Goodreads giveaway for The Iron Wire by Garry Kilworth

Due to be published in print and ebook formats on 21 October 2014, we’re running a Goodreads giveaway for the print edition of The Iron Wire by Garry Kilworth:

In 1870 an enterprise began in Australia that was breathtaking in its ambition: to construct a single galvanised iron wire between Adelaide and Darwin, crossing two thousand miles of virtually unexplored wilderness. This was the Overland Telegraph Line, using local trees as poles, thousands of them, and hundreds of men who would not return to civilization for two years or more. Some would not return at all.

Alex McKenzie is a young telegrapher who believes his chosen profession to be at the cutting edge of contemporary science. A man who knows that once the last pole is erected and the line is open from Adelaide, to Darwin, to London and on to New York, the world will have shrunk and messages that used to take four months from sender to receiver will then take only minutes. His hopes for the future, for him and the love of his life, Sally, rest on the success of this magnificent Australian achievement. However, there are those whose enmity he has aroused and who would not hesitate to rob him of his life simply because he represents all they hate: someone who has grabbed at his opportunities and has risen from farm labouring roots to man of science.

The Iron Wire: a novel of human hope and progress in a land where men die, women are widowed, and bushrangers live by the lie and the gun.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Iron Wire

by Garry Kilworth

Giveaway ends October 21, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

“His characters are strong and the sense of place he creates is immediate.” (Sunday Times on In Solitary)
“The Songbirds Of Pain is excellently crafted. Kilworth is a master of his trade.” (Punch Magazine)
“Atmospherically overcharged like an impending thunderstorm.” (The Guardian on Witchwater Country)
“A convincing display of fine talent.” (The Times on A Theatre Of Timesmiths)
“A masterpiece of balanced and enigmatic storytelling …Kilworth has mastered the form.” (Times Literary Supplement on In The Country Of Tattooed Men)
“An absolute delight, based on the myths and legends of the Polynesian peoples.” (Mark Morris on The Roof Of Voyaging)
“A subtle, poetic novel about the power of place – in this case the South Arabian Deserts – and the lure of myth. It haunted me long after it ended.” (City Limits Magazine on Spiral Winds)

Publication day for new infinity plus titles from Brooke & Brown

Today sees publication of two new titles from infinity plus, Keith Brooke’s epic fantasy novel Riding the Serpent’s Back and Eric Brown’s science-fiction story collection Deep Future.

Both are available at an introductory price of 99c/77p for a few days only (note: this price is only available at Amazon).

 

Riding the Serpent’s Back by Keith Brooke
An old era is drawing to a close, a new era about to begin, and the great mage Donn has passed on his Talents to a new generation. When a rogue church leader threatens to set loose wild powers, Donn’s children must oppose him but, also, they must contend with Donn himself: the old mage has not finished with his children yet. A fantasy epic of revolution, jealousy and earth-shattering magic.
Ebook: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Amazon Canada – Barnes and Noble – Kobo – Apple– Smashwords – Weightless Books
Print: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Amazon Canada –CreateSpace

Deep Future by Eric Brown
Deep Future collects ten tales of the past, present and future by the award-winning author of the best selling Helix. Whether he’s writing about aliens coming to Earth, virtual reality, alternate worlds or immortal men, Brown imbues his fictions with a concern for character and an abiding passion for story, underlining his position as one of Britain’s finest SF writers.
Ebook: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Barnes and Noble – Kobo – Apple– Smashwords – Weightless Books

Going cyberpunk for charity

Available only until 1st October, my novel The Accord is featured in a bundle of thirteen cyberpunk novels, curated by bestselling author Steven Savile and featuring such notable award-winning and bestselling authors as Melissa Scott, Kevin J Anderson, Billy Dee Williams (Lando!), Frank Herbert and David Bischoff.

The deal is simple: pick a price you’re willing to pay, pay it, and get a bunch of great books. Minimum price is $3, for which you get six novels, by Kevin J Anderson, Melissa Scott and Jo Graham, David Bischoff, Billy Dee Williams and Rob MacGregor, Keith Brooke, and David Farland. Pay a minimum of $15 and you get the complete set of thirteen novels.

Not bad, eh?

But to make it even better, you can opt for a proportion of what you pay to go to charity. Our chosen charities are Girls Write Now and Mighty Writers, and we’re hoping to raise them great big bucket-loads of cash.

The Cyberpunk Storybundle is available from http://storybundle.com/cyberpunk for the period 10th September 2014 to 1st October 2014, inclusive. All books are available in a variety of DRM-free formats.

Our charities

Girls Write Now

Girls Write Now helps mentor girls so they can develop writing skills, leading to a more successful future no matter what path they decide to choose.

Distinguished as one of the top 15 after-school arts and culture programs in the nation by The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Girls Write Now is New York’s first and only organization with a writing and mentoring model exclusively for girls. From young women exploring writing to seasoned professionals practicing their craft every day, GWN is a community of women writers dedicated to providing guidance, support, and opportunities for high school girls to develop their creative, independent voices and write their way to a better future.

Over the past 15 years, more than 4,500 underserved teen girls have benefitted from the GWN community and 100% of seniors in our flagship mentoring program go on to college—bringing with them portfolios, awards, scholarships, new skills, and a sense of confidence. Girls Write Now has built a record of achievement and innovation recognized twice by the White House, by The New York Times, and the MacArthur Foundation, and evidenced by the hundreds of Scholastic Art & Writing awards our girls have earned.

Mighty Writers

As avid readers, we’re always on the lookout for new authors and new titles. So what better way to make sure there will always be new authors than to help train the next generation of aspiring kids. Not only will they gain appreciation for the writing process itself, but the confidence this gives them will allow them to succeed in other areas of learning.

Mighty Writers’ mission is to teach Philadelphia kids to think and write with clarity. Our free programs combat the literacy crisis in a city where nearly half of high school students drop out and some 50% of working-age adults are functionally illiterate (can’t read bank statements, fill out job applications or easily comprehend news articles).

Today, Mighty Writers offers year-round writing programs for some 1,000 kids and teens, ages seven to 17, with help from 300 volunteers. At our headquarters in one of Philadelphia’s historic neighborhoods, we offer an after-school writing academy, themed writing workshops, one-on-one mentorships, a weekly teen lounge, SAT preparatory courses and college essay writing classes. Our programs draw students from more than 125 city schools (public, parochial, magnet, charter, cyber, home) and an array of communities.

Final Frontier – guest post by Brian Clegg

One of the reasons I’m a science writer is the sheer excitement generated by spaceflight when I was young. The Sky at Night was one of my favourite programmes, but you could hardly avoid Patrick Moore and many others cropping up all over the place in the media to discuss the space race, because it was big news. I had science fiction from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star Trek telling me we were going to be out there in the future, and I had the reality of more and more dramatic manned missions, leading up to 1969, when I was allowed to stay up all night to watch the moon landing. And this, we thought, was just the beginning.

Since then, reality has been disappointing. The Space Shuttle might have been a step forward, but the missions were mundane, never reaching far away from the Earth. It seemed increasingly that people were just an inconvenience for space exploration. They made missions far more expensive and risky – they simply weren’t cost effective when it came to doing space science. When I started writing Final Frontier, to capture the excitement of the manned conquest of space, it seemed as if I was writing an epitaph. Yet the more I got into it, the more my enthusiasm grew. Not only was there the nostalgic recapturing of the old thrill from my teens, but it really did seem as if we are on the verge of a different view of exploring the final frontier.

Two factors influence this. One is the ability to pull together more international effort. The original space race was very much a political battle between the USA and the USSR, with national pride and glory at stake. But with projects like the Large Hadron Collider we have come to realize just how much more can be achieved with good international cooperation. (Compare this with the US Superconducting Supercollider, cancelled after huge amounts of money had been spent on it.) In fact it’s more than just glossing over national boundaries. It’s interesting that in early SF, most space exploration was expected to be by private companies and individuals. Now private money is back in the business, providing new ideas and impetus. Joint national and private enterprise really could make a huge difference to the future of manned space flight.

The second factor is the realisation that the battle for science funding should not exist. A while ago I interviewed a Nobel Prize winning physicist, who was dismayed about the amount of science money going to the ISS, because scientifically it had practically no return on investment, while that same money could do so much more on the ground or in robotic probes. What we need to realise is that the science is secondary when it comes to this kind of exploration. When Cook and Magellan and Columbus were out there, they may well have picked up some scientific information, but it wasn’t the driving force behind their expeditions. They weren’t scientific missions on a science budget. The Beagle, for that matter, was a survey ship, on which Darwin’s work was at best a secondary role. Similarly we have to see manned expeditions into space being about prospecting, exploring, perhaps finding future homes, widening our horizons and doing what makes life worth living. This shouldn’t be eating into a fragile science budget – it’s more about defence, though defence of humanity rather than an individual nation.

So what I started in a negative vein ended up feeling much more positive. Of course there was also the chance to bring in all kinds of interesting context, from space travel in science fiction to the potential realities of reaching the stars, and whether a warp drive really does make sense from the viewpoint of physics. It might seem corny, but the spirit of that old intro to Star Trek really came home to me, along with the hope that we really will continue to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net) is an award-winning popular science author whose books include The Universe Inside You, Dice World, Build Your Own Time Machine, The Quantum Age and Final Frontier.Final Frontier is available from Amazon US, Amazon UK and other booksellers.

Thirteen bargain novels in the Cyberpunk Storybundle

Available for a limited time only, from http://storybundle.com/cyberpunk:

A bundle of cyberpunk novels from top authors, including Frank Herbert, Kevin J Anderson, Melissa Scott and David Bischoff. Oh, and yours truly, of course.

And what’s more, you get to choose how much you want to pay! If you pay $3 or more you get these titles:

• Resurrection, Inc. by Kevin J. Anderson
• Lost Things by Melissa Scott and Jo Graham
• The Infinite Battle (Star Hounds: Book 1) by David Bischoff
• PSI/NET by Billy Dee Williams and Rob MacGregor
• The Accord by Keith Brooke
• On My Way to Paradise by David Farland

Pay $15 or more, and you get these additional titles:

• Immortal by Steven Savile
• High-Opp by Frank Herbert
• Pennsylvania by Michael Bunker
• Dreamships by Melissa Scott
• Galactic Warriors (Star Hounds: Book 2) by David Bischoff
• The Macrocosmic Conflict (Star Hounds: Book 3) by David Bischoff
• Beowulf: A Bloody Calculus by Milo Behr

This bundle of books is coordinated by Steven Savile, whose novel Immortal appears here exclusively a month ahead of its publication anywhere else. Of this bundle, he says:

“Some of these writers are among my favourites in any genre. I can honestly say I adore each and every one of the books in this bundle. More than anything, I think the books here do a fantastic job of showcasing the dark cities and darker edges of where this world is going and can’t help but capture your imagination in the same way that Philip K Dick and other great writers captured mine. I really hope you enjoy them.”

The Cyberpunk Storybundle is available from http://storybundle.com/cyberpunk for the period 10th September 2014 to 1st October 2014, inclusive. All books are available in a variety of DRM-free formats.

Riding the Serpent’s Back: free draw

Following closely on the heels of announcing the introductory price for the ebook edition of my new epic fantasy, Riding the Serpent’s Back, we’ve just been given the go-ahead to run a Goodreads giveaway for a free copy of the paperback edition:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Riding the Serpent’s Back

by Keith Brooke

Giveaway ends September 23, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Riding the Serpent’s Back: epic fantasy from Keith Brooke – pre-order for 99c/77p

The ebook edition of my new 200,000 word fantasy novel is now available for pre-order from Amazon for the bargain price of 99c/77p. Later this month, the ebook will become available at other retailers, and the print edition will also come out.

~

Riding the Serpent’s Back by Keith Brooke

With his health failing, the great mage Donn has chosen to pass on his Talents to a new generation: an old era is drawing to a close, a new era about to begin. But with change comes instability. War looms and a rogue church leader threatens to set loose the wild powers of the First City. Donn’s children must oppose this man but, also, they must contend with Donn himself: the old mage has not finished with his children yet.

On the run from the religious repression of the mainland, Leeth Hamera joins a group of outcasts on the Serpent’s Back, a continually changing island continent in the middle of a lava sea. Leeth has never lived up to the expectations of his wealthy merchant family and his only magical skill is the lowly Talent of bonding with animals. But, as he learns, the greatest Talents can sometimes be the slowest to emerge.

The leader of the outcasts is Chi, son of Donn and the greatest healer of his generation. Chi is in exile for breaking the Embodied Church’s edict against intervening in the natural order: many years ago Chi used his skills to revive his son from the dead. That son, Lachlan Pas, is now a church leader tortured by the guilty knowledge of what his father had to do to return him to life. When he learns Chi is still alive, he orders his execution, determined that his secret should never be exposed.

Until now, Chi has been content to live in exile but now he knows that his son’s insane and cruel rule must be stopped. Chi summons his half-siblings from throughout the inhabited lands of the Rift valley. The need for action is confirmed when one of them reveals that Lachlan and his mage, Oriole, are rebuilding the ancient city of Samhab – an act which will release the powers of the earth with unforeseeable consequences.

Welcome to the magical island city of Zigané, endlessly adrift in the southern lava sea; the searing soda plains home of the Morani warriors; the impenetrable Zochi jungle, full of illusion and hidden hazard; the charmed fortress-like City of the Divine Wall; and Samhab, the fantastic First City of the True, built at the geographical centre of the Rift, where the magical powers of the earth rise up to be set free by the earth-charmers and mages. The novel’s cast of shape-changers, earth-charmers, healers and illusionists must battle to save civilization from the evil rule of Lachlan Pas and his followers.

For whoever controls the power of Samhab controls the future of the world.

“Keith Brooke’s prose achieves a rare honesty and clarity, his characters always real people, his situations intriguing and often moving.” World Fantasy Award-winner Jeff VanderMeer

“A progressive and skilful writer.” Peter F Hamilton, author of the Night’s Dawn trilogy

“In the recognized front ranks of SF writers.” Locus

Pre-order from: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Amazon Canada

Deep Future by Eric Brown: pre-order for 99c/77p

Eric Brown’s collection Deep Future: available in ebook formats for the first time. Publication date is 23rd September, but this title is now available for pre-order at Amazon at the knock-down price of 99c/77p!

Deep Future collects ten tales of the past, present and future by the award-winning author of the best selling Helix. Whether he’s writing about aliens coming to Earth, virtual reality, alternate worlds or immortal men, Brown imbues his fictions with a concern for character and an abiding passion for story.

Meet Edward Sinclair, a man grieving the loss of his daughter, and the scientist who just might be able to bring her back from the dead…

Ben Henderson, a gem-cutter, and what happened one summer on a far-away colony world…

The telepathic Tavernier and his involvement with a strange alien race who will change his life forever…

Claudine Hainault, a schoolgirl who turns her back on the chance to live for ever when the Kethani come to Earth…

And many other humans – and aliens – from the imagination of one of Britain’s finest SF writers.

Pre-order from: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Amazon Canada