New year, new books! But also: new chances to read slightly older books!
Kickstart your year with these hot eBook deals!
Three Parts Dead
by Max Gladstone — $1.99
A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith. When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts?and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival.
Rise of the Mages
by Scott Drakeford — $2.99
Emrael Ire is a student of war with lofty ambitions, despite being so poor his boots are more hole than leather. He and his talented younger brother Ban work hard to build themselves a better life at the Citadel, a school that specializes in both infusori Crafting and military arts. Their lives are upended when the power-hungry Lord Governor of the neighboring province invades the school with the help of a sinister sect of priests devoted to the newly awakened Fallen God of Glory. Many of the infusori Crafter students are captured—Including Ban. Though Emrael stands little chance against the Lord Governor and his armies, he’s desperate to save his brother—even if that means accepting the help of allies with uncertain motives, or becoming a practitioner of a forbidden magic. There is nothing he won’t sacrifice to save his brother, but what happens when the cost of success is not his to pay?
Probability Moon
by Nancy Kress — $2.99
Humankind has expanded out into interstellar space using star gates-technological remnants left behind by an ancient, long-vanished race. But the technology comes with a price. Among the stars, humanity encountered the Fallers, a strange alien race bent on nothing short of genocide. It’s all-out war, and humanity is losing. In this fragile situation, a new planet is discovered, inhabited by a pre-industrial race who experience “shared reality”-they’re literally compelled to share the same worldview. A team of human scientists is dispatched-but what they don’t know is that their mission of first contact is actually a covert military operation. For one of the planet’s moons is really a huge mysterious artifact of the same origin as the star gates . . . and it just may be the key to winning the war.
On Blue’s Water
by Gene Wolfe — $2.99
Horn, the narrator of the earlier work, now tells his own story. Though life is hard on the newly settled planet of Blue, Horn and his family have made a decent life for themselves. But Horn is the only one who can locate the great leader Silk, and convince him to return to Blue and lead them all to prosperity. So Horn sets sail in a small boat, on a long and difficult quest across the planet Blue in search of the now legendary Patera Silk. The story continues in In Green’s Jungles and Return to the Whorl.
Starfish
by Peter Watts — $2.99
A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew–people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater–down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness. Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below?
Solider of the Mist
by Gene Wolfe — $2.99
The first volume of Gene Wolfe’s powerful story of Latro, a Roman mercenary who received a head injury that deprived him of his short-term memory. In return it gave him the ability to converse with supernatural creatures, gods and goddesses who invisibly inhabit the ancient landscape.
A Cavern of Black Ice
by J. V. Jones — $2.99
As a newborn Ash March was abandoned–left for dead at the foot of a frozen mountain. Found and raised by the Penthero Iss, the mighty Surlord of Spire Vanis, she has always known she is different. Terrible dreams plague her and sometimes in the darkness she hears dread voices from another world. Iss watches her as she grows to womanhood, eager to discover what powers his ward might possess. As his interest quickens, he sends his living blade, Marafice Eye, to guard her night and day. Raif Sevrance, a young man of Clan Blackhail, also knows he is different, with uncanny abilities that distance him from the clan. But when he and his brother survive an ambush that plunges the entire Northern Territories into war, he yet seeks justice for his own . . . even if means he must forsake clan and kin.
In the Garden of Iden
by Kage Baker — $2.99
In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus. One of these is Mendoza the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. But while there, she meets Nicholas Harpole, with whom she falls in love. And that love sounds great bells of change that will echo down the centuries, and through the succeeding novels of The Company.
Hominids
by Robert J. Lawyer — $2.99
Hominids is a strong, stand-alone SF novel, but it’s also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people. They are alien to each other, yet bound together by the never-ending quest for knowledge and, beneath their differences, a common humanity. We are one of those species, the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligence. In that world, Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but is very different in history, society, and philosophy.
The Eye of the World: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1
, based on the novel by Robert Jordan, written by Chuck Dixon, and illustrated by Chase Conley — $2.99
Created with the cooperation of the Jordan estate, adapted by well-known comics writer Chuck Dixon and illustrated by the talented Chase Conley, The Eye of the World: The Graphic Novel has been hailed as an exciting interpretation of Robert Jordan’s classic fantasy novel. The Eye of the World: The Graphic Novel, Volume One begins Robert Jordan’s epic tale by introducing Rand al’Thor and his friends Matrim and Perrin at home in Emond’s Field, shortly before the spring festival. Moiraine Damodred and Lan Mandragoran appear and almost before Rand knows it, he’s fleeing his home village with Moiraine, Lan, his friends, and Egwene al’Vere, the innkeeper’s daughter, who wishes to become an Aes Sedai. The conclusion of this volume leaves the travelers on the road to Baerlon, barely ahead of the pursuing Trollocs and Draghkar. But even as they run for their lives, Moiraine and Lan begin to teach the young people what they will need to know to survive in this dangerous world.
