Spontaneous ∂erivation

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Badda-bing, badda-boom, Matter, eight novel in the Culture series, on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2008, and probably about to get nominated for multiple awards, including the Hugo and the Nebula, is finally available on the Kindle.

In Matter, the mentoring of less technologically advanced species by greater ones is explored in detail in a sort of Russian nesting doll set of the Sari (near Industrial Age), who are mentored by the Oct, who are in turn mentored by the Nariscene, who are in turn mentored by the Morthanveld (and the buck stops there).

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Continuing the story from the acclaimed Y.A. novel Wake, in Fade, Janie and Cabel continue their dream-catching work under Captain, investigating the nightmares surrounding a teacher-run sex ring at a high school.

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Bianca leaves the small town she grew up in for Evernight Academy, a boarding school where everyone possibly glitters she doesn’t fit in, and then meets Lucas, a brooding, aggressive, and over-protective loner.

This might sound a little familiar to fans of Twilight.

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Be careful what you wish for. Be really, really careful.

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In a world like our own, but suffused with magic, Thea is expected to be a powerful magic-wielder. She’s the seventh daughter of a seventh son and a seventh daughter, after all. But when she manifests no abilities at all, she’s sent to the Wandless Academy¹ for the magically challenged… and indeed, her challenges begin to accelerate at a terrible speed. World-saving involved.

Because HarperCollins has a clue, on the same day that the first book in the Worldweavers series was released to the Kindle, so were the other two:

Worldweavers: Spellspam
You think normal spam is bad? Try spam mixed with magic, sent to the students of the Wandless Academy.

Worldweavers: Cybermage
The Federal Bureau of Magic needs Thea to unravel a deadly magical mystery.

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Alternate history fantasy about the last days of the Third Reich, involving as central characters Speer, Himmler, and Dönitz, trying to preserve the regime; and the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers, quadruplets with psychic powers who become insider rebels of the Nazi party.

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A retelling of the famous Indian epic, the Mahābhārata, through the eyes of the wife of the five Pandavas brothers² and her life and times during exile, civil war, and encounters with deities.

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Christopher Moore, irreverent fantasy humorist, turns out an alternate Shakespeare twist on King Lear, where the king’s fool, Pocket, has to muck out the kingdom-wide problems caused by the mad king and his entire troubled court (both alive and dead). With a Moore take on the traditional Shakespeare theatrics and mechanics, to boot. Poor fool.

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The second book in the Seekers series, which is a spinoff of the Warriors fantasy mega-series, this time featuring intelligent bears instead of cats. The previous book, The Quest Begins, is available on the Kindle, along with every Warriors book ever.

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The final book in the Five Ancestors series is now available on the Kindle, featuring a street urchin who gets mixed up with the five greatest criminals in China.

The entire series is available on the Kindle:

1. Tiger
2. Monkey
3. Snake
4. Crane
5. Eagle
6. Mouse

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Sid, the last Synapsid³, who lived 30 million years before the dinosaurs, and is now traipsing into our time to hunt down the vicious gorgonopsid. Rob and Phoebe must help him, or else the entire human race is a stepped-on butterfly, if you know what I mean.

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In a small town in post-Katrinia Louisiana, Iris and her friends play around with being psychic mediums, and Iris accidentally invokes a real and scary ghost, and he’s not anywhere near nice. When he haunts her, she decides to try to solve his murder so that he might have some peace.

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A retelling of the story of Eve, trying to rebuild her life after being cast out of the garden with Adam, and of course the family ties are a bit strained.

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Henry York’s adventures continue, with him still on the farm with his aunt and uncle in boring ol’ Kansas, except for that cupboard with 100 doors⁴ that are portals to other worlds. He decides to start exploring them in the hopes of uncovering his own unknown personal history.

The first book in the series, The 100 Cupboards, is also available on the Kindle.

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A Kabbalist discovers that twelve of the 36 anonymous saints in Jewish folklore are real and exist in the world, and records the fables of each saint and his or her own tale.

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Don’t you want another volume in the Dune series? Of course you do. The story covers the MuadDib jihad between Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah (e.g., Paul Takes Over the World).

You can also watch a video interview with the authors.

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In a near future world, artificial intelligence developed for controlling prosthetic limbs and otherwise controlling human/machine interactions, evolves consciousness. This is almost always a bad thing.

Lerner also has another book available on the Kindle, Fleet of Worlds, a prequel to Larry Niven’s classic Ringworld.

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The third volume of the Crown of the Isles series, which began with The Fortress of Glass.

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The latest volume of the fantasy series The Corean Chronicles, which is almost entirely on the Kindle as of this writing. The previous books in order:

• Legacies
• Darknesses (not yet on the Kindle)
• Scepters
• Alector’s Choice
• Cadmian’s Choice
• Soarer’s Choice

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Covering the first days of the Human-Covenent War in the world of your very favorite first-person-shooter science fiction space opera video game, from the viewpoint of one Lieutenant Jacob Keyes.

Please give Mr. Buckell your good wishes, as he is at this time in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism, second in the Surprising Secrets of Tobias S. Buckell’s Heart series.

Also by Tobias S. Buckell: Crystal Rain and Sly Mongoose.

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This is an early surprise: the fifth book in Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series, has come out on the Kindle and in press.

Other books in this series:

• Book 1: Furies of Calderon
• Book 2: Academ’s Fury
• Book 3: Cursor’s Fury
• Book 4: Captain’s Fury

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A continuation of The Ruby Throne series, featuring the story of Lea, sister to Emperor Caelan Light Bringer. The first half of this story is available on the Kindle: The Pearls.

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The second book in the first cycle of the Deryni series, which includes Deryni Rising (previous) and High Deryni (next).

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The third book in the Dragonmaster trilogy, the second being Knighthood of the Dragon.

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Second in the Rogue Mage series, now completing the Kindle set of Bloodring (book 1) and Host (book 3).

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It’s Elric. It’s Michael Moorcock. It’s a new edition of a classic tale of the Eternal Champion. With extras.

Other Elric books available on the Kindle:

• Elric: The Stealer of Souls
• Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn
• The Dreamthief’s Daughter

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According to Meredith Schwartz in Library Journal: “Her lush prose and dark fantasy cityscape will appeal to fans of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and Sarah Monette’s Melusine, but her manipulative, scarred, sexual, unapologetic antiheroine recalls Elizabeth Bear or Melissa Scott.”

Phillips has also been compared to Jeff VanderMeer. All this tends to spell WIN for me. How about you?

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It’s a werewolf romance—and the protagonist here is the werewolf. Her perfect life begins to fall apart when she suspects her boyfriend of philandering¹, a Texas millionaire client begins to exude a strange hold over her, and the Houston wolf pack shows up on her doorstep demanding union dues.

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Military colonial science fiction, the most recent book in the second cycle of the successful Starfist series, preceded by Backshot and Pointblank.

The very first two Starfist books are available as one bundle:
First to Fight/School of Fire.

Many more Starfist books are available on the Kindle.

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The conclusion to Adair’s paranormal romance trilogy, which started with Night Fall and continued with Night Secrets.

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Sex in the City. With demons—in particular, a succubus who works for Satan and is searching for true love to free her. The sequel to Succubus in the City.

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The conclusion to the fantasy Heartstone trilogy, wherein the Heir of Autumn must stop a ruthless enchantress from destroying the world. The trilogy started with Heir of Autumn and continued with Mistress of Winter.

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The latest in the third mini-series of the highly successful Young Adult fantasy books that follow the adventures of four clans of wild cats.

The entire series has been released on Kindle, with six books per mini-series. The first mini-series begins with Into the Wild; the second, The New Prophecy, begins with Midnight; the third, Power of Three, started with Sight.

A brand new series in the same vein, but this time covering three bears, has started with Seekers.

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A humorous, light romantic fantasy that recasts the tale of Beauty and the Beast with an imperfect heroine (irreverent and overweight) and a dragon (wounded and gentlemanly).

She has another book below….

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A humorous, light romantic comedy that recasts the tale of Sleeping Beauty in a more complex mold, with a man as the sleeping beauty (but not how you think), a woman who wishes vengeance upon him, and a woman who loves him. And the last two are the same woman.

I think this technically isn’t fantasy, because there appears to be no magic or fantastic beasts involved. But I included it anyways, because it seems fun and it’s a reprint of an otherwise unavailable book.

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Military science fiction, and the sequel to The Sagittarius Command.

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Soldiers of Armageddon who lay waste to worlds in their passage, unstoppable save for actions unthinkable to Starfleet captains. Or are they so unthinkable? See Captains Picard, Riker, and Dax struggle with their choices.

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Through a fair amount of Googling, I’ve determined that Lexi is YA fantasy-but-it-might-not-be-fantasy-kind-of-fantasy. A girl wakes up in the woods, remembering nothing before that, with a silver key. She finds shelter, and rediscovers a life she never knew bit by bit.

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Third in a series featuring a cranky mermaid named Fred, a hidden civilization of mer-people, a mer-prince, and her marine biologist friend Thomas.

The second book, Swimming Without a Net, is also available for the Kindle.

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The first of the 42 Magic Treehouse books to make it onto the Kindle, and part of the “Merlin’s Missions” second cycle.

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A geologist is hired by a corrupt company to discover secrets beneath a rain forest, which turn out to be a miracle that might save the planet from the ecological crisis it’s currently headed down the maw of. But the company is corrupt, you know.

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The third book in the Tamír Triad, where the main character is a woman who’s been hidden with a man’s body in the person of Prince Tobin for years. The second book, Hidden Warrior, is also available on the Kindle.

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The third book in the The Second Sons Trilogy. The first two books, The Lion of Senet and Eye of the Labyrinth, are both available in the Kindle store.

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A malevolent spirit in the forest brings supernatural mayhem and horror to the home of a family on the edge of its woods.

Feist is more famous for his fantasy, in particular the Riftwar Cycle. The earliest available in the series on the Kindle is the first half of a duology, Prince of the Blood.

Every trilogy after this duology is complete on the Kindle, however, starting with The Serpentwar Saga:

• Shadow of a Dark Queen
• Rise of a Merchant Prince
• Rage of a Demon King
• Shards of a Broken Crown

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From Subterranean Press; two novellas set in the world of Noreela:

• Vale of Blood Roses
• The Bajuman

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The best short stories of Jack McDevitt, who writes the popular far-future Alex Benedict detective series.

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Here are sample chapters. I can’t describe it well enough to do it justice.

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Science fiction horror stories and novella (think Weird Science or Weird Fantasy magazines) by Brian Lumley.

Sample chapters includes the first story, “Snarker’s Son”.

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His award-winning short stories, covering the last quarter-century from “The Feast of Saint Janis” all the way to “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” and “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory…”.

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The best columns of John Scalzi’s Whatever blog from the last ten years, starting with a wonderful and short treatise on hate mail. Hilarious and sharp, there’s a reason Whatever pulls hundreds of thousands of hits every week.

His famous earlier book, collecting the writing-orientated posts of Whatever, is also available via Webscriptions: You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop. I actually reviewed it back in 2007, and favorably so.

Scalzi is also famous for the Old Man’s War series.