Ice, monsters, wood, iron, and blood. What else will we find in this week’s new releases?

Be Of Good Cheer (Valens Heritage #3) – Jan Stryvant

Having taken the Auction House in Bartertown, Mihalis must now keep it. Thankfully, five of his sisters who recently unlocked their ‘cubi aspects have come to help. As all of them are members of the self-styled ‘Sisters of Steel’ and Alska their leader is with them, he’s feeling good about the situation as they’re all experienced warriors.

However this still leaves him with his other problems: A dozen women whom he just rescued from certain death that he now has to take care of, protect, and figure out what to do with until he can send them home; Dr. Ruxton, who is most certainly up to something other than what he claims to be doing – but who has actually done a lot of good in the world for all that he is a ruthless man; a profitable black market business that needs to be run in such a manner as to make sure that those profits end up in his pocket, and a dark elf house that needs to be put in its place and taught a lesson.

Oh, and it just might be true that two of those women he rescued just might be famous.

At least it won’t be boring.

Dungeon of Chance: All-In (Serious Probabilities #3) – Johnathan Brooks

The Dungeon Core known as Clay had successfully trained up the local Heroes of Sunfall Island to repel the recent attack by a World Threat, but as he was beginning to prepare for the next Dungeon Adventure Season in his dungeon, something happened to bring his plans to a screeching halt.

In short, his little part of the world was unexpectedly invaded by thousands of foreign Heroes.

Now, due to a new “World Event” that involves a competition between two types of Heroes – the Hero Guilds from the mainland and the new arrivals – Clay is tasked with creating something called the Tower of Trials. This 100-Floor Tower is greater in scope than anything he’d ever created before, and according to the Event, he only has six months in which to complete it. Even more than that, the Dungeon Core needs to somehow train the massive influx of Heroes in a new way so that they are prepared for the Tower of Trials.

But how can Clay juggle his normal dungeon training and designing an entirely new Tower at the same time? Sometimes the only choice is to embrace the challenge, take some risks, and go all-in.

First Life (The River Saga #1) – Nathan Hystad

Colton Beck has six months to live. He works for the Angor near Los Angeles, aware that any day could be his last.

The Angor arrived twenty years ago, resolved to help mankind survive, but not everyone believes their motives are honorable.

When the Angor offer humanity a colony world, Colton is determined to see another planet before his final breath. He’s been diagnosed with Xeno, a rare disorder that surfaced with the Angor’s arrival, but he won’t let this stop him.

With the help of his old friend Indie Hart, now the single most powerful human on Earth, he joins the Expedition to Dicore.

What they find on Dicore is far from idyllic, and Colton struggles to navigate their new existence while coping with his impending death. Read More

Independent science fiction has a distinct tradition of raiding established series’ toyboxes, stealing the toys, and re-envisioning the stories into new works and new stories. These tales are more than just mere reskinnings of the original works, with new names for old faces. Instead, they keep resonances with the original works while rearranging the elements of style, story, and setting into something new. Star Wars had its #StarWarsNotStarWars moment with Galaxy’s Edge. #AGundamForUs created Combat Frame Xseed. Others have taken on Jurassic Park.

Now it is Babylon 5‘s turn.

Take the second and third seasons, where wars wracked the galaxy, Earth fell into tyranny, and a malevolent, manipulative force pulled the strings from the Shadows.  Shake it up, and drop a whimsical encyclopedia of death and faith into the story’s equivalent of the Rangers. Garnish with a fashion sense that can only be called wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Serve in a pewter mug, slammed against the head of the nearest foe.

Call it White Ops, by Declan Finn. Read More

Divine serpents, space paladins, and cursed warrior strive in this week’s new releases.

Accidental Thief – Jamie Davis and C. J. Davis

Stuck in the Game, Can He Get Home?

Hal can’t catch a break.

What can he do to turn his luck around?

Wandering through a flea market, a strange woman starts to talk his ear off. She won’t let him leave. He doesn’t want any of her junk, that is, until she pulls out a bootleg copy of a new game. Maybe he can forget his troubles for a few hours?

What happens next, turns Hal’s life upside down.

End Game (The Kyron Invasion #3) – Jasper T. Scott

Earth is overrun.

Chris Randall and his family are on the run with a group of renegade soldiers led by General Gold. Having stolen a Kyron shuttle and escaped from the occupied cities, they are safe—for now.

General Gold has a plan to strike back against the Kyra. Meanwhile, one of Earth’s old colony ships has returned, and they have revealed the invaders’ weakness: the Chrona.

But are the Chrona a new enemy, or a friend? Chris isn’t sure, and he isn’t convinced that striking back is a good idea. Yet, one thing he knows without a doubt: the fate of the human race hinges on the answer.

The Magnetar (The Combined Service #1) – Jo Boone

A second chance… at life.

When a natural disaster destroys Charlie’s planet, she almost survives the carnage, dying just a few minutes before a rescue crew would have saved her.

When she wakes up again, a number of surprises await her, not the least of which is that she’s been brought back to life. In addition to that unlikely event, she’s also been taken to another planet and drafted into the Combined Service, a service composed of all the allied races—octopods, gu’ul, avians, and the upstart humans, who the others aren’t sure they can trust.

Being drafted does serve one purpose, though: it allows her to get off the planet on which she finds herself, giving her the only chance she has to get back to the planet of her birth, where she hopes to find her missing family. When she’s offered the chance to serve aboard the Magnetar, the first jointly operated cruiser of the Combined Service, she seizes the chance.

But the Magnetar is on a dangerous mission: to return an octopod terrorist, Praetori, to the home world of the octopods. No one has ever successfully held an octopod captive, and the only thing found of the last ship that tried—the Roggewein—were tiny pieces.

Will Charlie and the Magnetar see the prisoner transfer to its successful conclusion, or will they suffer the same unexplained and disastrous fate as the Roggewein?

Mardis Dane (World of Magic #3) – Levi Werner

Whoever told Lox magic was safe, was lying.

The time spent clearing the city of Westia was beneficial for all the immortals, making them stronger. But Lox is restless.

Not wanting to settle down in the city they were building for the immortals, he leaves the city behind in search of new magic and wonders out in the Shattered Continent.

Lox soon finds himself in the magical city of Mardis Dane. Floating in the clouds, the city is everything Lox hoped it would be, full of magic and mysteries.

But all is not well, and soon unknown forces will ravage this wondrous city… Read More

Last time, we explored the idea of science fiction as an uncomfortable marriage between speculation and setting. And while the speculative predictions and the mythology of “What if?” have taken precedence within the SFF community, with every flip phone, tablet, defibrillator, and credit card celebrated, the gadgets, knickknacks, and tchotchkes–these elements of setting–are remembered when the adventures and mysteries that used them are forgotten,

Stories such as George O. Smith’s “QRM Interplanetary” are remembered, not for adventures and mysteries, but for the setting quirks. In “QRM Interplanetary”, the quirk was a space station that envisioned satellite communications and long-haul communications years before the U. S. Navy’s first experiments with the concept. Meanwhile, Arthur C. Clarke’s “Superiority” with its warnings against overconfidence and overcomplexity to generals, managers, and inventors, alongside other dire SFF tales of warning and woe, have vanished from the public consciousness, as decades of defense boondoggles and runaway spending have shown. Certainly, administrative error is far more abstract than satellite television, but it can be argued that the genre’s fixation on technological prophecy has trained readers to approach science fiction as a setting or an aesthetic to be mined instead of for the stories that take place in these settings.

But that is an argument for another time.

Instead, let us examine why setting is so vital to fiction, and science fiction at that. After all, critics are fond of saying that there are limited types of stories that can be told. And while these stories are viewed outside of their setting, how that story is told depends on the environment it is set in. A shipwreck story may have the same structure regardless of whether the shipwreck happens in the Arctic, the Tropics, the ocean floor, or Mars, but the tools, challenges, and demands available in space are different than in the Caribbean.

But that’s too academic for fiction. Instead, let me show the power of a setting through a story. A true story, of 1930s Hollywood, of a man born as Ernest Raymond Gantt. A man better remembered as The Beachcomber.

Donn Beach.

Read More

“If you don’t believe in your own vision, who else is supposed to?”

Days after Perry Rhodan invited the world to join him in the new city of Terrania, the Chinese siege intensifies, even scoring a success by shooting down Rhodan’s only spaceship, the Stardust. In an attempt to get around the Arkonide shields, General Bai Jun cuts off humanitarian aide to refugees flocking to Terrania. But the Chinese government has other ideas, and smuggles nuclear weapons into the Gobi Desert.

Meanwhile in Ireland, the mutant Sid Gonzalez is unconscious, trapped by his fears in visions of the past. John Marshall and Sue Mirafiore, with the help of other mutants such as series favorite Ras Tschubai, must dive into the young man’s mind to save him. But what they find in Sid’s past may be the key to understanding the man who now holds the Arkonide Crest da Zolral prisoner. The man who now knows why the Arkonides visited the Solar System.

Clifford Monterny.

The revisioned adventures of science fiction’s longest running hero, Perry Rhodan, continue in Perry Rhodan NEO #3 with School for Mutants by Michael Marcus Thurner and The Dark Twins by series veteran Frank Borsch. And while both novels push Perry Rhodan forward towards inevitable conflicts between his Terrania, China, and the United States deep state, the heart of each is the creation of two rival schools for mutants. One, by Homeland Security agent Clifford Monterny, who seeks to develop mutants into a sort of Hitlerjugend for Homeland Security, and the other, by wealthy billionaire Homer Adams, who seeks to marry the emerging potential of humanity to Perry Rhodan’s vision of the stars. And Sid Gonzalez, once a street urchin in Nicaragua, has at various times been in the care of both. Read More

Dragons, zombies, and starships, oh my!

Admiral’s Oath (Dakotan Confederacy #1) – Glynn Stewart

Rear Admiral James Tecumseh barely survived his last mission against the Alliance of Free Stars with his reputation and life intact. Under a cloud of suspicion, he has been assigned to a quiet sector far from the front of the Terran Commonwealth’s war with the Castle Federation and its allies.

But when the Federation’s Operation Medusa cripples his nation’s communications and plummets an interstellar empire into silence, Admiral Tecumseh finds himself thrust into command of an entire fleet—and responsible for the safety of billions of innocent souls.

Enemies internal and external alike challenge the nation he is sworn to serve. Duty and honor call him to action to protect the innocent, and the Admiral and his new fleet are called to war once more.

But the darkest treason lurks where no one expects it…

After Dark (The Underground #2) – R. L. Kennedy

It’s not about how to survive… it’s about who to trust.

Cora and Mason reunite in the continuation of the epic new series, The Underground. New relationships will be tested, old ones will break, and confusion will reign.

The status quo has changed… just as Mason and Cora are getting to know — and trust — each other, new questions arise that threaten loyalties all around.

Through it all, one question remains at the forefront of Cora’s mind: what’s up with the constellation map? What could it mean?

And what will happen if she can’t figure it out in time?

The Dragon King (The Dragon Thief #5) – D. K. Holmberg

Ty’s connection to the Flame is the key to a greater truth.

After saving the king from the Lothinal attack and defeating Roson James, Ty thinks he will finally have a chance to learn more about his connection to the dragons.

There’s much to be done, as he’s convinced the Dragon Touched are still compromised, and the threat from Lothinal is not gone, but when the ghost king requests Ty’s help, he has little choice but to help.

The journey leads Ty toward a different understanding of the kingdom, as well as his connection to the Flame. Secrets long buried may destroy the kingdom—or save it.

First Trial (Betrayal of the Arcani #2) – Angelus Maximus

The adventure continues as three unlikely heroes continue to fight to protect Rome from an unknown evil force.

Marius, Marcus, and Aelia have put their political differences aside as they continue to try and defeat Patricius the necromancer. However, as they will soon learn, the conspiracy plot has many layers above Patricius. Marcus continues to fine tune his magical ability in hopes he can successfully defend the party from the necromancer. Marius continues to have his suspicions that the Arcani are more than just a secret intelligence organization.

With new towns to explore in the grand Roman Empire, the party find themselves overwhelmed trying to find the truth. Meanwhile Patricius the necromancer is only becoming stronger as he and the legendary undead dragon, Zyrdeg continue to wreak havoc in Hispania. Even the zombies are becoming stronger with new abilities.

With Rome in danger, the party must complete the first trial that has been given to them by Jupiter, the Roman god of all Rome. However, when they learn the truth of the depths of the conspiracy they will probably wish they never accepted this mission. They will learn that Patricius is more than just your average evil blood mage.

All that can be said is that Rome is in more danger than anyone knows. Read More