FREE/BARGAIN - DRM-Free - 2015

[ATDrake]

The new Wildside Press freebie for this Tuesday is:

Seeds of Murder: A Captain North Tale by the late Van Wyck Mason (Wikipedia), the start of a long-running pulp intrigue series starring a U.S. Army Intelligence agent, originally published in 1930.

When Mr. Wallace was found neatly suspended from a hook in the bathroom ceiling, with a slender chain around his neck and the wastebasket on which he had stood carefully kicked away, there seemed little doubt of it. Especially as there was a note in the dead man's handwriting saying, "I am worried, tired, and sick of heart. Why go on with this senseless struggle? Disgrace faces me."

But—why was the sheet on which the note was written shorter than all the other sheets on the desk? Where had the three seeds that come from that were found near the body, and why should Wallace, partner in a brokerage house, have chosen the beginning of a merry Long Island house party to have committed suicide? Captain North, late of the American Intelligence Service, saw these things, and they puzzled him.

Before that dreadful night was over, death struck again, and the terrified house guests knew that in their midst was a killer—cold blooded, ruthless, efficents—and always the three white seeds followed in his wake…a symbol of death!

Also, a reminder of some bundles expiring within the next couple of days:

Humble Comics Bundle The X-Files Presented by IDW is good until 11 AM Pacific Time tomorrow on Wednesday. It's mostly comics based on the popular TV series, but there are two prose tie-in novel reprints and one brand-new anthology of short stories with contributions by award-winning sfnal authors.

StoryBundle's Sci-Fi Spectrum Bundle, curated by indie author Joseph R. Lallo and featuring a mix of things by indie and trad-published authors, expires in 2 days.

[ATDrake]

New Humble Bundle is up and it's for:

Humble Book Bundle Learn Raspberry Pi + Arduino presented by Make:, chock-full of titles for DIY robotics and programming enthusiasts, from the popular magazine.

This is already up to just under $13 for the more-than-average tier (with more titles to be added next week), and is $15 for the top tier.

Pay what you want for Make: Raspberry Pi and AVR Projects, MintDuino: Building an Arduino-compatible Breadboard Microcontroller, Make: Getting Started with Adafruit Trinket, Make: Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA, Make: Making Simple Robots, and Make: Arduino Bots and Gadgets.

Pay more than the average price to also receive Make: A Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot; MAKE 38: High-Tech DIY; MAKE 36: Boards and Microcontrollers; Make: The Maker’s Manual; Make: JavaScript Robotics; Make: Getting Started with Sensors; Make: Getting Started with Arduino, 3rd Edition; Make: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, 2nd Edition; and Make: AVR Programming.

Pay $15 or more for all of that plus Making Things Talk and Make: Sensors.

Plus, everyone who buys the bundle receives $10 off a print and $5 off a digital Make: Magazine subscription.

Also, last week's Humble Book Bundle Prime Sci-Fantasy has added 3 more anthologies to the more-than-average tier, including time travel, zombies, and more Cthulhu (not all in the same anthology, mind you).

StoryBundle has a new offering, good for the next 28 days:

The VanderMeer Winter Mix Tape Bundle curated by Ann (ISFDB, Wikipedia) & Jeff VanderMeer (ISFDB, Wikipedia), continues their tradition of offering speculative/experimental literary & sf/fantasy fiction from diverse sources such as translated foreign authors and niche works, many of them not available as ebooks from other sources.

There's works by Finland's Leena Krohn (ISFDB, Wikipedia), Germany's Eugen Egner (ISFDB, Wikipedia DE), Norway's Berit Ellingsen (ISFDB), as well as story contributions from better-known World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula award-winners and finalists.

$5 minimum gets you a World Fantasy Award-finalist novel, a literary fantasy novel, a Spanish steampunk anthology, a themed anthology of space opera featuring women heroes, and the collected edition of Leena Krohn's novels (including 2 novels not previously published in English).

$15 top tier adds 2 novels by foreign authors and 2 anthologies (one of them a complete collection of a year's worth of Clarkseworld magazine stories; the other an imaginary bestiary filled with stories by notable fantasy authors including China Mieville), as well as Leena Krohn's collected short fiction.

This is pretty much an auto-buy for me, since I'm always interested in seeing speculative fiction from other countries/cultures, and the complete set of Krohn novels alone would probably make it worth it in monetary terms, even if the other stuff didn't look interesting (which it does).

[ATDrake]

New Wildside Press freebie for this Tuesday:

The Silver Menace by the late Murray Leinster (ISFDB, Wikipedia), a vintage early science fiction alien encounter novel with horror-ish elements.

A classic early science fiction short novel by Murray Leinster—a tale of global doom—originally published in the pulp magazine "The Thrill Book" as a 2-part serial in 1919!

At last the government could keep silence no longer, and the world was informed of the true malignity of the Silver Menace. The silvery jelly had reached the American coasts, invaded and conquered the harbors, and was even then rapidly solidifying the rivers, but its threat did not end there.

Just as it had crept up the sides of Gerrod's test tubes, and as it had overwhelmed the yacht, now it crept up the beaches. Slowly and inexorably die slimy masses of jelly crept above the water line. The beaches were buried below thick blankets of sticky, shimmering animalcules and still the menace grew.

They overwhelmed all obstacles placed in their path. The whole green, fertile earth was threatened with burial beneath a mantle of slimy, silvery, glistening horror!

Also, a reminder that the Humble Book Bundle Prime Sci-Fantasy, chock full of anthologies and story collections (and a cookbook! containing instructions on "To Serve Elf") with contributions by notable award-nominated authors in the genre, ends tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific Time on Wednesday.

[Calenorn]

The link below takes you to the Radio Archives ebook catalog page. They're offering "The Spider #11" free (and DRM free) in both epub and Kindle formats.

This volume includes:

* The Full-Length Feature Novel "Prince of the Red Looters" by Norvell W. Page writing as Grant Stockbridge

* "Doc Turner Visits A Slaughter House" — A Doc Turner Story by Arthur Leo Zagat

* "Dynamite and Stone" — A Short Story by Winston Bouvé

* and a column "The Web" — A Department by Inspector Leslie T. White
How can we aid the Spider’s fight against crime?

http://www.radioarchives.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=128

I have found the Radio Archives books to be very well constructed.

As their name implies, Radio Archives also sells audiobooks, and I think they have a few samples of those also available for free download.

Highly recommended!

[Calenorn]

Over 150 posts to this thread. (And it wasn't started until March.)

Is that enough to qualify it to become a "sticky" in the new year?

[ATDrake]

The new Wildside Press freebie for this Tuesday is:

The Melba Marlett Minipack™ featuring vintage short mystery and literary stories by the late Melba Marlett (biographical obituary at Alliance High School).

Melba Marlett (1909-1994) is an unjustly obscure mystery novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist. I am pleased to have acquired the rights to all of her works for Wildside Press; we will be bringing them back into print over the next year.

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here is a Melba Marlett collection presenting one of her best-known short stories: “The Second Mrs. Porter” (originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Msytery Magazine in 1986) and a mainstream story, “White Peacocks” (originally published in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1959). Also included are 2 bios written by Melba Marlett at different stages of her career.

Enjoy!

StoryBundle has a new offering for the next two weeks, which is a very nice one indeed for:

The New Worlds Bundle curated by Steven Savile, featuring a very substantial selection of complete trilogies and other short series featuring newer and backlist works by authors including Craig Shaw Gardner (ISFDB, Wikipedia), Jody Lynn Nye (ISFDB, Wikipedia), Melissa Scott (ISFDB, Wikipedia), and Bradley P. Beaulieu (ISFDB), which were originally printed by Baen, Ace, Night Shade, and Warner's old Questar imprint, and many more.

At the $7 minimum level, you get 12 books, including Bradley P. Beaulieu's The Lays of Anuskaya trilogy (which you may have already picked up the first two of as bonuses from his Kickstarter a few years ago) which were out from Night Shade Books, and #1-3 of Jody Lynn Nye's Mythology comedic fantasy series out from Questar.

At the $15 top tier level, you get 18 more books, including Melissa Scott's Baen-published Silence Leigh LGBT sci-fantasy hybrid space opera series, which IIRC fellow MR member DMcCunney once recommended to me, so it'll be nice to finally check these out, and Craig Shaw Gardner's Ebenezum Trilogy, which I picked up as paperbacks from the used bookshop and quite enjoy as a pleasantly light-hearted silly parodic fantasy romp.

This is actually very good value for money just for the backlist stuff which I recognize, and there's over a dozen more new books by newer authors to be introduced to as well, so this is an auto-buy for me.

Also, a reminder that the Humble Book Bundle Learn Raspberry Pi + Arduino presented by Make, chock-full of books for the aspiring home robotics programmer, expires tomorrow on Wednesday at 11 AM Pacific Time.

[ATDrake]

In case anyone's interested in Osprey Publishing's historical military combat books and wants to pick up a few cheaply, Humble Bundle has been repeating one of their previous offerings as the Humble Total War Bundle Encore as a weekly bundle expiring tomorrow on Thursday at 11 AM Pacific Time.

For the minimum $1 at the lowest tier, you can get all 3 ebooks, as well as Steam keys for the games, and of course if you want more games you can go up to the $15 top tier and if you want a T-shirt as well, you can go to $30.

It's got 2 of Osprey's books on particular ancient Roman battles (details in the write-up for the original bundle in the post here), plus 1 novelization of one of the game campaigns.

[AnemicOak]

Pwning Tomorrow, a free, Creative Commons-licensed anthology of short fiction curated by EFF!

As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We're releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate/pwning-tomorrow

Contributing authors...
Charlie Jane Anders
Madeline Ashby
Paolo Bacigalupi
Lauren Beukes
David Brin
Pat Cadigan
Cory Doctorow
Paul Ford
Neil Gaiman
SL Grey
Eileen Gunn
Charles Human
Kameron Hurley
Carolyn Jewel
James Patrick Kelly
Ramez Naam
Annalee Newitz
Hannu Rajaniemi
Rudy Rucker
Lewis Shiner
Bruce Sterling
Charles Yu

[ATDrake]

The new Humble Bundle is for:

Humble Book Bundle Be The Boss which unusually, has no geeky/sfnal ties, and is instead chock-full of business leadership/career productivity/management creativity-type books from publisher Berett-Koehler (Wikipedia).

Anyway, better-than-average is a little under $11.50 with more books to be added next week, top tier is $15.

Tired of the bossman bringing you down? We've got a solution: read these books and become the boss!

Pay what you want for I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze; Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Think and Act Like a Leader; Let's Stop Meeting Like This: Tools To Save Time and Get More Done; and Be the best Bad Presenter Ever: Break the Rules, Make Mistakes and Win Them Over.

Pay more than the average price to also receive Networking For People Who Hate Networking; The Introverted Leader: Building On Your Quiet Strength; What To Do When There's Too Much To Do: Reduce Tasks, Increase Results and Save 90 Minutes a Day; Peacock in the Land of Penguins; Hello My Name is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick; and Chess Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game.

Pay $15 or more for all of that plus Got your Attention?: How to Create Intrigue and Connect with Anyone, The Daily Edge: Simple Strategies to Increase Efficiency, The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, and Crowdfunder's Strategy Guide: Build A Better Business By Building Community.

Also, a reminder that StoryBundle's current batch of assorted bundles will all be expiring on Dec 31st, at what looks like 11 PM Eastern Time, and include: New Worlds (mix of newer and backlist sf/fantasy introductory series which work out to just 50 cents per title if you get the top tier); VanderMeer Winter Mix Tape (sf/fantasy in translation from around the world, plus some anthologies containing stories from well-known US/UK authors); Dynamite Thrills and Chills (mostly horror-themed comics franchises, but some fantasy adaptations); Holiday Fantasy (mix of new and backlist festive works); Sci-Fi Spectrum (a sampling of indie science fiction in many subgenres); 2015 NaNoWriMo Writing Tools (DIY author stuff including creativity and professional advice).