Fortress on the Sun ($5.99 Kindle), by Paul Cook, is this month's free book from Phoenix Pick. Click HERE for the free download. Enter coupon code 9992371, then once past the newsletter subscription page, download the DRM-free format of your choice.Book Description
Ra is a 21st century prison camp that also acts as facility for harvesting metals—from the Sun. The prisoners have all been banished here for extreme crimes, but none of them remembers anything from their past. As a lethal disease slowly spreads through the camp and the prisoners are abandoned, Ian Hutchings must find a way out if he and his people are to survive. But dark secrets lurk, and as they try to survive both the illness and the inferno they live on, they will discover a truth even stranger than their own circumstances.
Paul Cook's The Engines of Dawn is also on sale, currently $4.99 on Kindle.Book Description
The great engines of the Enamorati have enabled humanity to travel the stars, but at what cost?
Little is known of the jealously guarded engines while a complacent humanity slowly losses its edge and becomes increasingly dependant on mysterious alien technologies.
However, when an engine failure strands a university ship, Professor Ben Bennet and a group of students challenge the status quo and start discovering hidden secrets that threaten the future of humanity itself.
While you are on the Phoenix Pick page, you should also take a look at Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories, which contains a number of short stories by Frederik Pohl, David Drake, S.M. Stirling and Alexei and Cory Panshin, in addition to the out of print Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. On sale for $4.99, this one will be $9.99 when it reaches the Kindle store. The book is DRM-free when purchased from Phoenix Pick, so you can convert it as needed; get the Mobi version to send to your Kindle without conversion and the EPUB for any other reader (I'd only get the PDF as a last resort, as it will have the most problems if you need to convert to another format).Book Description
Rarely do books have such a great influence on a genre as Lest Darkness Fall has had on science fiction. Frequently quoted as one of the ‘favorite’ books of many of the masters of the field, this book by L. Sprague de Camp helped establish time-travel as a solid sub-genre of science fiction.
An indication of the influence and longevity of the book is by the number of best-selling writers who have written stories in direct response to, or influenced by, Lest Darkness Fall. This new volume also includes three such stories by Frederik Pohl, David Drake and S. M. Stirling written over a period of forty-three years—a testament to the timelessness of the book.
Similar, thematically, to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the book tells the tale of Martin Padway who, as he is walking around in modern Rome, is suddenly transported though time to 6th Century Rome.
Once in ancient Rome, Padway (now Martinus Paduei Quastor) embarks on an ambitious project of single-handedly changing history.
L. Sprague de Camp was a student of history (and the author of a number of popular works on the subject). In Lest Darkness Fall he combines his extensive knowledge of the workings of ancient Rome with his extraordinary imagination to create one of the best books of time travel ever written.
