Subterranean Press - free ebooks

[fred_mouse]

To me, Subterranean Press press means expensive editions of books I can't justify buying. BUT! today I discovered that they also do free ebooks:

https://subterraneanpress.com/free-ebooks/

I discovered this because they have made available a short story by Travis Baldree (of Legends and Lattes fame) and I was intrigued enough that I wanted to know more. To be fair, I thought it was a new novel, and enough different from the previous that it might be more my style, but I'm still looking forward to reading it.

Comments

[yhlee]

I really liked Anthony Ryan's "The Scarlet Ziggurat," which is an enjoyable pulp-style sword-and-sorcery tale (tie-in to his books, I gather) but with a more modern approach to e.g. female characters. I keep meaning to read the K. J. Parker free ebook they released because he's one of my favorite authors, but I am buried under deadlines.

[fred_mouse]

Appreciate the rec. I got the Baldree and the Tade Thompson, but didn't have the spoons to go through the rest. I've only read one K J Parker, and bounced pretty hard, but the sword-and-sorcery might be my thing.

[yhlee]

K. J. Parker is a VERY acquired taste. He is one of my favorites and also I almost never recommend him to other people unless I have specific reason to believe his books would be up their alley. Even for people who like Machievellian asshole protagonists (I do), a lot of the earlier books suffer egregiously from extremely nonentity to outright eep handling of female characters. This has gotten much better in the recent books, but it's definitely something I suss out before I rec him. I have an extremely high tolerance for period-typical (or worse) nonsense withj sword and sorcery, but "The Scarlet Ziggurat" was genuinely good on that front, and I also have a very soft spot for pulp sword and sorcery or modern spins on it.

If you bounced off K. J. Parker, never ever EVER read John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century (sf). I love it but it is so incredibly sociopath villain protagonist, and I have to warn people about it because the YA sf novel in the same setting, Orbital Resonance, which includes a character who's related to a side character in Kaleidoscope Century, is genuinely a pretty sweet, good-natured, updated (ca. 1990s) take on a Heinlein juvenile. If you read Orbital Resonance first and go into Kaleidoscope Century, you're going to be in for a nasty shock.