far future, with some echoes to the first game. And the third one goes back to the past, and has a parser interface similar to the old Sierra games. The last one is the weirdest

[salty-horse]

The Keeper's Six by Kate Elliott is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Was on my wishlist. Unofficially(?) set in the same universe as Servant Mage, but no familiarity is required.

You never stop worrying about your kids, even when they're adults. Features a world-hopping, bad-ass, spell-slinging mother who sets out to rescue her kidnapped adult son from a dragon lord with everything to lose.

It’s been a year since Esther set foot in the Beyond, the alien landscape stretching between worlds, crossing boundaries of space and time. She and her magical traveling party—her Hex—haven’t spoken since the Concilium banned them from the Beyond for a decade. But when she wakes in the middle of the night to her grown son’s cry for help, the members of her Hex are the only ones she can trust to help her bring him back from wherever he has been taken.

Esther will have to risk everything to find him. Undercover and hidden from the Concilium, she and her Hex will be tested by false dragon lords, a darkness so dense it can suffocate, and the bones of an old crime come back to haunt her.

There are terrors that dwell in the space between worlds.

[salty-horse]

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky is $2 on Amazon.com
Standalone fantasy. Another novel in the same world has been announced.
I have it and have yet to read it, but everyone's really positive about it.

A darkly inventive portrait of a city under occupation and on the verge of revolution.

There has always been a darkness to Ilmar, but never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse.

What will be the spark that lights the conflagration?

Despite the city's refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood – that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores.

Ilmar, some say, is the worst place in the world and the gateway to a thousand worse places.

Ilmar, City of Long Shadows.

City of Bad Decisions.

City of Last Chances.

[ZodWallop]

Shardik by Richard Adams is $1.99 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo US.

In a bitterly divided world, a giant bear becomes an object of worship in “the extraordinary fantasy novel by the author of Watership Down” (The Guardian, UK).

In a burning forest, Kelderek the hunter encounters a gigantic bear unlike any he’s seen before. Surely this is the reincarnation of Lord Shardik, the messenger of god whose return has been anticipated by the primitive Ortelgan people. In service to Shardik, Kelderek becomes a prophet, then a soldier, and finally an emperor-priest. Swept up by fate and his impassioned faith, Klederek will come to discover ever-deeper layers of meaning implicit in the bear’s divinity.

Written after his bestselling debut novel Watership Down, Richard Adams’s Shardik is an epic fantasy of tragic character. A fascinating depiction of the power of belief, it explores themes of faith, slavery, and war.

[sufue]

A collection of three Walter Tevis books has dropped to $3.99 in the US, and it’s discountable at Kobo US. The books in the Walter Tevis Sci-Fi Novels collection are: The Man Who Fell to Earth, Mockingbird, and The Steps of the Sun.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L9JZ9ZW
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/wal...-sci-fi-novels

Spoiler:

Three science fiction novels from the Nebula Award–nominated author of The Hustler and The Color of Money.

The Man Who Fell to Earth
After his home planet is devastated by war, an alien disguised as a human comes to Earth on a mission to save his people. He begins amassing wealth needed to build a spacecraft to bring his people to join him, but his plans get sidelined when he descends into alcoholism.

Mockingbird
On a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity has suffered devastating losses, people are drugged from childhood on, there is no art, and reading is illegal. A suicidal machine runs the world, while the passion between two humans provides the only hope for humankind.

The Steps of the Sun
When the world’s richest man travels to the stars in search of the mineral wealth America needs to get it out of an energy crisis, he finds more than he bargains for—and gets more than he ever believed was possible . . .

[ZodWallop]

Helliconia Spring by Brian W. Aldiss is $1.99 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo US.

The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author and Science Fiction Grand Master delivers a sweeping epic of a planet suffering deadly conditions of alternating extremes in this Nebula Award finalist

Helliconia follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system with a twenty-six-hundred-year cycle of very long seasons. As spring slowly breaks the brutally long winter, humans emerge from hiding and a long sequence of civilization and growth begins to repeat again, unbeknownst to the participants but watched by an orbiting satellite station, Avernus, created by Earth some centuries ago. Humans free themselves from slavery to the aboriginal Phagors, and religion and science flower and expand.

Brian W. Aldiss has, for more than fifty years, continued to challenge readers’ minds with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive fiction. Helliconia Spring’s prescience with regard to climate change is nothing short of extraordinary.

[ZodWallop]

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is $1.99 at Amazon, B&N and Kobo US.

A space-traveling Jesuit priest confronts a moral but godless alien race in this Hugo Award–winning novel by the author of the Cities in Flight saga.

Father Ruiz-Sanchez is a dedicated man, a Jesuit priest who is also a scientist, and a scientist who is also a human being. He doesn’t feel any genuine conflicts in his belief system—until he is sent to Lithia.

The reptilian inhabitants of this distant world appear to be admirable in every way. Untroubled by greed or lust, they live in peace. But they have no concept of God, no literature, and no art. They rely purely on cold reason. But something darker lies beneath the surface: Do the Lithians pose a hidden threat? The answers that unfold could affect the fate of two worlds. Will Ruiz-Sanchez, a priest driven by his deeply human understanding of good and evil, do the right thing when confronted by a race that is alien to its core?

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia lauds A Case of Conscience as “one of the first serious attempts to deal with religion [in science fiction], and [it] remains one of the most sophisticated. It is generally regarded as an SF classic.” Readers of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, or Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz will find this award-winning novel a gripping, compelling exploration of some of the most intractable and important questions faced by the human species. Includes an introduction by Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Greg Bear.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Helliconia Spring by Brian W. Aldiss is $1.99

I particularly like this review of Aldiss's writing on the trilogy as a whole:

"The detail can get you bogged down at times but at others the author just skims through things as in 'I dropped the bomb and it went off. The next day I ate some ice cream and began studying piano for three years.' (Not an actual quote from the book, but you get the drift.) I wouldn't go out of my way to look for other books by this author."

I guess he wasn't a fan.

[salty-horse]

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Returning triumphantly to the brilliantly evoked near-Renaissance world of A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky, international bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay deploys his signature ‘quarter turn to the fantastic’ to tell a story of vengeance, power, and love.

On a dark night along a lonely stretch of coast a small ship sends two people ashore. Their purpose is assassination. They have been hired by two of the most dangerous men alive to alter the balance of power in the world. If they succeed, the consequences will affect the destinies of empires, and lives both great and small.

One of those arriving at that beach is a woman abducted by corsairs as a child and sold into years of servitude. Having escaped, she is trying to chart her own course—and is bent upon revenge. Another is a seafaring merchant who still remembers being exiled as a child with his family from their home, for their faith, a moment that never leaves him. In what follows, through a story both intimate and epic, unforgettable characters are immersed in the fierce and deadly struggles that define their time.

All the Seas of the World is a page-turning drama that also offers moving reflections on memory, fate, and the random events that can shape our lives—in the past, and today.

Inda by Sherwood Smith is $1 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
First in a complete series. Previous discounts were $3.

Indevan-Dal is the second son of the Prince and Princess of Choraed Elgaer, destined to become his elder brother Tanrid'’ Shield Arm—his military champion. Like all second sons, he is to be privately trained at home by Tanrid, the brother whose lands he will one day protect.

When the King’s Voice comes to summon Inda to the Military Academy, he might well feel foreboding, or even fear—war is imminent—yet youthful Inda feels only excitement.

But there are things that Tanrid hasn’t prepared him for, and Inda will soon learn that the greatest threats to his safety will not come from foreign enemies, but from supposed allies within his own country.