My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new February/March promotion, Clean Sci-fi & Fantasy.
Check out over 100 novels, excerpts, and short stories, available for free.
My latest novelette, “In the Country of Free Men,” appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 25: Gulliver’s Other Travels:
In this thrilling tale, Granuaile Moore, the great-granddaughter of Lemuel Gulliver, travels to the mysterious Moon. There, she gets caught up in an adventure beyond her wildest dreams.
When her scout flyer is attacked and destroyed, Moore finds herself at the mercy of the cruel ruler known as the Drummer. Imprisoned in his decaying palace, she befriends Tichollo, a young servant boy, and hatches a desperate plan to escape back to Earth.
Pursued by the Drummer’s soldiers, the two race across a bizarre lunar landscape in a bid for freedom. They must reunite with the island-ship Lemuel II, if it's still there!
Moore’s quest to explore new worlds has led her into grave danger. But with courage and cleverness, she might live to sail the skies once more.
A near-future techno thriller.
Get your FREE copy of Forced to be Free by Koen Martens.
Young and brilliant hacker Sam takes a job at a defence contractor to fight for his freedom in a Europe that is about to be overrun by the Russian Federation.
With time running out, Sam finds out who his real allies are. Fighting betrayal and his inner demons, he must pull out all his clever hacking tricks to stop the advancing army.
Can he stop the invasion, and at what price?
Club Codex is discussing Cloud-Castles by Dave Freer from February 18-March 16. We’re starting this novel a bit late. I’ve been running behind due to an illness in January. Freer received the Prometheus Award for Best Novel of libertarian science fiction last year.
From the Amazon website:
“Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.”
Here’s the discussion schedule for February and March:
February 18-24: Author’s Note-Chapter 6
February 25-March 2: Chapters 7-13
March 3-9: Chapters 14-20
March 10-16: Chapter 21-Finale
I plan to post my thoughts on our current chapter selection to Club Codex as I read. Join me!
Please restrict posted comments to the chapters we're discussing or have discussed. This will help protect other participants from spoilers. Thank you!
I look forward to sharing ideas with each of you.
The Club Codex selection for the second half of March is Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion by K. Tempest Bradford.
Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!
Club Codex (February 2024): "Cloud-Castles" by Dave Freer