Spontaneous ∂erivation

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Remy Chandler is really Remiel, an angel of the Christian stripe, and wanders the Earth as a private investigator. One day, in A Kiss Before Apocalypse, Heaven starts hiring him for jobs and life has been… interesting ever since.

Starring a talking dog (but Remy talks to animals, so…).

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A young sorcerer in London dies brutally at the hands of a evil mage and is resurrected two years later as… something else. Whatever he is now, he has vengeance on his mind.

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The second in the Orcs series, where the orcs, usually the monstrous other side in its massive numbers, are trying to find peace away from relentless persecution, ever since thefirst book.

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The conclusion of the gritty low-fantasy trilogy, Godless World, following Bloodheir and Winterbirth.

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Can’t do a better blurb than what’s already there: “Meet Monster. Meet Judy. Two humans who don’t like each other much, but together must fight dragons, fire-breathing felines, trolls, Inuit walrus dogs, and a crazy cat lady – for the future of the universe.”

I am really quite curious about the walrus dogs.

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Part of the Jason Wander series, a troubled teenage orphan in a future where aliens are attacking earth (indeed, they killed his family). A long time ago, he had to choose between the Army or jail. Fortunately he made the choice that resulted in the more interesting series of books.

The series thus far is all accounted for on the Kindle:

1. Orphanage
2. Orphan’s Destiny
3. Orphan’s Journey
4. Orphan’s Alliance
5. Orphan’s Triumph

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A new stand-alone book set in the world of his acclaimed First Law series (not yet available for the Kindle), a war-mongering duke decides have his far-too-deadly leading mercenary, Monza Murcatto, murdered, and leaves her for dead. In this awfully genre-blind act, the duke is going to get what’s coming to him.

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Parker, who penned what can only be defined as a hard low-fantasy war series, turns a new story about four retired soldiers seeking peace on an island with a hidden temptation, into a reflection on what happens to the machinery in people’s heads and their relationships after war.

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Library Journal’s description: “On the run from a cult of intergalactic religious fanatics who want her death, the Lady Sharrow emerges from retirement to seek out a powerful artifact that may save her life–the legendary Lady Gun, a weapon that kills by altering the reality around it.”

I’m going to take Banks at his word from the title that this is a book of his which, while I would enjoy reading it, would also leave me emotionally drained at the end.

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In the Corporate Owned Future, two superheroes, Jet and Iridium, grew up together, went to superhero academy—and then a tragedy set them apart. One is now the Hero of New Chicago, and the other is a Hero with Bad Publicity. When a reporter disappears and Iridium is suspected, there’s either going to be a throw-down or a reconciliation or even something else.

This particular superhero battle is anything but Black and White.

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Apparently most people’s reactions to the predecessor in the Autumn Rain series, The Mirrored Heavens, was along the lines of “… waaaoooh.” Featuring a female protagonist in a darker, grittier cyberpunk future, in The Burning Skies Claire Haskell takes more of a back seat compared to The Mirrored Heavens, while the political machinations of the Throne are front and center.

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Three high fantasy romance novellas in one package. Nice.

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A Seattle cop discovers her shamanistic powers. And also that she has to save the world from conquest by the Fae. In, like, three days. No pressure.

The first book in the series, the other two—Thunderbird Falls and Coyote Dreams—are also on the Kindle at the same time, as publishers learn the wisdom of/gain the ability of putting out as many series books as possible out, all at once.

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An urban fantasy romance series set in Manhattan, featuring Wren, a Retriever (finds dangerous magical things for you) and her lover Sergei, an agent who negotiates the fees involved. Things, you know, get interesting in multiple ways.

The complete Retrievers series is now available in the Kindle store, including:

1. Staying Dead
2. Curse the Dark
3. Bring It On¹
4. Burning Bridges
5. Free Fall
6. Blood from Stone

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Won the World Fantasy Award, although it’s a book I find difficult to like. I mention it in passing partly because of the WFA, and partly because there’s a 2004 flamewar going on in the Amazon reviews, back before Amazon had proper forums to have flamewars in (seriously, with 1-star review replies to each other and everything).

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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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Available on February 10th, the eight novel in his acclaimed Culture series. If there’s a “high science-fiction”, then this is it.

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The last book in an alternate history Time’s Tapestry series that began with Emperor in Rome, continued with Conqueror (Dark Ages) and Navigator (late 1400s), and now ends in World War II.

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Telepathic communication between two groups eons upon eons apart, between three Seattlites now and two ultra-evolved beings near the heat-death of the Universe.

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Sample chapters available from Webscriptions.

Lovely beginning:

“Are you a child of DNA?”

Rakesh was affronted; if he’d considered this to be information that any stranger wandering by had a right to know, it would have been included in his précis.

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You would never have guessed it from the cover, but this is a tale involving a strong young adult heroine who lives in a Mars space colony, and stumbles across real Martians. Nevertheless, this is not YA.

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A very big book. Good thing it’s available for the Kindle. Jo Walton has a spectacular post on Tor.com about the book, Anathem: what does it gain from not being our world?

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I reviewed it here. (Note: not a Tor.com review, and rather shorter.)

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Military science fiction, the sequel to Red Lightening, and it name drops Podkayne. (And yes, the character is a third-generation Martian. What is it about that name? Ah, Heinlein.)

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Sample chapters at Webscriptions.

The following summary paragraph put this book on my radar:

Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmessa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.

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The third book in the Long Price Quartet, preceeded by books 1 and 2, A Shadow in Summer and A Betrayal in Winter (the latter not yet on the Kindle).

The last in the series, The Price of Spring, is forthcoming later in 2009.

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Another haunting novel, split up into multiple stories set in Japan (“Realer Than You”, “The Suicide Club”, “If You Can Read This You’re Too Close”).

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Ben Gould slips and dies—or should have died. Due to a technical problem, Heaven has placed him and others on indefinite hold, as it were. Which leaves them free to explore the space between life and the afterlife.¹

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The first English translation of one of Chaviano’s works, it’s supernatural historical fiction involving hauntings, imps, and clairvoyants. Winner of the Best Spanish Language Book prize in the 2007 Florida Book Awards.

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The children in a dysfunctional family cope by developing their own alternate reality through a miniature Botch Town, populated with models of people in the neighborhood.

Yes, that venture doesn’t turn out well for them, or at least, it turns out creepy spooky murder mystery.

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Kindle Store (Shadowbridge)
Kindle Store (Lord Tophet)

Shadowbridge and its sequel, Lord Tophet, focus on the adventures of Leodora, an orphaned 16-year-old with a talent for puppetry and storytelling, who walks through a world of mythical creatures and dark chaos energy.

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Lavinia, Aeneas’ second wife, is barely mentioned in the Aeneid. Le Guin takes the tale of Lavinia and spins it out fully, as you would expect.

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Romance, intrigue, and mystery in a mansion by the seaside where an unseen magical bell haunts the town.

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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.”²

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Featured in Amazon’s Best of June 2008.

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I reviewed it here. (Note: not a Tor.com review.)

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Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series is finally making it onto the Kindle, following just about every single Xanth book in existence.¹ The rest of the series (in particular, On a Pale Horse) are not yet available, but we’ll be watching.

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Yet Another H.P. Lovecraft Collection With a Title So Unsubtle He Would Be Rolling Over in His Grave Right Now and Yeah You Better Watch Out, Anthology Editor.

Although his dialogue was rather terrible, even as his sense of gripping terror was compelling, so I guess pot, kettle, green-spotted-luminous-tentacled-folds.

Stories include: “Cool Air”, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, “The Terrible Old Man”, “Herbert West–Reanimator”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, “The Lurking Fear”, “The Hound”, “The Outsider”, “The Unnamable”, “From Beyond”, “Arthur Jermyn”, and others.

If you get this plus the first volume, Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macbre: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, you’ll have a fairly full complement of his short story work. And yes, none of the stories are duplicated.

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Douglas Adams’ classic Hitchhiker’s Guide series is also coming to completion on the Kindle, with most of the series following by December 31st.

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (available now)
2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (available now)
3. Life, the Universe, and Everything (available now)
4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (December 31st)
5. Mostly Harmless (no date yet)
6. And Another Thing… (to be written by Eoin Colfer, who pens the Artemis Fowl series)

The Salmon of Doubt, consisting of Adams’ essays and an incomplete Dirk Gently novel, is also available.

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The adventures of Flinx, a man born with an abnormal mind condition² and a telepathic minidragon named Pip, and they have adventures in the far future in the Humanx Commonwealth worlds.

Other books involving this odd partnership:

1. For Love of Mother—Not
2. The Tar-Aiym Krang and Orphan Star 2-for-1 bundle
3. The End of the Matter
4. Flinx in Flux
5. Mid-Flinx
6. Reunion
7. Flinx’s Folly
8. Sliding Scales
9. Running from the Deity
10. Bloodhype
11. Trouble Magnet
12. Patrimony

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The first book in an alternate history saga of the United States, How Few Remain is a novel that begins with: What if the South won the war?—and goes on from there through Second Civil War between the now truly divided United States.

Also the 1998 Nebula Award winner for Best Novel.

It is followed herewith by:

1. American Front (The Great War, Book 1)
2. Walk in Hell (The Great War, Book 2)
3. Breakthroughs (The Great War, Book 3)
4. Blood and Iron (American Empire, Book 1)
5. The Center Cannot Hold (American Empire, Book 2)
6. The Victorious Opposition (American Empire, Book 3)
7. Return Engagement (Settling Accounts, Book 1)
8. Drive to the East (Settling Accounts, Book 2)
9. The Grapple (Settling Accounts, Book 3)
10. In at the Death (Settling ACcounts, Book 4)

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The second book in the Merry Gentry series, featuring private detective Meredith Gentry, who also happens to be a faerie princess. Love, sex, magic, supernatural, etc.—the usual red-hot Laurell K. Hamilton mix.

The series is now complete on the Kindle:

1. A Kiss of Shadows
2. A Caress of Twilight
3. Seduced by Moonlight
4. A Stroke of Midnight
5. Mistral’s Kiss
6. A Lick of Frost
7. Swallowing Darkness

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Yes, they are indeed bringing Frog and Toad, as well as the rest of Arnold Lobel’s classic charming children’s books, onto the Kindle.

Frog and Toad:

1. Frog and Toad are Friends (December 30th)
2. Frog and Toad Together (not yet available)
3. Frog and Toad All Year
4. Days with Frog and Toad (December 30th)

Also available is the exceedingly charming Owl at Home. There’s also Mouse Soup, and Uncle Elephant.

… this is going to be like The Velveteen Rabbit all over again. Well, it’s not like I’ll ever find my tattered, third-hand Frog and Toad paperbacks, ever lost in the space of time and… well, probably time.

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Featured over on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea, she talks about the theme of faerie lore and its collision with modern Central Park. This Young Adult book is under consideration for my January review pick for Tor.com.

You know, I’m very appreciative of The Big Idea series; otherwise trying to find books with more than a cover blurb is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, especially for new authors whose fans have not yet carved out a niche in Wikipedia.

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Strongly resembling a mix of John Swift and Alice in Wonderland, this is the second book in the adventures of Lizard Maker Finn, his companion Letitia (a half-human/half-mouse experiment left over from older times), and Julia (his intelligent mechanical lizard). Finn must deliver a gift to a the King of Heldessia, which doesn’t like Finn’s home country. This, of course, doesn’t bode well.

The first book in this series, which apparently has no more, is The Prophecy Machine.

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Banks’ Culture series is just now being released to the Kindle, starting with the third book, Use of Weapons. The only other book in the Culture series currently available on the Kindle is the seventh book in this 8-book series, Look to Windward. His most recent and acclaimed novel in this series, Matter, is not yet available on the Kindle either.

This should be remedied near in the future, considering that Orbit is the publisher.

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The second book the the Chronicles of Solace trilogy, about the far-future art of terraforming and all the things that can go horribly, horribly wrong. The first book, The Depths of Time, is not yet available on the Kindle, but the third book, The Shores of Tomorrow, is.

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Seven young adult Western stories that all take place in seven different ghost towns. By the talented journalist and fiction writer behind The Other Side of Dark.

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A young adult parody of Lord of the Rings, where Joe, an ordinary boy, is pulled into the world of Muddle Earth by the wizard Randalf, who works for the Horned Baron and his wife Ingrid. Amusing parallels listed on Wikipedia.