FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Book of Love by Kelly Link is £2 on Amazon UK (Still full price on Kobo)
Link's highly anticipated first novel (and there's another one in the works!)

Now $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

[salty-horse]

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
First in a new series.

A Holmes and Watson–style detective duo take the stage in this fantasy with a mystery twist.

In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.

Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.

[Kieran Seymour]

Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World is today's £1.99 Daily Deal at Kobo here in the UK. Amazon appear to have price-matched, but they're not advertising the fact on their deals pages. It only came out at the end of March, so a decent price.

Bonus for anyone with Kobo VIP membership - only £1.79 and 5x Super Points.

Kobo | Amazon

Outside the island there is nothing: the world destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched. On the island: it is idyllic. 122 villagers and 3 scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they're told by the scientists.

Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And they learn the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay.

If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island – and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer – and they don't even know it…

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Kieran Seymour

Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World is today's £1.99 Daily Deal at Kobo here in the UK. Amazon appear to have price-matched, but they're not advertising the fact on their deals pages. It only came out at the end of March, so a decent price.

It was on sale for almost two weeks earlier this month.

[salty-horse]

Void Star by Zachary Mason is $3 in the US (Kobo US, Kobo WW, Amazon)

Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, but it’s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging.

Kern has no such access; he’s one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city’s periphery, where he lives like a monk, training relentlessly in martial arts, scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely—the mathematically inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, he’s fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead.

A ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. Kern flees for his life after robbing the wrong mark. Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop’s screen in her employer’s eyeglasses. None are safe as they’re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight.

[salty-horse]

New Subterranean Press free short story:

Goblins & Greatcoats by Travis Baldree - Link
Set in the Legends & Lattes world, but standalone.

Also didn't post the last one:

White Horse, Red Fruit by Kat Howard - Link
Looks like dark fantasy.

[Croptop]

Fearless by Allen Stroud is $0.99 on Kobo CA
It's the first book in The Fractal Series. I've not read it but for $0.99 it looks interesting enough for me to give it a try.

AD 2118. Humanity has colonised the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. Captain Ellisa Shann commands Khidr, a search and rescue ship with a crew of twenty-five, tasked to assist the vast commercial freighters that supply the different solar system colonies.

Shann has no legs and has taken to life in zero-g partly as a result. She is a talented tactician who has a tendency to take too much on her own shoulders. Now, while on a regular six-month patrol through the solar system, Khidr picks up a distress call from the freighter Hercules…

[GA Russell]

Earthrise, books 1-3
by Daniel Arenson

free

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071S1JL7P

[Mort1997]

Free on Amazon UK today - The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection by CS Lewis

[snip]

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Mort1997

Free on Amazon UK today - The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection by CS Lewis

This edition has always been free. I don't know if it's legitimate, since the books are still under copyright in the UK.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Mort1997

Free on Amazon UK today - The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection by CS Lewis

[snip]

"Horizon Ridge Publishing (17 Jun. 2024)"

The Narnia books are definitely in-copyright, and published in the UK by Harper Collins. This must be a pirate edition. I'm rather surprised it's stayed up for 10 days.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

"Horizon Ridge Publishing (17 Jun. 2024)"

The Narnia books are definitely in-copyright, and published in the UK by Harper Collins. This must be a pirate edition. I'm rather surprised it's stayed up for 10 days.

In countries where copyright was extended beyond 50 years due to Disney greed and lawmakers following USA instance, or part of trade deals with USA.

He died in 1963, same day as J. F. Kennedy. That's about 61 years ago.

There is also an Avarang Books (20 Jan. 2023) edition for 78p, no doubt shouldn't be on Amazon UK.

[salty-horse]

The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach, translated by Doryl Jensen is $3 on Amazon.com.
German Science Fantasy. Was on my Wishlist - don't remember why.

Since the time of pre-history, carpetmakers tie intricate knots to form carpets for the court of the Emperor. These carpets are made from the hairs of wives and daughters; they are so detailed and fragile that each carpetmaker finishes only one single carpet in his entire lifetime.

This art descends from father to son, since the beginning of time itself.

But one day the empire of the God Emperor vanishes, and strangers begin to arrive from the stars to follow the trace of the hair carpets. What these strangers discover is beyond all belief, more than anything they could have ever imagined...

Counting Heads by David Marusek is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Was also on my wishlist, because I was reading a review of Iain M. Banks' Excession and came across it on the same page.

The year is 2134, and the Information Age has given rise to the Boutique Economy in which mass production and mass consumption are rendered obsolete. Life extension therapies have increased the human lifespan by centuries. Loyal mentars (artificial intelligences) and robots do most of society's work. The Boutique Economy has made redundant ninety-nine percent of the world's fifteen billion human inhabitants. The world would be a much better place if they all simply went away.

Eleanor K. Starke, one of the world's leading citizens is assassinated, and her daughter, Ellen, is mortally wounded. Only Ellen, the heir to her mother's financial empire, is capable of saving Earth from complete domination plotted by the cynical, selfish, immortal rich, that is if she survives. Her cryonically frozen head is in the hands of her family's enemies. A ragtag ensemble of unlikely heroes join forces to rescue Ellen's head, all for their own purposes.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Quoth

In countries where copyright was extended beyond 50 years due to Disney greed and lawmakers following USA instance, or part of trade deals with USA.

He died in 1963, same day as J. F. Kennedy. That's about 61 years ago.

There is also an Avarang Books (20 Jan. 2023) edition for 78p, no doubt shouldn't be on Amazon UK.

The UK extension of copyright was more a harmonisation within Europe to Germany's 70-year term which had been in effect since 1965 (reduced from life+80!)

[salty-horse]

Empire of Silence (Sun Eater #1) by Christopher Ruocchio is $2 on Amazon.com
This series is the current hotness, mixing of space opera, sword and sorcery, politics, cosmic horror.
Video review by SciFiScavanger.
Text review by author Shawna Lawless.

Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.

It was not his war.

The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives—even the Emperor himself—against Imperial orders.

But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.

On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe starts down a path that can only end in fire. He flees his father and a future as a torturer only to be left stranded on a strange, backwater world.

Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, Hadrian must fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.