Archive for Extracts

Read an exclusive extract from Far from the Light of Heaven

There is no need to know what no one will ask. Walking on gravel, boots crunching with each step, Shell doesn’t know if she is who she is because it’s what she wants or because it’s what her family expects of her. The desire for spaceflight has been omnipresent since she can remember, since she was three. Going to space, escaping the solar system, surfing wormhole relativity, none of these is any kind of frontier any more.

There will be no documentary about the life and times of Michelle Campion. She still wants to know, though. For herself. The isolation is getting to her, no doubt. No, not isolation, because she’s used to that from training. Isolation without progress is what bothers her, isolation without object. She thinks herself at the exact centre of the quarantine house courtyard. It’s like being in a prison yard for exercise, staggered hours so she doesn’t run into anyone. Prison without a sentence. They run tests on her blood and her tissues and she waits, day after day. She stops and breathes in the summer breeze, looks up to get the Florida sun on her face. She’s cut her hair short for the spaceflight. She toyed with the idea of shaving her head, but Max Galactix didn’t think this would be media friendly, whatever that means. Shell spots something and bends over. A weed, a small sprout, pushing its way up between the stones. It shouldn’t be there in the chemically treated ground, but here it is, implacable life. She feels an urge to pluck the fragile green thread, but she does not. She strokes the weed once and straightens up.

Humans in the cosmos are like errant weeds. Shell wonders what giants or gods stroke humanity when they slip between the stars. The wind changes and Shell smells food from the kitchen prepared for the ground staff and their families. Passengers and crew like Shell are already eating space food, like they’ve already left Earth. Around her are the living areas of the quarantine house. High- rises of glass and steel forming a rectangle around the courtyard. One thousand passengers waiting to board various space shuttles that will ferry them to the starship Ragtime. Shell, just out of training, along for the ride or experience, committed to ten years in space in Dreamstate, arrival and delivery of passengers to the colony Bloodroot, then ten further years on the ride back. She’ll be mid- forties when she returns.

Might as well be a passenger because the AI pilots and captains the ship. She is the first mate, a wholly ceremonial position which has never been needed in the history of interstellar spaceflight. She has overlearned everything to do with the Ragtime and the flight. At some predetermined point, it will allow her to take the con, for experience and with the AI metaphorically watching over her shoulder. She turns to her own building and leaves the courtyard. She feels no eyes on her but knows there must be people at the windows.

 

Start reading THE BROKEN EYE on Wattpad

Hey Lightbringer fans, we know you’re eagerly waiting for the next Lightbringer book. Good news, over the next couple of weeks we’ll be releasing the first 50 pages from THE BROKEN EYE (US | UK | AUS). Follow Brent Weeks on Wattpad to receive an update when new chapters are available, and get a head start on the next exciting installment of The Lightbringer series.

Residents of the US, UK, and Australia can still pre-order THE BROKEN EYE and claim a free signed bookplate, plus gain access to two exclusive short stories written by Brent Weeks!  A couple of reminders:

1.) You must provide proof of purchase. This can be a picture or your receipt or copy of the confirmation email you received if you ordered online from your preferred retailer.

2.) You must fill out this form to qualify. Sending us your information by any other means does not qualify you to receive the bonuses.

3.) If you experienced any technological difficulties during the download of the short stories, please contact us so we can help you out.

4.) Supplies are limited. In fact, supplies are nearly gone. If you haven’t pre-ordered yet but want a bookplate, we suggest you pre-order soon. Once they’re gone, they are gone.

Full details and entry form can be found here.

 

Read a free extract of THIEF’S MAGIC by Trudi Canavan

It’s now just over a week until the release of THIEF’S MAGIC (UK|US|ANZ), the brand new fantasy adventure from No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author Trudi Canavan.

Millions of readers worldwide have read and enjoyed Trudi’s fantastic books – and this new novel is something to get VERY excited about.

It’s set in a brand new world, featuring a whole new cast of characters. It’s time to forget what you know about the nature of magic . . .

You can read a free extract of the book right now by visiting Trudi’s Facebook page. The more you share the extracts, the more we’ll unlock!

 

Read an excerpt from A DANCE OF CLOAKS by David Dalglish

OctoberAssassin or protector; every choice has its consequences.

For the rogues and fantasy readers out there, Orbit’s Fall line-up is an exciting one, and it includes the Shadowdance series by David Dalglish! Starting in October, we’re publishing the first three books back-to-back. Here’s an excerpt from the first book, A DANCE OF CLOAKS (US | UK | AUS)

For the past two weeks the simple building had been his safe house, but now Thren Felhorn distrusted its protection as he limped through the door. He clutched his right arm to his body, fighting to halt its trembling. Blood ran from his shoulder to his elbow, the arm cut by a poisoned blade.

“Damn you, Leon,” he said as he staggered across the wood floor, through a sparsely decorated room, and up to a wall made of plaster and oak. Even with his blurred vision he located the slight groove with his fingers. He pressed down, detaching an iron lock on the other side of the wall. A small door swung inward.

The master of the Spider Guild collapsed in a chair and removed his gray hood and cloak. He sat in a much larger room painted silver and decorated with pictures of mountains and fields. Removing his shirt, he gritted his teeth while pulling it over his wounded arm. The toxin had been meant to paralyze him, not kill him, but the fact was little comfort. Most likely Leon Connington had wanted him alive so he could sit in his padded chair and watch his “gentle touchers” bleed Thren drop by drop. The fat man’s treacherous words from their meeting ignited a fire in his gut that refused to die.

Continue reading.

Become a fan of the official Facebook fanpage for the latest updates and connect with other fans of the series.

Praise for A DANCE OF CLOAKS

“A gritty book with intriguing characters and has a plot which will keep you hooked till the end’ Fantasy Book Critic

“Fast, furious, and fabulous.” – Michael J. Sullivan, author of THEFT OF SWORDS (US | UK | AUS)

“Dalglish concocts a heady cocktail of energy, breakneck pace and excitement that a reader could get drunk on.” – Sam Sykes, author of Tome of the Undergates

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Read a sample from HELEN AND TROY’S EPIC ROAD QUEST

Martinez_HelenandTroy-TPOn cross-country road trip, a minotaur girl and an all-american boy will discover the adventure of a lifetime in HELEN AND TROY’S EPIC ROAD QUEST — a new comic fantasy by A. Lee Martinez! Publishers Weekly called it “a sweetly charming, gleefully entertaining tale of two teens traveling across the country, one mythic encounter at a time,” releases next week. Get ready to laugh out loud until your sides hurt and check out the first chapter!

Chapter One

The strangeness of a minotaur working at a burger joint wasn’t lost on Helen, but she’d needed a summer job. If she’d applied herself, she probably could’ve found something better, but it was only a few months until she started college, so why bother?

Fortunately Mr. Whiteleaf had been pretty cool about it. He didn’t make her flip burgers, and he didn’t make her stand out on the curb with a sandwich board as she’d feared he might. She usually ran the register, and while some customers might give her funny looks before placing their orders, that was their problem, not hers.

Full-blown minotaurism was rare in this day and age. Last time she’d checked, there had been thirteen recorded cases in the last hundred years. All the others were male. The enchantment or curse or whatever you wanted to call it usually didn’t take with girls. Not all the way.

The last full female minotaur, Gladys Hoffman, aka Minotaur Minnie, had made a name for herself as a strongwoman touring with P. T. Barnum’s Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome. Gladys had made the best of her circumstances, but that was 1880. The world was different now, and Helen had more options. Or so she liked to believe.

She was still a seven-foot girl with horns and hooves, dozens of case studies in various medical journals, and her very own Wikipedia page. But she’d learned to roll with the punches.

Read more.

 

Read a sample from LOVE MINUS EIGHTY

Love-Minus-EightyBased on the Hugo-winning short story, LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (US | UK | AUS) is a haunting and compelling story which Kirkus called “speculative fiction at its most personal and powerful”.

In this full-length novel, Will McIntosh expands upon the complexity of love, loss, and death in a future where advancements in medicine and cryogenics have changed the dating game in a major way. Although the technology may be unfamiliar, the challenges these characters face while struggling with issues of identity, existence, and the search for love ring eerily true for all of us. Read the prologue on io9 or continue on to the first chapter below.

Chapter 1: Rob
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The woman across the aisle from Rob yammered on as the micro-T rose above street level, threading through the Perrydot Building, lit offices buzzing past in a colorful blur. He should have taken his Scamp. Public transport was simpler, but he always seemed to share a compartment with someone who didn’t have the courtesy to subvocalize.

For no reason except that she was annoying the shit out of him, Rob decided to scan her to see how much work she’d had done on her face.

As his fingers danced over the skintight system on his left arm, the woman glanced his way and curled her lip—a microexpression that was there and gone in a flicker. Now he had another reason to dislike this complete stranger. No, his style wasn’t elegant and seamless, and he was tired of being judged by the technological glitterati as lacking some vital core because he only cared about making his system function, not how he looked doing it.

Read more here. 

Read a sample from THE TYRANT’S LAW

THE TYRANT'S LAWHot on the heels of an exciting April which included some gut-wrenching moments in Game of Thrones and several great new fantasy novels to read, this May gives us every reason to continue celebrating. THE TYRANT’S LAW (US | UK | AUS), Daniel Abraham’s latest novel in the Dagger and Coin series, will be available for purchase next week!

Here’s an excerpt from the third novel in the series which RT Book Reviews called “easily the best of the series, and perhaps the best book this reviewer has read in the last 12 months!”

Read an excerpt from the novel or start from the beginning of the series with THE DRAGON’S PATH (US | UK | AUS).

Prologue

Milo of Order Murro

Milo slipped in the darkness, falling to one knee. The stones of the beach cut his skin, and the blood darkened the oiled wool of his leggings. The old fisherman, Kirot his name was, paused and looked back at him, lifting his lantern and one white eyebrow in query. Are you coming, or staying here? To the north, the waves cracked with ice. To the south, the deep darkness of the village waited for their return. Milo forced himself to stand. A little more blood would do him no harm. He’d lost enough, God knew. Kirot nodded and turned back to the long, slow trudge along the shore.

The rhythm of their steps sounded against the waves like the complex patterns of a marriage dance. Milo could almost conjure up the thrill of the violins and the tapping of the shell drums. He had heard it said that of all the thirteen races of mankind, the Haaverkin had the most exquisite sense of music. In fairness, he’d only heard this said by other Haaverkin. A woman’s voice rose in the music, ululating in a sensual harmony with the strings, and Milo recognized that he was hallucinating. The voice of the water, his father called it. He’d heard it before sometimes when he’d been out on the boats in the dim light before dawn or limping back in to shore after a long day on the cold northern waters. Sometimes it was music, other times voices in conversation or argument. Some of the very old or very young claimed that the sounds were real, that they were the Drowned calling out to their brother race. Milo’s father said that was rot and piss. It was only a man’s mind playing tricks on itself, and the roar of ice and water to give it ground to play on. And so that was what Milo believed.

The coast nearest his village was ragged. Cliffs and stony beach, fat green crabs and snow-grey gulls. Some nights the aurora danced green and gold in the sky, but tonight it was low dark cloud and the smell of snow coming. The moon struggled now and again through the cover, peeping down at the two men and then looking shyly away. No, not two men. Not yet. One man and one nearly so. Milo had been a boy that morning, and would be a man before he slept, but he was still in the dangerous place between places, neither one thing nor another. It was why. he was here.

Read more. 

“Pimp My Airship” – Reclaiming Airships for Epic Fantasy

Airships have somehow ended up becoming the ultimate symbol of steampunk fiction. But as much as we love their appearance in established steampunk classics such as Gail Carriger’s fantastic Parasol Protectorate novels, Cherie Priest’s BONESHAKER and Stephen Hunt’s COURT OF THE AIR, I’m making a plea that we remember the humble airship does not have to remain in the domain of steam – and the punkification thereof!

Talking airships in Terry Brooks's brand new Dark Legacy of Shannar novel WARDS OF FAERIE - perfect for fans of Christopher PaoliniI think it’s really time to claim back the airship for epic fantasy. What got me thinking about this was Terry Brooks’s new Dark Legacy of Shannara series, starting with WARDS OF FAERIE (UK / ANZ) and continuing with the recently released BLOODFIRE QUEST (UK / ANZ).

Airships have been in Terry Brooks’ novels for a while, ever since ILSE WITCH I believe, but it’s in his brand new series The Dark Legacy of Shannara that they’re really coming into their own. I couldn’t help thinking – I really, really want to own one of these airships.

Terry Brooks’ airships are like the suped-up, turbo charged versions of the common airship we’re all so familiar with. They’re powered by the sun – using ambient-light sails, something called diapson crystals and radian draws. Light gets converted into energy, and then this energy is expelled through what’s called the parse tubes. They’ve also got sails to gather extra power from the wind. They can easily fly at 1000 feet, and they’re kickass.

In WARDS OF FAERIE, things only get more exciting on the airship front. You don’t have to have read any previous Terry Brooks novels to enjoy this brand new novel, and you don’t have to know a lot about what’s gone before in airship automobile history to appreciate just how cool Terry’s speed-demon designs are.

To set the scene, there are two twins, Redden and Railing Ohmsford, who are thrill-seekers, risking life and limb racing special modified airships of their own design called Sprints.

Now I’m not into fancy cars, superbikes or private jets, but there’s something about these airships that really gets me salivating . . .

Sprints were one wicked pair of machines . . . Painted black from mast to keel, light sheaths black as well to better absorb the power of the sun, they had long, narrow hulls stripped of everything that might slow them down . . .

The controls were set to either side of a shallow depression that served as a cockpit, all within easy reach of the pilot. The pilot lay on his back with his head slightly elevated, facing forward down the length of his body toward the bow . . . Inside the cockpit, the thrusters and steering levers were manipulated by a combination of hands and feet, the cords that ran from the levers to the sheaths, rudder, and fins drawn so tightly that even the smallest amount of pressure would produce a response in the vessel’s handling . . .

These slender black monsters weren’t designed as transports; they were built to race.

Talking airships in Terry Brooks's brand new Dark Legacy of Shannar novel BLOODFIRE QUEST, book two in the series and perfect for fans of Christopher Paolini*HUMANA, HUMANA* . . . It would be pretty cool to pull up outside Orbit Towers in one of those.

Now Terry Brooks certainly isn’t the only author to be using airships in a fantasy setting. A number of other authors doing this in books that are just as much fantasy as pure steampunk (Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadow of the Apt books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Neil Gailman’s STARDUST come to mind…).

But I think that Terry Brooks really is one of the pioneers making airships truly sexy. If anyone can think of sexier airships then I’d be open to opinions!

But all I’m going to say for now is, to quote an Amazon reviewer, “Hold onto your diapson crystals – Shannara is back!”

 

Read an excerpt from REBELLION by Ian Irvine

Rebellion

This week, the follow-up to VENGEANCE (US | UK | AUS) releases everywhere.  Magic is failing and there are dark days ahead for the land of Hightspall . . .

If you haven’t picked up the first book of The Tainted Realm series, you can check our the first chapter here or find out what fans are already saying about it on Ian’s Facebook page.

The action does not let up in the latest novel, REBELLION (US | UK | AUS). From the first pages you’ll be caught up in the epic struggle as Rix and Tali fight against a villain hellbent on destroying the world in order to rebuild it according to his desires. Read an excerpt below.

Chapter 1

“Lord Rixium?” Her voice was desperate. “You gotta get up now. The enemy are coming. Coming fast.”

Rix’s right wrist throbbed abominably, and so did the back of his head. He groaned, rolled over and cracked his ear on a stone edge. His cheek and chest were numb, as if he’d been lying on ice.

“What . . . ?” he mumbled. “Where . . . ?” His eyes were gummed shut and he didn’t want to open them. Didn’t want to see.

“Chancellor’s stolen Tali and Rannilt away, to milk their healing blood.”

Click to continue reading.

 

Read a sample from AMERICAN ELSEWHERE

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson BennettArt first glance Wink, New Mexico is a seemingly normal town except that you won’t’ find it on any map. You see Wink should not exist, but that is not the strangest thing you’ll find there when you crack open AMERICAN ELSEWHERE (US | UK | AUS) –  the latest novel from Edgar Award winning author Robert JacksonBennett.

Check out Publishers Weekly starred review and read the first chapter of this riveting novel.

“Bennett (The Troupe) gives the idealized image of the American dream a pan-dimensional twist with this alien invasion tale, part Bradbury and part L’Engle with a dash of Edward Scissorhands…Through sharp empathetic detail, the horrific becomes both achingly poignant and comic; a wholesome diner where no one can ever order just one piece of pie shares space with a harsh alien landscape where a quivering blue imp cowers in terror while pleading for his life. Readers will be captivated from start to finish.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Chapter One

Even though it is a fairly cool night, Norris is sweating abundantly. The sweat leaks out of his temples and the top of his skull and runs down his cheeks to pool around his collarbones. He feels little trickles weaving down his arms to soak into the elbows and wrists of his shirt. The entire car now has a saline reek, like a locker room.

Norris is sitting in the driver’s seat with the car running, and for the past twenty minutes he’s been debating whether leaving the car running was a good idea or not. He’s made several mental charts of pros and cons and probabilities, and overall he thinks it was a good idea: the odds that someone will notice the sound of a car idling on this neighborhood lane, and check it out and sense something suspicious, feel fairly low; whereas the odds of him fumbling with the ignition or the clutch if he needs to start the car quickly seem very, very high right now. He is so convinced of his own impending clumsiness that he hasn’t even dared to take his hands off the steering wheel. He is gripping it so hard and his palms are so sweaty that he doesn’t know if he could remove them if he tried. Suction, he thinks. I’m stuck here forever, no matter who notices what.

He’s not sure why he’s so worried about being noticed. No one lives in the neighboring houses. Though it is not posted anywhere—in any visual manner, that is—this part of town is not open to the public. There is only one resident on this street.

Norris leans forward in his seat to reexamine the house. He is parked right before its front walk. Behind the car is a small, neat gravel driveway that breaks off from the paved road and curves down the slope to a massive garage. The house itself is very, very big, but its size is mostly hidden behind the Englemann spruces; one can make out only hints of pristine white wooden siding, sprawling lantana, perfectly draped windows, and clean red-brick walls. And there, at the end of the front walk, is a modest, inviting front door with a coat of bright red paint and a cheery bronze handle.

It is a flawless house, really, a dream house. It is a dream house not only in the sense that anyone would dream of living there; rather, it is so perfect that a house like this could exist only in a dream.

Read the rest of this excerpt.