If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
With an introduction by Holly Chism.
FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Hunter, Traitor: A Familiar Origins Story (Familiar Tales)
The Hunters’ lord turns his back on duty.
Matias held duty to people closer than duty to his sworn lord. Now alone and outside the shield of the law, an old man forces his battered body to obey his will and continue the Hunt.
Only one Hunter remains faithful—perhaps.
What can a single Hunter do? Where are the others? Dare any stand up to a corrupted lord and see justice done?
A Familiar Origins novella, set fifty years after the Mongol invasion, two hundred years before Lord Adrescu’s Blade.
FROM KEVIN CRAIGHTON: Salvation
Vengeance belongs to someone.
John Rogers is a retired Army Ranger and bodyguard living in Southwest Florida. After years in personal security, John seeks a quiet life but is drawn back into the darker side of life when his best friend asks him to protect a church volunteer on a mission of mercy. The novel explores themes of redemption, justice and faith, as John grapples with his past, begins a new relationship and rekindles his spiritual beliefs.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Huntress on the Rocks (Timelines Universe Book 4
A young military intelligence agent. Hunting a murderous drug dealer across a floating city on a water world light-years from Earth – with only his name, and a vague description of what he might look like. Will she finally find her quarry and bring him to justice, or will cases of mistaken identity mean she’ll simply end up
A Huntress on the Rocks
(A Delaney Wolff Fox story)
FROM ALIDA LEACROFT: Cecily
Wicked uncles, abductions, courage and romance…
Her father lost at sea, under seemingly scandalous circumstances, Miss Cecily Winiard is brought to the northern Spa town of Harrogate, to make her come-out under the aegis of her great aunt. Her family are in dire straits, and she must make an advantageous marriage. Except… her great aunt’s ideas of an advantageous marriage and Cecily’s do not run in tandem. Her great aunt wants birth and breeding, and certainly no-one with an interest in vulgar commerce. Young Lord Coleford, is, as far as her great aunt is concerned, a vulgar Cit and entirely unworthy to even breathe the same air as a Winiard, let alone have further pretentions. It’s a trifle awkward that Cecily likes him. It’s even more awkward that she, on the instructions of great aunt, snubbed the eligible young man severely. That is not something he’s accustomed to. He’d come to Harrogate expecting to be bored, not to be treated like a hatstand.
And stalking behind the gaiety and social whirl, there lurks the scandal of her father’s disappearance, and the plots that surround it.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love (Building a Life Book 1)
Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?
FROM KAREN MYERS: Mistress of Animals: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 2)
Book 2 of The Chained Adept.
AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.
Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.
This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.
The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.
BY LEIGH BRACKET, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Starmen of Llyrdis (Annotated): The Pulp Libertarian Science Fiction Classic
Michael Trehearne sensed his difference from other men, but he little knew he was a changeling of the only race able to conquer the stars!
Leigh Brackett’s 1951 novel, which first appeared in Startling Stories, not only prefigures books like Alfred Bester’s The Stars, My Destination and movies like Joss Whedon’s Serenity, it also makes a strong case for open source software and free culture in general, decades before either of those terms were coined.
- This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book genre and historical context.
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: I Never Applied for This Job (Family Law Book 8)
Lee seems to be getting a handle on this sovereign business. Mostly it is making sure you have exceptional people and then stay out of their way. She’s learning moderation a little at a time and commissioned a self programming AI who may be a he instead of an it.
Friendship is also a difficult process to master when you are torn between the standards of several species, but she manages to satisfy Badgers ideals, and her Human allies turn out to be very good friends too. A little working vacation with Jeff and April solidifies that bond and gives then a couple of adventures too. They really needed to check on the Bunnies and the Jeff had to teach the squids to keep their filthy tentacles off Lee.
Now if the Earthies would just stop trying to kill her, and they figure out how to deal with the impending death of money, maybe she can do some stuff again just for fun.
FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY, PERSONALLY RECOMMENDED BY SARAH A. HOYT: PLANTING LIFE: Shut the Kingdom (Near Future Science Fiction Adventure)
Nominated for the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
The road to Mars has to start somewhere. It might as well be central Virginia.
Jack Darien scorns his parents’ path. After the disaster at his father’s Mars settlement, the high school senior scraps both his lifelong interest in space exploration and his college plans. Even his rescue of a college student from assault doesn’t make him see his own future any differently.
Jack becomes obsessed, however, when one strange comment from the attacker draws him to unravel secrets at the former Superfund site that is now Webb University, the school where his returning father teaches and eco-restoration reigns. What starts for Jack as a distraction from thinking of his future turns into a dangerous journey that puts him, his mother, and sister at risk. As for his father, Jack decided long ago the man was on his own.
IN THE STILL ONGOING BASED BOOK SALE FOR 99c UNTIL TUESDAY NIGHT: FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).
(The link goes to Based Book Sale. You can search for No Man’s Land on the side bar. C. Chancy also has a book in it.)
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.
Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.
Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.
BUY STUFF FROM PEOPLE WHO DON’T HATE YOU:
They were in a show this weekend, with Morrigan’s Mercantile so we visited younger son and Little Pickle (Younger DIL) and tried out their jerky. It’s amazing. Highly recommended by me and Dan both. Oh, we also talked to them. They don’t hate us. (Gooble gobble, etc.)
SPEAKING OF, Have you Need FOR: Sharp, Shiny and Sylish! Morrigan’s Mercantile!
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: WORK
According To Hoyt 
Remember, o Readers, that you can be FORCE MULTIPLIERS!
When you read books, you can rate and review them.
Even short reviews are of aid to the writer, because sheer mass helps. (And if you really can’t review, still rate.)
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She forged on. It would not become her to undermine his work, if he did intend that.
“Who’s there?” came a woman’s voice. A thin woman with pale brown hair shifted in the brush, her hands rising.
“Elaine,” said Augustus. “Is someone injured?”
She hesitated. “Several.”
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Done with Mirrors appeared in my Kindle app Friday night. Probably won’t start it until Tuesday, still in the middle of something else.
I buy a lot of kindle books; AMZ sends me a couple emails a day tempting me, and I succumb fairly often. I do try to wait for the Sunday post, to shove a few pennies into the bowl here.
But something got me to buy Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Lost World, so I could re-read the first.
And TV this week put up the movies back to back, so I watched the last hour of JP and the first half-hour of LW. I decided I hated all the characters in LW and turned it off. Aside from getting preachy, the LW book was way better than the movie (which was preachy in its own way).
The LW book did have a scene where a T-rex scent-marked a vehicle. That’s a specialized dinosaur dance, the T-work.
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“How can we find this Susan?” said Asteria.
“She has red hair,” said Honor. Her heart pattered the faster. “We may have to go in closer, so that I can see and know her.”
The cat mask looked disapproving. It was uncanny, how those masks, however magical, showed their emotions.
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Sarah did a lot of work to find books that I’d enjoy but already have. [Very Big Crazy Grin]
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I was fighting for every breath. Plasma had leaked from the reactor, binding with oxygen in the compartment.
If I couldn’t get this makeshift air scrubber online in thirty seconds, my engineers and I would be toast, and then the rest of the crew.
OK, finished. But will it work?
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“Remember: order, rhythm, volume!” coached Clyde. He and Elmer, both aspiring wizards, had been working on the cantrips all day. It was Elmer’s turn. “RammaTammaZammaBoomRiffTiff!” he yelled as a waved his hands. “How’d I do?”
“RiffZIFF,” corrected Clyde. “And all you’ve managed to do is set your hat on fire.”
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Jenn Redmond hadn’t expected a work shift in Food and Nutrition to turn into a physics lesson. But there was Lou Corlin explaining the specialized sense of the word “work” in physics, with a pot of soup boiling hard enough that the steam was making the lid rattle a little.
“Of course it’s not doing any useful work, beyond letting steam escape. Now if you could attach a properly-balanced lever to the knob, you could arrange for it to ring a bell.”
As he led into a discussion of the earliest steam engines, Jenn considered the vast difference between the attitudes of these kids and the vast majority of those back in Houston. It was still fascinating to see how Lunans didn’t just see knowledge as something abstract, to be accumulated to pass tests. Instead they saw its application everywhere, even in something as simple as a pot that was boiling a little too hard.
Which raised the question of whether she should ask Lou to rig such a bell-ringer so she could know when a pot was in danger of boiling over.
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Also notice that 1/6 gravity will make things tend to boil over more easily and/or worse, as the weight difference is what separates the steam from the water (etc.) in a pot. (Other things could use a whirl of spin-gravity to help with that; here, not so much.)
One of the hugely under-appreciated benefits of spin-gravity stations, when we finally get them (see for example the planned Vast Haven-2), is that we can play around with variable spin-pseudo gravity, to see about things like cooking and animal reproduction and so forth. Now, and for the past of the Space Age, it’s been 1 or 0 gee only, with a very small brief bit of 1/6 thrown in. Not counting 1+ gee, which is very easy to do here but doesn’t apply to much of the Solar Syatem.
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Max opened the Governing Body’s message. Two years of Developmental League, endless work and an endless monk-like existence – was it paying off? “Dear Maximilian Sundberg,” the message read. “You have been drafted by…”
Rovers! I’m gonna play pro ball! Max was beyond elated.
But where was Cari going to be?
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Yes, dear fans, it was WORK, the dreaded day job, that distracted me from attempting to add one of mine to the works presented here. Psychologically damaging work. Soul-shattering work. It was, as Dickens put it in A Tale of Two Cities, “the worst of times.” Really “had my nose rubbed in it” (think puppy, accident, newspaper). But I was the innocent bystander watching my “doom” approach in slow motion. For certain values of innocent, that is.
God-willing, Tuesday will fix everything.
May you all have a blessed week!
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“That way,” said Rosalind, pointing. An inn stood there. A merchants’ train was hard at work, with the business of arrival, and no one had noticed them.
Rosalind took a room for herself and her cousin.
“At least no one’s talking of the queen and princess,” Elise murmured over soup.
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“You shouldn’t hide away like that. Makes things difficult! We have much work to do and little time to do it in.” The fae woman, dressed in a wild gown, of brilliant red and green tatters, shook her head.
Marguerite could not find her tongue. She bowed her head and hoped that would be taken as courtesy enough. Though this fae was certainly her godmother, and not just a fae woman who had taken a whimsy.
She found her tongue. “What should I do, my gracious godmother?”
The woman beamed. “Just stand there, Pearls-And-Diamonds!” She closed one eye. “And hold out your arms.”
Marguerite obeyed. And probably could not have spoke again, she thought. She looked at the patching and rents in the woman’s gown and hoped she would do better for a ballgown. Because even if she wore a beggar’s gown however bright colored, she would have to go.
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(Part 1/3)
Late for the next panel — the sort of thing that, thirty years ago, would have featured ones like Niven and Pournelle and Baen discussing near-term space development as mirrored in fiction — she barreled around the corner at a jog, nearly colliding with… a solidly-built older couple. It would not likely have been so close; only, the woman had dodged quite as nimbly as herself and in the same direction until suddenly she’d reversed.
“I’m so sorry,” said Leigh-Anne, taking a moment now that she’d stopped to both apologize and catch her breath. “In a huge hurry to get to the Space For Profit and Fun panel. Rumor says someone from Space X will be there, explaining something of all those new far-out Space xAI plans.” Catching her breath took a moment longer yet. And another.
The man grinned. “All these years going to conventions, and we’re still at the loser’s game of taking hallway corners to the inside. I’m Alec.”
“Leigh-Anne Shannon. Pleased to meet you, if briefly.” Back to breathing. Maybe almost-running hadn’t been the smartest of moves, after all.
“Arielle; I’m with him. And could I ask you a question about that button, do you really think ‘I’ve seen the future and it works… BUT WE DON’T!’?”
That was one of Leigh-Anne’s favorite convention buttons — among the very literally dozens displayed on her vest — a Carina Olivetti original.
“Um, kind of in a hurry… but, well, yes. Robotics really is supposed to make normal work mostly-obsolete, sooner or later, and much the sooner if you believe it the way Musk and Tesla are talking it up.”
They looked at each other, so briefly but so pointedly. Like the “old married couple” variation on a puppeteer chuckle, Leigh-Anne suddenly couldn’t help but think. And there was something oddly familiar about Alec and Arielle, that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, deeply-focused as she still was right now on getting into Ballroom Eleven, soonest.
“For one thing, if we somehow got handed a ‘working’ version of the ‘RUR’ with a better ending scenario… how could we be sure the whole system, as run by its ‘AIs’ and ‘robots’ and so forth, would even be stable? Arielle’s voice was conversational, not like a zealot refuting a heresy.
“As in, not mis-improve itself, or evolve weird, or just fall apart? Given especially the conventional co-assumption that ‘no human would be able to understand’ exactly how it works, and/or our LLM-era assumption there’d literally be no code to extract and scrutinize in the first place?”
“‘The Machine Stops’ by Forster… who some claim wasn’t an SF writer.” It didn’t even occur to Leigh not to reply to her.
Arielle grinned. “And don’t worry about getting in, that one’s been moved to Ballroom Two anyway, to handle the predicted overflow, as of fifteen minutes ago. And more importantly delayed by a half-hour. And most of all, they wouldn’t likely start without us two, anyway; given we’re a third of the panelists between us.” She pointed to her red pin-on cardboard badge — which said, Arielle Fletcher — with an even-bigger smile. Jerked a thumb at her husband, just as clearly self-identifying as Alec Fletcher.
“Oh! Oh, I didn’t I wasn’t, I guess I’m… extra sorry?” Shut up and stop gibbering, Leigh. Now. “But I do have to say, I absolutely loved your Ninshubur the Fixer. Even just the idea of transposing classical Mesopotamian mythical history to a 27th-century FTL commercial and political empire is really… neat. And, the way it works out is just, well, a real blast to read.” She smiled, and got a bit of a faraway look, even while walking beside and with Alec and Arielle Fletcher..(!)
She had to say it, she did, even if it was… carrying coals to Newcastle.
“‘Princely, Morning, Evening Stars, Lady of Largest Heart;
‘She wears the carved-out ground plan of all heaven and earth;
‘Terror folds in her robes, the stench of fear perfumes her garments.’
“Or whatever exactly it was Enheduanna wrote instead, it’s been awhile for me.”
Leigh had by now pulled up the convention ‘app’ on her phone, it confirmed both particulars about the schedule… pivot. Maybe that ‘declare your next intentions, if you please’ feature really is good for something?
Looked up, to see Alec grinning at her. “We didn’t put that quote in any of the books, so far. So, you really do have a clue about this?”
Leigh-Anne grinned back. “Not so much of one, just read a few of the many translations out there. It’s kind of mesmerizing, actually, reading stuff from a time where writing itself is a new and cutting-edge thing. And I do have to say, Inanna is… a very interesting person all in herself.”
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