FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[tlc]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Looks like a mistook, by Baen or Amazon, so have reported it to Baen tech support. Having checked by buying first.

I checked it, too. Just to be thorough.

[Kieran Seymour]

Originally Posted by tlc

I checked it, too. Just to be thorough.

Quite right. You can never be too careful with these sorts of things...

While I'm here, I've just noticed that there's some cheap Ray Bradbury books from HarperVoyager at Amazon UK at the moment. 99p each.

Death is a Lonely Business

Spoiler:

Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort – until strange things begin happening around him.

Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious ‘accidents’ – some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.

Now and Forever

Spoiler:

Two previously unpublished novellas comprise this astonishing new volume from one of science fiction's greatest living writers. In the first, 'Somewhere a Band is Playing', newsman James Cardiff is lured through poetry and his fascination with a beautiful and enigmatic young woman to Summerton, Arizona. The small town's childless population hold an extraordinary secret which has been passed on for thousands of years unbeknownst to the rest of human civilization.

In the second novella, 'Leviathan '99', the classic tale of Herman Melville's ‘Moby Dick’ is reborn as an interstellar adventure. It recounts the exploits of the mad Captain Ahab, who, blinded by his first encounter with a gigantic comet called 'Leviathan', pursues his lunatic vendetta across the universe. Born in space and seeking adventure in the skies, astronaut Ishmael Jones joins the crew aboard the Cetus 7 and quickly finds his fate in the hands of an indefatigable captain.

Published together for the first time in one volume, these two stories twinkle with Bradbury's characteristically intricate metaphors and lyrical phrases. Both are a lasting testament to an older generation of writers that, much like the Leviathan itself, are on the threshold of passing on into the realm of legend.

Let's All Kill Constance

Spoiler:

On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge – and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included among them.

And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood – a graveyard of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and shattered dreams … and, all too often, to death.

Quicker Than the Eye (contents at ISFDB.org)

Spoiler:

The internationally acclaimed author of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury is a magician at the height of his powers, displaying his sorcerer's skill with twenty-one remarkable stories that run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of growing young and mad; opening a Witch Door that links two intolerant centuries; joining an ancient couple in their wild assassination games; celebrating life and dreams in the unique voice that has favoured him across six decades and has enchanted millions of readers the world over.

Driving Blind (contents at ISFDB.org)

Spoiler:

Over the course of a long and celebrated career, Ray Bradbury has traveled many roads: cruising down country highways that wound through the unseen heart of small-town America; exploring rutted backwoods paths that led to dark and dangerous places; racing at mach-speed along shimmering celestial turnpikes as limitless and exciting as the unbound imagination.

DRIVING BLIND is a stunning collection of short fiction. With a steady hand on the wheel, the master once again transports us to remarkable places – and to warm and achingly familiar destinations of the heart, revealed as we've never seen them before in the brilliance of day or gloom of night. Here are unforgettable excursions to the fantastic, glorious grand tours through time and memory – interspersed with strange, unexpected side trips to the disturbing and eerie – where surprises are waiting around every curve and just beyond each mile marker.

These are new roads we have never ridden before – sprawling interstates and lush, twisting rural routes fraught with dangers and delights of all manner, shape and substance. With Ray Bradbury in the driver's seat, the journey promises to be a memorable one. Come along and enjoy the ride.

And Stephen King's Christine seems to have finally settled at £1.99.

[pdurrant]

Crystal Rain by Tobias S Buckell seems to be free at Amazon UK at the moment. The first in his 'Xenowealth" series.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by booklover6

I hope Overdrive gets it eventually.

Only if Baen's negotiations with OverDrive bear fruit. For now, no Baen stuff is available through OverDrive libraries.

[ATDrake]

X-link to the DRM-free thread for a new Humble Bundle:

Humble Book Bundle Haikasoru presented by Viz Media contains Japanese science fiction in translation, with both popular series volumes such as Legend of the Galactic Heroes, as well as individual titles by established and up-and-coming authors.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

X-link to the DRM-free thread for a new Humble Bundle:

Humble Book Bundle Haikasoru presented by Viz Media contains Japanese science fiction in translation, with both popular series volumes such as Legend of the Galactic Heroes, as well as individual titles by established and up-and-coming authors.

Thanks for that. I only have the first Yukikaze book and I wasn't aware it was a first book.

[orangekiwi]

Trading in Danger (Vatta's War Book 1) by Elizabeth Moon is currently $1.99 in the US

https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Dange.../dp/B000FBJBA4
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/trading-in-danger-1

Ky Vatta is a highly promising military cadet with a great future ahead of her, until an apparently insignificant act of kindness makes her the focus of the Academy's wrath. She is forced to resign, her dreams shattered.For the child of a rich trading family, this should mean disgrace on a grand scale. And yet, to her surprise, Ky is offered the captaincy of a ship headed for scrap with its final cargo.Her orders are absolutely clear, but Ky quickly sees potential profit in altering the parameters of the journey. Because, whatever the risks, it's in her blood to trade - even if the currency is extreme danger.

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by Kieran Seymour

Hodder and Stoughton are having one of their very infrequent sales of Stephen King novels at Amazon UK. £1.99 each. Best be quick as Carrie and The Shining have both returned to their usual prices since this morning and they weren't reduced when I looked yesterday.

The Dark Tower: 1: The Gunslinger
The Stand
Christine
Misery
Different Seasons

Damn! There are a few Stephen King novels I still want but they don't seem to be included.

[orangekiwi]

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett is currently $1.99 at amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Thief-Time-Di.../dp/B000W916WK

Everybody wants more time, which is why on Discworld only the experts can manage it -- the venerable Monks of History who store it and pump it from where it's wasted, like underwater (how much time does a codfish really need?), to places like cities, where busy denizens lament, "Oh where does the time go?"
While everyone always talks about slowing down, one young horologist is about to do the unthinkable. He's going to stop. Well, stop time that is, by building the world's first truly accurate clock. Which means esteemed History Monk Lu-Tze and his apprentice Lobsang Ludd have to put on some speed to stop the timepiece before it starts. For if the Perfect Clock starts ticking, Time -- as we know it -- will end. And then the trouble will really begin...

and

Magic Bleeds by Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels #4) is also $1.99 in the US

https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Bleeds-.../dp/B003NX7NHO
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/magic-bleeds

Kate Daniels works for the Order of the Knights of Merciful Aid, officially as a liaison with the mercenary guild. Unofficially, she cleans up the paranormal problems no one else wants to handle—especially if they involve Atlanta’s shapeshifting community.

When she’s called in to investigate a fight at the Steel Horse, a bar midway between the territories of the shapeshifters and the necromancers, Kate quickly discovers there’s a new player in town. One who’s been around for thousands of years—and rode to war at the side of Kate’s father.

This foe may be too much even for Kate and Curran, the Lord of the Beasts, to handle. Because this time, Kate will be taking on family...

[orangekiwi]

One Fell Sweep (Innkeeper Chronicles Book 3) by Ilona Andrews is currently $1.49 at amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Fell-Sweep-In.../dp/B01MSJJFAC

Dina DeMille may run the nicest Bed and Breakfast in Red Deer, Texas, but she caters to a very particular kind of guest… the kind that no one on Earth is supposed to know about. Guests like a former intergalactic tyrant with an impressive bounty on her head, the Lord Marshal of a powerful vampire clan, and a displaced-and-superhot werewolf; so don’t stand too close, or you may be collateral damage.

But what passes for Dina’s normal life is about to be thrown into chaos. First, she must rescue her long-distant older sister, Maud, who’s been exiled with her family to a planet that functions as the most lawless penal colony since Botany Bay. Then she agrees to help a guest whose last chance at saving his civilization could bring death and disaster to all Dina holds dear. Now Gertrude Hunt is under siege by a clan of assassins. To keep her guests safe and to find her missing parents, Dina will risk everything, even if she has to pay the ultimate price. Though Sean may have something to say about that!

[Kieran Seymour]

There's some interesting items at Amazon UK at the moment. The first three are Monthly Deals for October.

The City & The City - China Miéville - £1.19
Might be worth picking up now in anticipation of the television adaptation which should be on the BBC in the next month or two.

Spoiler:

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other.

With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, the multi-award winning The City & The City by China Miéville is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy - £1.19

Spoiler:

So good that it will devour you. It is incandescent. - Daily Telegraph

The Road is the astonishing post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams - Peter F Hamilton - £1.19
Book 1 of 2 in the Chronicles of the Fallers series. This wasn't one of the novels included in the recent PFH sale.

Spoiler:

The first volume in the Chronicles of the Fallers, The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton, is an exceptional novel exploring the mystery at the heart of the Commonwealth Universe. Fitting between the events of the Commonwealth Saga and the Void Trilogy, The Abyss Beyond Dreams is the first in an expansive duology, from the master of space opera.

To save their civilization he must destroy it . . .

When images of a lost civilization are 'dreamed' by a self-proclaimed prophet of the age, Nigel Sheldon, inventor of wormhole technology and creator of the Commonwealth society, is asked to investigate. Especially as the dreams seem to be coming from the Void - a mysterious area of living space monitored and controlled because of its hugely destructive capabilities. With it being the greatest threat to the known universe, Nigel is committed to finding out what really lies within the Void and if there's any truth to the visions they've received. Does human life really exist inside its boundary?

But when Nigel crash lands inside the Void, on a planet he didn't even know existed, he finds so much more than he expected. Bienvenido: a world populated by the ancestors of survivors from Commonwealth colony ships that disappeared centuries ago. Since then they've been fighting an increasingly desperate battle against the Fallers, a space-born predator artificially evolved to conquer worlds. Their sole purpose is to commit genocide against every species they encounter. With their powerful telepathic lure - that tempts any who stray across their path to a slow and painful death - they are by far the greatest threat to humanity's continued existence on this planet.

But Nigel soon realizes that the Fallers also hold the key to something he'd never hoped to find - the destruction of the Void itself. If only he can survive long enough to work out how to use it . . .

Weaveworld - Clive Barker - 99p

Spoiler:

Here is storytelling on a grand scale — the stuff of which a classic is made. Weaveworld begins with a rug — a wondrous, magnificent rug — into which a world has been woven. It is the world of the Seerkind, a people more ancient than man, who possesses raptures — the power to make magic. In the last century they were hunted down by an unspeakable horror known as the Scourge, and, threatened with annihilation, they worked their strongest raptures to weave themselves and their culture into a rug for safekeeping. Since then, the rug has been guarded by human caretakers.

The last of the caretakers has just died.

Vying for possession of the rug is a spectrum of unforgettable characters: Suzanna, granddaughter of the last caretaker, who feels the pull of the Weaveworld long before she knows the extent of her own powers; Calhoun Mooney, a pigeon-raising clerk who finds the world he's always dreamed of in a fleeting glimpse of the rug; Immacolata, an exiled Seerkind witch intent on destroying her race even if it means calling back the Scourge; and her sidekick, Shadwell, the Salesman, who will sell the Weaveworld to the highest bidder.

In the course of the novel the rug is unwoven, and we travel deep into the glorious raptures of the Weaveworld before we witness the final, cataclysmic struggle for its possession.

Barker takes us to places where we have seldom been in fiction--places terrifying and miraculous, humorous, and profound. With keen psychological insight and prodigious invention, his trademark graphic vision balanced by a spirit of transcendent promise, Barker explores the darkness and the light, the magical and the monstrous, and celebrates the triumph of the imagination.

The Thief of Always - Clive Barker - 99p

Spoiler:

The horror story your students have been asking you for! The only children’s story by the master of horror.

Mr Hood’s Holiday House has stood for a thousand years, welcoming countless children into its embrace. It is a place of miracles, a blissful round of treats and seasons, where every childish whim may be satisfied.

There is a price to be paid, of course, but young Harvey Swick, bored with his life and beguiled by Mr Hood’s wonders, does not stop to discover the consequences. It is only when the House shows its darker face – when Harvey discovers the pitiful creatures that dwell in its shadow – that he comes to doubt Mr Hood’s philanthropy.

The house and its mysterious architect are not about to release their captive without a battle, however. Mr Hood has ambitions for his new guest, for Harvey’s soul burns brighter than any soul he has encountered for a thousand years…

[Avice]

The Last Good Man by Linda Nagata is $1.60 at Amazon US.

Spoiler:

Scarred by war, in pursuit of truth: Army veteran True Brighton left the service when the development of robotic helicopters made her training as a pilot obsolete. Now she works at Requisite Operations, a private military company established by friend and former Special Ops soldier Lincoln Han. ReqOp has embraced the new technologies. Robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence are all tools used to augment the skills of veteran warfighters-for-hire. But the tragedy of war is still measured in human casualties, and when True makes a chance discovery during a rescue mission, old wounds are ripped open. She's left questioning what she knows of the past, and resolves to pursue the truth, whatever the cost.

The Last Good Man is a powerful, complex, and very human tale.

[Fluribus]

I looked at Amazon.com and noticed that Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers was available for $1.99.

Immediately after purchase, I invited my mother-in-law over. I keep waiting for her to get snatched, but she's STILL here. I've even tried flashing the porch lights. Nothing. I think I got ripped off.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by Fluribus

I looked at Amazon.com and noticed that Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers was available for $1.99.

Immediately after purchase, I invited my mother-in-law over. I keep waiting for her to get snatched, but she's STILL here. I've even tried flashing the porch lights. Nothing. I think I got ripped off.

Are you sure she hadn't already been snatched?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cromag

Are you sure she hadn't already been snatched?

I think she was part of the invasion of the pod people and is now a pod person.