FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

We Are the Crisis by Cadwell Turnbull is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Sequel to No Gods, No Monsters.

[salty-horse]

Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher is $2 in the US (Kobo US, Kobo WW, Amazon)
First in a series. Grimdark. Popular on booktube, but some hate it.

Faith shapes the landscape, defines the laws of physics, and makes a mockery of truth. Common knowledge isn't an axiom, it's a force of nature. What the masses believe is. But insanity is a weapon, conviction a shield. Delusions give birth to foul new gods.

Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geisteskranken--men and women whose delusions manifest, twisting reality. High Priest Konig seeks to create order from chaos. He defines the beliefs of his followers, leading their faith to one end: a young boy, Morgen, must Ascend to become a god. A god they can control.

But there are many who would see this would-be-god in their thrall, including the High Priest's own Doppels, and a Slaver no one can resist. Three reprobates--The Greatest Swordsman in the World, a murderous Kleptic, and possibly the only sane man left--have their own nefarious plans for the young god.

As these forces converge on the boy, there's one more obstacle: time is running out. When one's delusions become more powerful, they become harder to control. The fate of the Geisteskranken is to inevitably find oneself in the Afterdeath.

The question, then, is: Who will rule there?

[zje]

The Long Sunset by Jack McDevitt is $1.99 in US (Amazon) (Kobo)

From Nebula Award winner Jack McDevitt comes the eighth installment in the popular The Academy series—Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchins discovers an interstellar message from a highly advanced race that could be her last chance for a mission before the program is shut down for good.

Hutch has been the Academy’s best pilot for decades. She’s had numerous first contact encounters and even became a minor celebrity. But world politics have shifted from exploration to a growing fear that the program will run into an extraterrestrial race more advanced than humanity and war.

Despite taking part in the recent scientific breakthrough that rejuvenates the human body and expands one’s lifespan, Hutch finds herself as a famous interstellar pilot with little to do, until a message from an alien race arrives.

The message is a piece of music from an unexplored area. Despite the fact that this alien race could pose a great danger and that this message could have taken several thousand years to travel, the program prepares the last interstellar ship for the journey. As the paranoia grows, Hutch and her crew make an early escape—but what they find at the other end of the galaxy is completely unexpected.

[Aleron Ives]

The second book in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, The Tombs of Atuan, is $2.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008GTB52E
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-tombs-of-atuan-5

In this second novel in the Earthsea series, Tenar is chosen as high priestess to the ancient and nameless Powers of the Earth, and everything is taken from her—home, family, possessions, even her name. She is now known only as Arha, the Eaten One, and guards the shadowy, labyrinthine Tombs of Atuan.

Then a wizard, Ged Sparrowhawk, comes to steal the Tombs’ greatest hidden treasure, the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. Tenar’s duty is to protect the Ring, but Ged possesses the light of magic and tales of a world that Tenar has never known. Will Tenar risk everything to escape from the darkness that has become her domain?

[salty-horse]

The new StoryBundle wasn't mentioned, so here it is:
Twisted Folklore Histories - https://storybundle.com/folklore

I mentioned some of these books in the past
I'm mostly getting this for Isabel Yap's collection.

$5 tier:

• Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
• Blood Mountain by Brenda S. Tolian
• The Twice-Drowned Saint by C. S. E. Cooney
• The History of Soul 2065 by Barbara Krasnoff

$20 tier:

• A Feast of Sorrows by Angela Slatter
• Dance on Saturday by Elwin Cotman
• Chasing Whispers by Eugen Bacon
• Black Cranes edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn
• The Collected Enchantments by Theodora Goss
• Like Smoke, Like Light by Yukimi Ogawa
• Dark Breakers by C. S. E. Cooney
• Shadow Atlas edited by Carina Bissett, Hillary Dodge and Joshua Viola

[salty-horse]

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Inspired by Aladdin. Was on my wishlist.

Shantiport was supposed to be a gateway to the stars. But the city is sinking, and its colonist rulers aren’t helping anyone but themselves.

Lina, a daughter of failed revolutionaries, has no desire to escape Shantiport. She loves her city and would do anything to save its people. This is, in fact, the plan for her life, made before she was even born.

Her brother, Bador, is a small monkey bot with a big attitude and bigger ambitions. He wants a chance to leave this dead-end planet and explore the universe on his own terms. But that would mean abandoning the family he loves—even if they do take him for granted.

When Shantiport's resident tech billionaire coerces Lina into retrieving a powerful artifact rumored to be able to reshape reality, forces from before their time begin coalescing around the siblings. And when you throw in a piece of sentient, off-world tech with the ability to grant three wishes into the mix… None of the city's powers will know what hit them.

The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
First in the follow-up series to The Shades of Magic.

[DrLimu]

Originally Posted by zje

The Long Sunset by Jack McDevitt is $1.99 in US (Amazon) (Kobo)

Thanks for the tip, I found quite a lot of his books are on sale on amazon.co.uk or Google for the rest of europe (?).

I bought book 4-7 of the Alex Benedict series, as I remember enjoying the first three.

[salty-horse]

Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell's 1984 by Sandra Newman is $3 in the US (Kobo US, Kobo WW, Amazon)

Julia Worthing is a mechanic, working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. It’s 1984, and Britain (now called Airstrip One) has long been absorbed into the larger trans-Atlantic nation of Oceania. Oceania has been at war for as long as anyone can remember, and is ruled by an ultra-totalitarian Party, whose leader is a quasi-mythical figure called Big Brother. In short, everything about this world is as it is in Orwell’s 1984.

All her life, Julia has known only Oceania, and, until she meets Winston Smith, she has never imagined anything else. She is an ideal citizen: cheerfully cynical, always ready with a bribe, piously repeating every political slogan while believing in nothing. She routinely breaks the rules, but also collaborates with the regime when necessary. Everyone likes Julia.

Then one day she finds herself walking toward Winston Smith in a corridor and impulsively slips him a note, setting in motion the devastating, unforgettable events of the classic story. Julia takes us on a surprising journey through Orwell’s now-iconic dystopia, with twists that reveal unexpected sides not only to Julia, but to other familiar figures in the 1984 universe. This unique perspective lays bare our own world in haunting and provocative ways, just as the original did almost seventy-five years ago.

[salty-horse]

Crossposted to Horror.
The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
An expansion of the novella Botch Town.

In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness—until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.

Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police—while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.

Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family—all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable—The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.

[salty-horse]

Three Days to Never by Tim Powers is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Albert Einstein's groundbreaking scientific discoveries made possible the creation of the most terrible weapon the world had ever known. But he made another discovery that he chose to reveal to no one—to keep from human hands a power that dwarfed the atomic bomb.

When twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity takes a videotape labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure from her recently deceased grandmother's house, neither she nor her college-professor father, Frank, realize what they now have in their possession. In an instant they are thrust into the center of a world-altering conspiracy, drawing the dangerous attentions of both the Israeli Secret Service and an ancient European cabal of occultists. Now father and daughter have three days to learn the rules of a terrifying magical chess game in order to escape a fate more profound than death—because the Marritys hold the key to the ultimate destruction of not only what's to come . . . but what already has been.

[GlennD]

Exiles, by Melanie Rawn, is on sale at Amazon for $1.99.

The title on Amazon is a little messed up; the series name is Exiles, the book itself should be "The Ruins of Ambrai". It's listed as a trilogy, but the third book has, as yet, not been written. She had made noises about writing it back in 2014, but there's been nothing that I can find since then. I'm crossing my fingers that this sale is a precursor to maybe finally seeing the completion of the trilogy.

Rawn is probably best known for the Dragon Prince and Dragon star trilogies, which are some of the best fantasy from the 80s/90s IMO.

[salty-horse]

The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

A frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it.

Ronan Szepessy promised himself he'd never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City's distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge.

Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom's wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become -- overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable.

Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren't the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan's hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.

[salty-horse]

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter is £1 on Amazon UK
Seminal work of fantasy retellings.
Here's a panel about her work from the British Library's Realms of Imagination event, with Kelly Link, Marina Warner, Terri Windling, moderated by Amal El-Mohtar.

Discover Angela Carter's classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales interwoven by a master of seductive, luminous storytelling.

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

Whether you're discovering these stories for the first time, or revisiting them after years away, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories remains an astounding collection by one of the twentieth century's most exciting and original writers.

[salty-horse]

Wild Life by Molly Gloss is $2 on Amazon.com
Hopefully The Dazzle of Day will also get a discount soon...?

In 1905, a cigar-smoking, feminist writer of popular adventure novels for women encounters Bigfoot in Molly Gloss’s best loved novel—**“never has there been a more authentic, persuasive, or moving evocation of this elusive legend: a masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Set among lava sinkholes and logging camps at the fringe of the Northwest frontier in the early 1900s, Wild Life is the story—both real and imagined—of the free-thinking, cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who pens dime-store women’s adventure stories. One day, when a little girl gets lost in the woods, Charlotte anxiously joins the search. When she becomes lost in the dark and tangled woods, she finds herself face to face with a mysterious band of mountain giants…or more commonly known as Sasquatch.

With great assurance and skill, Molly Gloss blends “heady cerebral satisfactions, gorgeous prose, and page-turning adventure” (Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves), and puts a new spin on a classic piece of American folklore.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter is £1 on Amazon UK
Seminal work of fantasy retellings.
Here's a panel about her work from the British Library's Realms of Imagination event, with Kelly Link, Marina Warner, Terri Windling, moderated by Amal El-Mohtar.

Angela Carter's Book Of Wayward Girls And Wicked Women is 85p https://www.amazon.co.uk/Angela-Cart...dp/B0166WL9WI/