Type: duology

The Turquoise Serpent: Ashes of the Urn 1

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The Turquoise Serpent: Ashes of the Urn 1
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Sharp swords ring and dark magic crackles! In this tense, high-speed story, an exiled warrior and a disfavored wizard find themselves stranded deep in the kingdom of a forgotten god. To survive, they will need overcome enemy soldiers, mythical beasts, a dark god, and their own hatred for each other – and even that might not be enough. This is the first novel in the Ashes of the Urn series.

A Ritual of Bone (The Dead Sagas Book 1)

A Ritual of Bone (The Dead Sagas Book 1)
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‘Only valour and steel can stand against the rising dead’

Arnar is a land of warriors, its people as stalwart as the stones themselves. In a land of dark forests and ancient hill forts, a forgotten evil is awoken by curious minds.
The Great Histories and the Sagas say nothing of this evil, long passed from the memory of even the studious scholars of the College. For centuries, the scholars of Arnar have kept these records and preserved the knowledge and great deeds of a proud people. The story of these peoples forever chronicled in the Sagas of the Great Histories.
But now the evil spreads and the dead walk in its wake, terrible creatures roam the night and even the spirits are restless. The Dead Sagas could perhaps be the final chapters of these great records.
Many threads entwine to tell this Saga, interweaving the tales of those who played their part in the search for answers and ultimately their fight for survival. Amid plague, invasion and terror, the inexorable rise of the dead sends a kingdom scrabbling to its knees.

This dark fantasy epic combines dark malign horror and gritty survival adventure as the Dead Sagas unfold in a world where honour and renown is all, where beasts and savages lurk in the wilderness, and where sword, axe and shield is all that stands between the living and the grasping hands of the dead.

The Powers of the Earth – Aristillus(with praise from John Carmack !)

The Powers of the Earth – Aristillus(with praise of John Carmack !)
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PROMETHEUS AWARD WINNER “BEST NOVEL” 2018

Earth in 2064 is politically corrupt and in economic decline. The Long Depression has dragged on for 56 years, and the Bureau of Sustainable Research is hard at work making sure that no new technologies disrupt the planned economy. Ten years ago a band of malcontents, dreamers, and libertarian radicals bolted privately-developed anti-gravity drives onto rusty sea-going cargo ships, loaded them to the gills with 20th-century tunnel-boring machines and earthmoving equipment, and set sail – for the Moon.

There, they built their retreat. A lunar underground border-town, fit to rival Ayn Rand’s ‘Galt’s Gulch’, with American capitalists, Mexican hydroponic farmers, and Vietnamese space-suit mechanics – this is the city of Aristillus.

There’s a problem, though: the economic decline of Earth under a command-and-control economy is causing trouble for the political powers-that-be in Washington DC and elsewhere. To shore up their positions they need slap down the lunar expats and seize the gold they’ve been mining. The conflicts start small, but rapidly escalate.

There are zero-gravity gun fights in rusted ocean going ships flying through space, containers full of bulldozers hurtling through the vacuum, nuclear explosions, armies of tele-operated combat UAVs, guerrilla fighting in urban environments, and an astoundingly visual climax.

The Powers of the Earth is the first book in The Aristillus series – a pair of science fiction novels about anarchocapitalism, economics, open source software, corporate finance, social media, antigravity, lunar colonization, genetically modified dogs, strong AI…and really, really big guns.

John Carmack, founder id Software, lead programmer of Doom, QuakeThis is a wonderful, sprawling, action-packed story with interesting characters, complicated conflicts, and realistic treatment of what a small colony faces when confronted by a hostile planet of nine billion slaves. Think of this as Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress done better.   I devoured these books and give them my highest recommendation.

John Walker, founder of AutoDeskYou’ve achieved something I’ve been hoping for decades someone would pull off – a book that is at once an affectionate tribute to and criticism/response to “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”.The Aristillus books are very strong.

Robopocalypse: A Novel

Robopocalypse: A Novel
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They are in your house. They are in your car. They are in the skies…Now they’re coming for you.

In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication. In the months leading up to this, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans – a single mother disconcerted by her daughter’s menacing “smart” toys, a lonely Japanese bachelor who is victimized by his domestic robot companion, an isolated U.S. soldier who witnesses a ‘pacification unit’ go haywire – but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is too late.

When the Robot War ignites — at a moment known later as Zero Hour — humankind will be both decimated and, possibly, for the first time in history, united. Robopocalypse is a brilliantly conceived action-filled epic, a terrifying story with heart-stopping implications for the real technology all around us…and an entertaining and engaging thriller unlike anything else written in years.

Time and Again

Time and Again
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The 50th anniversary edition of the beloved classic that Stephen King has called “THE great time-travel story.” Featuring a brand-new introduction by the New York Times bestselling author of Recursion, Blake Crouch.

When advertising artist Si Morley is recruited to join a covert government operation exploring the possibility of time travel, he jumps at the chance to leave his mundane 20th-century existence and step into the past. But he also has another motivation for going back in time: a half-burned letter that tells of a mysterious, tragic death and ominously of “fire which will destroy the whole world.”

Traveling to New York City in January 1882 to investigate, he finds a Manhattan teeming with a different kind of life, the waterfront unimpeded by skyscrapers, open-air markets packed with activity, Central Park bustling with horse drawn sleighs—a city on the precipice of great things. At first, Si welcomes these trips as a temporary escape but when he falls in love with a woman he meets in the past, he must choose whether to return to modern life or live in 1882 for good.

“Pure New York fun” (Alice Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author), Time and Again is meticulous recreation of New York in the late nineteenth century, exploring the possibilities of time travel to tell an ageless story of love, longing, and adventure. Finney’s magnum opus has been a source of inspiration for countless science fiction writers since its first publication in 1970.

Days of Infamy: A Novel of Alternate History

Days of Infamy: A Novel of Alternate History
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On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched an attack against U.S. naval forces stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. But what if the Japanese followed up their air assault with an invasion and occupation of Hawaii? This is the question explored by Harry Turtledove in Days of Infamy, with frightening implications.

With American military forces subjugated and civilians living in fear of their conquerors, there is no one to stop the Japanese from using the islands’ resources to launch an offensive against America’s western coast.

The Forge of God

The Forge of God
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This doomsday masterpiece from the author of Eon and Hull Zero Three was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

On July 26, Arthur Gordon learns that Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter, has disappeared. Not hiding, not turned black, but gone.

On September 28th, Edward Shaw finds an error in the geological records of Death Valley. A cinder cone was left off the map. Could it be new? Or, stranger yet, could it be artificial? The answer may be lying beside it—a dying Guest who brings devastating news for Edward and for Planet Earth.

As more unexplained phenomena spring up around the globe—a granite mountain appearing in Australia, sounds emanating from the earth’s core, flashes of light among the asteroids—it becomes clear to some that the end is approaching, and there is nothing we can do.

In The Forge of God, award-winning author Greg Bear describes the final days of the world on both a massive, scientific scale and in the everyday, emotional context of individual human lives. Facing the destruction of all they know, some people turn to God, others to their families, and a few turn to saviors promising escape from a planet being torn apart. Will they make it in time? And who gets left behind to experience the last moments of beauty and chaos on earth?

Nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, The Forge of God is an engrossing read, breathtaking in its scope and in its detail.

The Peace War

The Peace War
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First in a quintessential hard-science fiction adventure, Hugo Award-winning author Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War follows a scientist determined to put an end to the militarization of his greatest invention–and of the government behind it.

The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon–the “bobble,” a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent.

But they’ve never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to defeat the Authority. With the help of an underground network of determined, independent scientists and a teenager who may be the apprentice genius he’s needed for so long, he will shake the world.

Debt’s Pledge (Jefferson Odett Series Book 1)

Debt's Pledge (Jefferson Odett Series Book 1)
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He was a soldier without a war, alone and unwanted, until he discovered an alien enemy… Jefferson Odett found a skull on a blasted world on the edge of human space, just before the campaign against the rebel stationers was called off. A skull that was not human.

When the transport taking him home is attacked by a strange alien vessel, crewed by fearsome creatures, Odett barely manages to escape with his life.

Convinced the skull he found was from the same species as the aliens who attacked his transport, Odett believes they represent a deadly threat to humanity. The commanders of Earth’s military disagree and dismiss his claim. They send him to a remote outpost of a few hundred colonists. Saddled with a platoon of undisciplined and mostly green soldiers, Odett finds himself in an unenviable command on a backwater world.

But there is something else on this forgotten world — something frightening that he has encountered before. Odett and his platoon of green soldiers, hard cases and discipline problems are all that stand between the colonists and an alien army of unspeakable power who will kill any species that gets in their way.

Jack Mackenzie delivers the first in an action-packed Science Fiction adventure series. Watch for the second book, DEBT’S HONOR to be available in April of 2015!

Oathbreaker (Ravensworn Book 1)

Oathbreaker (Ravensworn Book 1)
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An action packed historical thriller set outside the boundaries of Ancient Rome. For fans of Bernard Cornwell, Matthew Harffy, Ben Kane and Simon Scarrow

At the edge of empire, one man stands alone

Alaric is an enemy of Rome.

For too long he has thwarted the empires attempts to gain control over the land that has long resisted them: Germania.
To the Romans he is a scourge, always evading their carefully laid traps. But to the tribes he is much worse: Outlaw, chief killer, battle turner, Oathbreaker.

All men know him, all men fear him. At his back is a war host, on his shoulder sits Loki, the Trickster. A deal has been struck between the legions and the tribes: lifelong enemies agree to become friends, for a time. The eagles march with the wolves, together they hunt the raven.

Isolated and lacking in allies, will Alaric be able to break free from the noose that slowly encircles him? Or will the Sly One once more come to his rescue.