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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM A. K. FEENEY: Orphans of Time
“Through water they will come,” she had said. “In fire they will go.”
High in the mountains of the American West lies a glacial lake with a deep underwater secret. Nearby lives Jake Greenwood, a straight-shooting libertarian professor of writing with a troubled past, who just wants a simple life. But on the morning of a summer solstice, he discovers two otherworldly visitors with odd burns washed up on the shore. Guided by a prophecy he received decades ago, he finds himself caught up with them in a global struggle for life and freedom. Can he ultimately save the world—and himself—by telling their story?
Gripping and often lyrical, Orphans of Time is a character-driven story of hope, desperation, healing, love, loss, and salvation. Told from the perspectives of three characters, it seamlessly weaves time travel, dystopian, sci-fi/ fantasy, romance, and visionary elements into a timely narrative.
FROM MATTHEW C. LUCAS: Space Station Halcyon: “Come and Get It!”
Welcome back to Space Station Halcyon!
Joey Mumbai had a hell of a time saving his space station from a code inspector. Who knew that running the place would be ten times worse?
A mob boss just dropped a “little job” on Joey’s doorstep: take out a rival’s shuttle bus when it docks at the station, and make it look like an accident. Seems easy enough. But the pilot is a jacked-up, strung-out, psychopathic rabbit named Captain Hazel. And Hazel has plans of her own for the ship. Meanwhile, a ritual to the eldritch demon that lives in the station’s kitchen has gone terribly wrong. And now eight sentient chicken tenders are running loose with a dream of freedom and a thirst for vengeance. They’d be pretty darned cute if they weren’t so darned murderous.
As gangsters, smugglers, terrorists, and homicidal fried food collide in the winding corridors of Halcyon, Joey must somehow keep everyone alive and prevent an interstellar gang war. All while coping with a rage-filled manatee, a maniacally happy computer, and not nearly enough booze.
A gritty, irreverent, sci-fi noir comedy packed with action, disaster, and questionable life choices, the second book in the Space Station Halcyon series answers the eternal question: “What could possibly go wrong?”
FROM J. KENTON PIERCE: Stormjammer: Book 2 of Shai
From the Prometheus Award-nominated series—Book 1 is a 2026 Prometheus Award Finalist for Best Novel.
The Long Night is over. The ash is clearing. And the orbital defense AI called Damocles still owns the sky.
Shaifennen Roehe is sixteen years old, five feet nothing, and meaner than a sack of wet roosters when the situation calls for it. She is also Hesperides Colony’s most effective corporal, which is either a compliment or a warning depending on how you look at it.
The skizzer swarms—giant predatory insects that are supposed to hibernate through the northern winters—are not hibernating. They are swarming earlier, bigger, and angrier than anything the colony’s histories describe. When one of those swarms hits Twelvety Homestead, Shai loses people she cannot replace. The answer to why the swarms have gone wrong is somewhere on the Southern Continent, and Shai is going to find it.
What she finds is larger than anyone guessed.
A thought-extinct alien species—not quite dead, not quite extinct, and not quite what the history vids suggested. A buried Mutual Prosperity artificial intelligence, waking up, very interested in meeting the colonists of New Vermont Prefecture, and extremely willing to help in ways nobody asked for. And enough pre-war hardware buried in the wreck of an assault shuttle to change every equation Shai’s people have been working with.
Meanwhile, Greenline Town is building airships. And the orbital AI called Damocles is still up there, waiting for someone to make a mistake big enough to earn a response.
Stormjammer is the second book in the Kiss for Damocles series, set in J. Kenton Pierce’s Tales from the Long Night universe. It is military science fiction built the old way: earned action, characters worth caring about, earned victory, and consequences that land. For readers who want their space opera gritty, their libertarian themes embedded in story rather than lecture, and their protagonists capable of punching above their weight class.
The Prometheus Award-nominated series continues. Shai Roehe does not stop. Neither do the problems.
FROM RACONTEUR PRESS: The Muse Within Us: An Anthology of Dark Fantasy and Horror (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 77)
What happens when inspiration stops feeling entirely human?
Paintings that command armies. Songs that shatter crowds. Ancient poems that speak directly into an immortal ear. A revolver forged from the ruins of Earth, passed from hand to hand across generations, delivering justice with a chorus of the dead riding in its steel.
The Muse Within Us is an anthology of dark fantasy, horror, military science fiction, and literary speculation. These eleven stories all ask one question: does inspiration come from within, or are we tuning into signals already moving through the world?
Editor Wally Waltner has gathered writers from across the speculative spectrum. Within these pages: a sorcerer-seamstress transformed into a dragon by her masterpiece; a court prince whose animation magic revives a forgotten civilization; a musician haunted by crowd-controlling spirits called the whispers, carrying two hundred dead from one show; a Norse scholar who realizes he has been speaking ancient kennings directly into an immortal ear; and a war painter ordered by a god of war to paint ever bigger victories until he refuses and pays the price.Also here: a baker empowered by a minor demon of boiling oil trapped in petrified wood; a mason’s boy whose hands transform into the arches of a destined cathedral; a blues musician whose song outlives him through new vessels; a gunsmith on a dead Earth forging a revolver that carries a chorus of voices across centuries; and a young woman who discovers that flowers blooming where bodies fell grant strange artistic power at a terrible cost.Some of these muses are generous. Several are predatory. All of them change the people they pass through.
The Muse Within Us because what moves through you may have its own agenda.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: I’m the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone: Volume 2 (I’m The Beautiful But … Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!)
Princess Regnant Alice and her companions, after a trip to Prince Daniel’s world Xeros, and a visit to Lost Terra and a meeting with Michael, the mysterious, ancient human, have been directed by Michael to travel to Mahoukai — a world of magical beings who will be able to properly train and guide Prince Daniel’s sister Alouette in the use of her inborn magical powers.
But a nagging question continues to bug both Alice and her father, Roger; what is really going on, back on Capital? Is a revolution brewing? Is the Lord Chancellor, Rupert, somehow involved, and at what level? Eventually they must bid a reluctant farewell to the Mahoukaian Great Mages of Antiquity, and end Alice’s six month absence from her Throne.
And what they find on Capital is far, far beyond anything they might have imagined from 50,000 light years away.
The second volume of the BBESP light novel!
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Rockin’ the USA
It’s not easy being married to the leader of the band, even in the best of times. When everything becomes political, you’ve got a nightmare on your hands.
Laurel had her doubts when her husband signed on to headline Governor Thorne’s Independence Day concert in Candlestick Park. Now that the band’s committed to the appearance, the Flannigan Administration has decided to shut the show down, with prejudice.
Laurel knows she has to fight this attempt to stop the signal. But doing so may put her in more danger than she could ever have anticipated, and risk those she loves.
A story of the Grissom timeline, originally published in Liberty Island Magazine.
This edition also includes a bonus essay on the era of dictatorship in Grissom-timeline America.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Faerie Gifts
A collection of short stories about the intersection between over- and under-hill, between human and faerie.
Fortunate One–Is the ability to see the normally unseen a gift…or a curse?
Steed–When you don’t fit anywhere, perhaps you should listen when the faerie horse says you belong elsewhere.
Kintsugi–When your fiance is a faerie, they don’t want your mortality to get in the way of forever.
Faerie Gifts–Sometimes, the faerie’s gift goes wrong…what’s a new mother to do when a faerie wants to bless her new babe?
Mixed Blessings–A boon to a musician exchanges one addiction for another..
Bargains Struck–When the fairy grants your wish in exchange for your firstborn…what happens when you can’t have a child?
Golden–When the geese aren’t killed, the eggs keep coming.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1
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.
FROM JOHN BAILEY The Vacation Broker Mysteries: Twelve Resort Worlds. Twelve Puzzles. One Very Observant Salesman. (The Detective Stories)
A salesman has no business solving murders.
Gideon Vale knows this perfectly well.
As a vacation-property consultant for Celestial Retreats Unlimited, his job is to help wealthy clients purchase dream homes on the most beautiful resort worlds in known space. Floating villas above sapphire oceans. Mountain lodges beneath alien stars. Private estates overlooking glowing seas.
The wealthy pay for his travel.
The scenery is spectacular.
The murders are entirely unexpected.
Armed with little more than patience, common sense, and an eye for detail, Gideon repeatedly finds himself entangled in mysteries that baffle local authorities. A billionaire dies inside a locked villa during a planetary storm. A famous celebrity disappears beneath a double sunset. A passenger commits murder without ever boarding the transport where the crime occurred.
Again and again, Gideon discovers that luxury may disguise greed, deception, and deadly secrets—but it can never hide them forever.
Inspired by the classic puzzle mysteries of the Golden Age, The Vacation Broker Mysteries combines fair-play detection, exotic science-fiction settings, and an unforgettable amateur sleuth whose greatest weapon is simple observation.
Twelve resort worlds.
Twelve impossible puzzles.
One very observant salesman.
Welcome to paradise.
FROM KAREN MYERS: The Visitor, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That
A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That
THE VISITOR – Felockati is anchored to his permanent location underwater and misses the days of roaming his ocean world freely.
But something new drops out of the sky and widens his horizons — all the way to the stars.
YOUR EVERY WISH – Stealing the alien ambassador’s dagger is a sure thing for Pete — just what he needs to pay off his debts.
Until he starts talking to it. There has to be a way to get something for himself out of the deal. Has to be.
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: RETURN
According To Hoyt 
“I wonder when his intelligence will return?”
“About the same time that my sanity will return”.
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No deposit. No Return.
I know it’s insane, but who else wants a box full of kittens?
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I really like the cover art on “Stormjammer”. I also approve of making the girls carry the crew served. Since it’s a Gatling I wonder who’s carrying the multitude of pan mag reloads it’ll go through.
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Also:
”I’d like you to meet my little friend!”
”It’s pretty big, Corp – bigger than you, pretty much.”
”Okay, fine — I’d like you to meet my big friend!!”
BRRRRRRRRRRRT!!
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“Dakka?”
“Dakka.”
For what it’s worth, Zeddie ran dry pretty quick, but it was just what the doctor ordered for that few seconds of sporty fun. ;) (She’s also a bit More Than Human.)
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Remember, o Readers, that you can be FORCE MULTIPLIERS!
After 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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He considered that. “Warmer if anything. With snow melt.”
“And then you get wet! The greatest folly, to get wet in this weather.” She spread her hands. “And worst of all, I would lose my way. I should not venture out without a guide, for I could not return safely.”
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“You came back. After all these years, you came back. Why?”
“Our time together–the memory’s never left me. I was hoping we could . . . reconnect somehow.”
“We have a lot of things to talk about. Like your children.”
“Children?”
“All eight of them, to be precise.”
–The Billionaire’s Surprise Baby Octo-mamma
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He finished. Scholars began to gather themselves to return to their towers. The newcomers grumbled about whether his first lecture had been better, and their having been tricked into attending this one.
One woman told, giggling, how he had named his sons Xenophanes and Anaximander.
“Fitting with such a father.”
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The cluster directly before her — she had not seen it from outside, it was interior, facing inward rather than outward — brightened to its full sustained illumination, the kind they had seen aimed at the party on the glacier slope two days before, and it was very large, and it was very close, and she understood, looking at it, that it was not a cluster of bioluminescent cells arranged in a pattern.
It was an eye.
A single eye, perhaps four metres across, suspended in the interior of the formation at her own height, looking at her with the clear, patient, absolute attention of something that has been waiting for this particular moment for a very long time. It was not human in its structure — the iris was vast and pale, the pupil a deep vertical slot — but it looked at her with a quality of recognition that had nothing to do with anatomy, and she understood, in the way that one understands things that are too large for the usual frameworks, that it knew her. Not as a type. As her.
She wrote, very carefully, in her notebook: *It is an eye. One eye, approximately four metres diameter, vertical pupil. It is looking at me. I am not afraid.*
That last sentence was the most important one, and the truest, and she wrote it because it was what she observed, which was what she was there to do.
Then the warmth increased, and the light changed again, and Helen Grant, journalist, lifted her face toward the great pale eye and held very still, and let whatever came next come.
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Keep going! I want to know what happens next.
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I will attempt to put it in next week’s promo… [insert smile here]
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Lucius Belfontaine took another look at the row of analog dials. “Looks like we’ve got a problem with the return line.”
Shelly looked from him to the instrument panel, which looked primitive compared to the digital readouts back at the American moonbase. She knew some things about refrigeration systems, mostly in relation to cryonic fuel storage, but she wasn’t sure how it would apply to a Soviet ammonia-loop refrigeration and air conditioning system.
She kept her voice low enough to carry only to her fellow astronaut, not the cosmonauts who were observing the work. “Is this something we can do here, or are we going to have to get more tools from base?”
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Colors. They swam and collided, forming fireworks explosions, devolving into chaos, almost forming ordered patterns before being swept away again in the visual storm.
It wasn’t that she could not see at all, not really. A world of darkness sounded quite nice, in fact. The padded mask Martin had made her so she could sleep sat beside the bed. He’d pressed the steel into perfect form with his thumbs, wrapped it in some kind of soft, silky padding, and put it in her hands the very third day.
Now he was gone. She put the beloved darkness away. Got ready for her day.
Gamiea station took in refugees by the hundred. Vita did not want to be a leech, rotting away in the slums. She had a man to seek out. Her ears were good and she could remember facts quite easily. Lack of eyesight was no bother when all you did was monitor the audio station and take calls.
“Nexus this is three. No new issues. Continuing patrol.”
“Roger that, three. Be careful out there.”
“Always caref- what the fuck? You! Stop right there!”
Station security was as overworked as the corridors were overloaded. The environmental systems, she heard, were still within tolerance. Barely. According to crosstalk, the limiters were more a guideline than rule.
That did not sound particularly good to her. But what did she know of the living microbiota that regulated air, waste, and water on the station? That sort of thing probably came easier when you could see to read graphs and such.
“Nexus this is niner. Ending sweep, headed back to the barn.”
“Acknowledged, niner. Status updated. Have a safe trip back.”
“Roger, Nexus. Niner out.”
Her replacement showed up late. This was coming to be a pattern.
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“Sorry Vita,” the chatty soprano called out, her voice stressed more than usual. “The Systemnet keeps kicking me out. Alarm didn’t go off, tram wouldn’t take my account so I had to hoof it in.”
“Any news on Martin’s ship?”
“Just came in today that Eternia’s gone dark. His ship wasn’t on the last receiving logs before that though, so he probably got diverted. Couldn’t say after that ‘cause that’s when the crash came through and booted me all the way out. Like I said, Systemnet is being fussy.”
“I see.” Not literally, of course. But she remembered what seeing was like. Before puberty and hormones activated something she hadn’t known she possessed.
Vita took the tram home. It was station night, so the corridors were less busy than usual. Two hundred odd steps to the tram. Wait for the arrival ping, wait for the access to clear. Listen for breaths and heartbeats. Board the tram.
Home was special. A tiny nook in the repurposed remains of offices or some such. It didn’t smell like him. There was no soft pallet with the warm fluffy blanket that smelled like soup.
It was a strange thing to miss the soup smell. But that wasn’t important now.
Vita took her queries to the tactinet. Audio and tactile only, it touched on the broader system net but wasn’t bound to it. There weren’t many users in total. The entire thing was a hobby created by a rather eccentric man with similar restrictions, lots of money, time and the skills to make the thing work.
The words stopped forming and she took her hands out of the wetboard. Queries to the local hub were slower than the tactinet, but she didn’t want to try and find the local address on her own. Her technical skills weren’t up to that level and she felt bad leaning on Actus and Gust so much as it was.
Perseus: formerly a pirate haven during the last war, taken over by a mercenary whose employer failed to pay the agreed upon amount, he then fought for and won possession of the station itself both in court and via combat when the aforementioned company tried to retake the station.
Instead of putting it up for sale, the mercenary (Amos Whitworth) put the station to work as a logistics and transportation hub for the Belt and Beyond loops. Integrated food production, metals processing, and fuel synthesis in the works…
The article went on like a sales pitch. Which, she realized, was the only source the information was pulled from when she began querying other links.
Perhaps the systemnet would have had the full story. But that ship had sailed. There had to be other avenues to pursue.
One thing was certain, though. He was out there somewhere. And either he needed to come back or she needed to get to him. Somehow.
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Damn. Messed up the formatting on that one.
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This is the part I always hate. Dealing with Things From Outside Our Universe, because they are only slightly better than the Darkness. I carefully look around for any traps and use fire magic to burn away the moss and clean off the rock floor I’m standing on. Snaps of lightening as it carves warding runes into the stone, the before-a-storm ozone and bitter garlic smell as I pour melted silver into the runes. Feel the prana build into them as I have just anchored this part of the cave in our universe very firmly.
Then I clear my throat and work out the words in formal Enochian, remembering that this language makes me long for the days of dealing with High Imperial or Copic, and fully recall that the language barely considers the concept of temporal causality and thermodynamic entropy. Low guttural tones come from my throat and tongue as I am very careful with my phrasing. O Fish, Are You Constant To The Old Covenant?
I’m told that my accent in Enochian is terrible, so I repeat myself. O Fish, Are You Constant To The Old Covenant?
Silence, then a soft sound that is too low and deep to be really heard, only felt through my feet as the cave rumbles. A voice, old as the stars, cold and empty, but somehow amused replies to me. Return, and we return. Keep faith, and so will we.
The rumbling grows, the sound of something wet and gelatinous coming up from the bottom of the pit, the smell of rotten burnt seaweed and the most ancient of saltwater oceans just behind the sounds.
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Christina sipped her tea as she looked at me intently. “You’re thinking about the future, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Are you reading minds now?” I asked in return, actually worried that she might be developing such an ability.
“No, but I felt a strong anticipation of good things from you.”
“You are a mind-reader, you minx,” I laughed.
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I think the first cover picture is for a different book. Used again below correctly.
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er…. I took it from Amazon.
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Oh. You’re right. I was doing it in the car and it saved wrong. Hold on.
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It’s okay, because I didn’t share at instapundit yet, which is when it gets most hits.
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Anyway, I think it needs to be reiterated that the Circle TRigon Party of the aggressor nation did not do a smart thing when they ruined their AC to change weather patterns. They were not informed, they were not thoughtful. They were basically doing a primitive religious act, a human sacrificial dogma. They are freaking animists, except about very curated expertise instead of some rock or this one really big tree on a hill near the river.
An informed thoughtful opinion with real evidence that they needed the climate rituals would have chosen to omit the nitrogen ban. The nitrogen ban was clearly based in a thinner amount of research, and was due to have the same real sort of population costs.
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