Tuesday, July 8, 2014

New Releases 7/8/14

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Hardcovers

Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen

"Every child knows how the story ends. The wicked pirate captain is flung overboard, caught in the jaws of the monster crocodile who drags him down to a watery grave. But it was not yet my time to die. It's my fate to be trapped here forever, in a nightmare of childhood fancy, with that infernal, eternal boy."

Meet Captain James Benjamin Hook, a witty, educated Restoration-era privateer cursed to play villain to a pack of malicious little boys in a pointless war that never ends. But everything changes when Stella Parrish, a forbidden grown woman, dreams her way to the Neverland in defiance of Pan’s rules. From the glamour of the Fairy Revels, to the secret ceremonies of the First Tribes, to the mysterious underwater temple beneath the Mermaid Lagoon, the magical forces of the Neverland open up for Stella as they never have for Hook. And in the pirate captain himself, she begins to see someone far more complex than the storybook villain.

With Stella’s knowledge of folk and fairy tales, she might be Hook’s last chance for redemption and release if they can break his curse before Pan and his warrior boys hunt her down and drag Hook back to their neverending game. Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen is a beautifully and romantically written adult fairy tale.

Paperbacks

Doorways by George R.R. Martin

Dr. Thomas Mason had a regular life, with a regular job, and a regular girlfriend. Until one night, zapped from somewhere else, a mysterious young woman named Cat ends up in the E.R. Pursued by the government and twisted creatures from her own world, Cat inadvertantly embroils Tom in her quest for freedom. Which takes him to alternative Earths he never imagined - and which he may never get back from!

On the False Earths: Valerian by Pierre Christin

A spatio-temporal agent is always ready to give his… lives… for the mission?!

Valerian, shot to death in an Indian fortress. Valerian, dead in 19th century London. Valerian, gunned down in San Francisco's Chinatown… And Laureline, paired up with an unpleasantly arrogant historian from Galaxity, forced to witness every demise of the man she loves on a succession of re-enacted pieces of human history. A very strange case that will take the two spatio-temporal agents to the limits of their endurance as they hunt down the mysterious architect of the false Earths….

The Return of the Discontinued Man by Mark Hodder

Explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and poet Algernon Swinburne return in a new series of wildly imaginative steampunk adventures.

SPRING HEELED JACK IS JUMPING BACK!

It's 9 p.m. on February 15, 1860, and Charles Babbage, the British Empire's most brilliant scientist, performs an experiment. Within moments, blood red snow falls from the sky and Spring Heeled Jack pops out of thin air in London's Leicester Square. Though utterly disoriented and apparently insane, the strange creature is intent on one thing: hunting Sir Richard Francis Burton!

Spring Heeled Jack isn't alone in his mental confusion. Burton can hardly function; he's experiencing one hallucination after another--visions of parallel realities and future history. Someone, or something, is trying to tell him about ... what?

When the revelation comes, it sends Burton and his companions on an expedition even the great explorer could never have imagined--a voyage through time itself into a twisted future where steam technology has made a resurgence and a despotic intelligence rules over the British Empire!

The Steampunk Trilogy by Paul Di Filippo

An outrageous trio of novellas that bizarrely and brilliantly twists the Victorian era out of shape, by a master of steampunk alternate history Welcome to the world of steampunk, a nineteenth century outrageously reconfigured through weird science. With his magnificent trilogy, acclaimed author Paul Di Filippo demonstrates how this unique subgenre of science fiction is done to perfection-reinventing a mannered age of corsets and industrial revolution with odd technologies born of a truly twisted imagination. In "Victoria" the inexplicable disappearance of the British monarch-to-be prompts a scientist to place a human-lizard hybrid clone on the throne during the search for the missing royal. But the doppelgänger queen comes with a most troubling flaw: an insatiable sexual appetite. The somewhat Lovecraftian "Hottentots" chronicles the very unusual adventure of Swiss naturalist and confirmed bigot Louis Agassiz as his determined search for a rather grisly fetish plunges him into a world of black magic and monsters. Finally, in "Walt and Emily" the hitherto secret and quite steamy love affair between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman is revealed in all its sensuous glory-as are their subsequent interdimensional travels aboard a singular ship that transcends the boundaries of time and reality. Ingenious, hilarious, ribald, and utterly remarkable, Di Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogy is a one-of-a-kind literary journey to destinations at once strangely familiar and profoundly strange.

E-books

Caesar's Bicycle by John Barnes

In an alternate Roman Empire, the ultimate battle is being waged for domination of the multiverse in the epic conclusion of the war for a million Earths

There are a million different Earths across an infinite number of timelines—and every one of them is in peril.

John Barnes’s ingenious science fiction saga the Timeline Wars reaches a breathtaking climax in Caesar’s Bicycle as former Pittsburgh private investigator–turned–Crux Op agent Mark Strang pursues the alien Closer enemy to a new battleground: an alternate ancient Rome of Caesar and Pompey.

Strang’s investigation into the disappearance of a fellow ATN operative has carried him along a new timeline to a Roman Empire at once strikingly similar and remarkably different from the one recalled in history books on his own Earth. What he discovers is a world in the process of radical transformation through the introduction of new technologies, centuries before their time, by both sides in the war for the multiverse—enemy Closers and ATN alike. And this time, Strang’s mission carries a new urgency, for the timelines are becoming dangerously unstable and mysteriously starting to close. To prevent the total enslavement of every one of the million Earths, Strang himself will now have to make history. But by ensuring that an infamous assassination actually does take place, Mark Strang could be condemning himself to the most horrible death the Romans ever devised.

Elements of Mind by Walter Hunt

In Victorian India, a Scottish doctor, Dr. James Esdaile, finds a way to use the power of mesmerism to aid him in performing surgeries, using a remarkable artifact that enhances his abilities. The revocation of the promise to bring the artifact to Rev. William Davey, the head of the secret Committee of English mesmerists leads him to commit suicide in the center of the Crystal Palace...but that is only the beginning of the story.Davey's pursuit of the object leads him across two continents, unfolding the story that has its origins two decades before - and reveals the secret world of the -chthonoi-, the elemental spirits that were banished from human lands in antiquity, and now want to find a way to open the Glass Door and reassert themselves in the world of men.

Patton's Spaceship by John Barnes

An unstoppable conspiracy of terror and death threatens a million alternate Earths in the first book of the Timeline Wars science fiction series

There are a million different Earths across an infinite number of timelines—and every one of them is in peril.

Mark Strang became a bodyguard and private investigator when terrorists killed his family; now he spends his days protecting Pittsburgh’s helpless and abused. But while on a mission to save the life of a ten-year-old girl, Strang is inexplicably cast into an alternate reality, transported to a different time on another Earth, where America was defeated in the Second World War and now suffers under the brutal yoke of Nazi oppression. Joining up with the remnants of the Resistance in the Free Zone—and allied with such notable commanders as George Patton and John F. Kennedy—Strang is suddenly a marked man and the last hope in a desperate fight for freedom, not only on this world but on countless others. For a war unlike any other is raging across time and dimensions, threatening every possible Earth, including Strang’s own. And the enemy will not rest until the entire multiverse is in chains.

In his epic and action-packed science fiction saga the Timeline Wars, John Barnes takes alternate-history SF to new heights, ingeniously reinventing and reinvigorating a genre popularized by such acclaimed authors as Harry Turtledove while joining the stellar ranks of Robert Heinlein and Joe Haldeman.

"A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star" by Kathleen Ann Goonan

"A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star", by Kathleen Ann Goonan, is about the daughter of a rocket scientist in the post 1950s who wants to go to the moon, despite being discouraged because “girls don’t do that.” A novelette that’s science fiction by association.

Washington's Dirigible by John Barnes

The war for a million Earths spreads to an alternate eighteenth century in the second book of the epic science fiction series the Timeline Wars

John Barnes has reinvented alternate-history science fiction in his ingenious saga of the battle to save the multiverse from enslavement by an alien enemy who can transcend time and reality. In the second volume of his remarkable trilogy, the war moves to a new battlefield: a different colonial America still happily tied to the British crown, where miraculous machines prowl the skies.

There are a million different Earths across an infinite number of timelines—and every one of them is in peril.

Former Pittsburgh private investigator Mark Strang is now a fully trained and blooded Crux Ops special agent, dedicated to the fight against the alien Closers who are invading every Earth in every time. Now the eternal struggle is carrying Strang to a different 1775 Boston, home of astounding technologies, where the colonists remain fiercely loyal to their king across the ocean. Something is rotten in England, though, and Strang must ally himself with the well-respected commander George Washington, the Duke of Kentucky, to derail a terrifying Closer plot and put this world’s history back on its proper course. But the enemy has unleashed a secret weapon that could permanently shift the balance: an unstoppable agent of destruction . . . named Mark Strang.

To fans, authors and publishers...

Is your story going to be published in time for the next New Releases? Contact us at ahwupdate at gmail dot com.  We are looking for works of alternate history, counterfactual history, steampunk, historical fantasy, time travel or anything that warps history beyond our understanding.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update and a blogger on Amazing Stories. Check out his short fiction. When not writing he works as an attorney, enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

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