The Teraport Wars is 204 MB.
These files are larger than our normal Ebooks in an attempt to do justice to Howard Tayler's art.

View Sample Chapters

Note: Sample chapters of Schlock Mercenary comics are in PDF form. Please download and install a PDF reader prior to viewing. We recommend Adobe Reader.

Sergeant Schlock lost his eyes, and thanks to a quirk of amorph biology, he needs to steal new ones. Naturally he asks Tagon's Toughs to help. Then an offer for real employment arrives and the company finds itself in a battle for galactic domination.

This second volume picks up where The Tub of Happiness left off, and features all of the original strips and footnotes along with concept art, commentary, guest art, deck plans, and a bonus story previously only available in print.

Gird up your annie-plant, grab an obligatory fiddly-bit and prepare for The Teraport Wars.

**Please consult the PDF Instructions for Schlock Mercenary web comics.**

In the 22nd century biofeedback techniques have enabled humans the ultimate expression--the ability to transform the body into any viable form. What began as an innocent technique to reduce anxiety without drugs has raised fundamental questions about what it is to be human.

Enter the Humanity Test. For those children who pass the test, life. For those who do not, the organ banks.

But ... what if the test itself cannot be trusted? Has humanity been culling its most valuable children?

The Tub of Happiness is 298 MB.
These files are larger than our normal Ebooks in an attempt to do justice to Howard Tayler's art.

View Sample Chapters

Note: Sample chapters of Schlock Mercenary comics are in PDF form. Please download and install a PDF reader prior to viewing. We recommend Adobe Reader.

Welcome to Tagon's Toughs, a mercenary company whose newest recruit is almost as much trouble as the new owners. They want to revolutionize space travel. Schlock just wants just wants to hurt people and break things.

This massive volume takes the reader through the first seventeen months of the hit comic strip Schlock Mercenary, and includes concept sketches, commentary, guest art, and a bonus story previously only available in print.

If you've been waiting to devour this strip from the very beginning, there's no better time to grab your big spoon and dig into The Tub of Happiness.

**Please consult the PDF Instructions for Schlock Mercenary web comics.**

The Godspeed Drive. It is the faster than-than-light spaceship drive that made human colonization of the galaxy possible. But it was not invented by humans — it was found in the wreck of an alien ship that drifted into the solar system. No one understood everything about how it worked, but it linked a hundred star systems together, and made even marginal planets like Erin in the Maveen system habitable.

But one day the Godspeed ships stopped coming. Erin and the Forty Worlds around Maveen were cut off from Interstellar commerce, confined to the slow insystem shuttles that were the only spaceships that were left at Muldoon Port.

Jay Hara grew up on isolated Erin, longing for the legendary days when Godspeed ships spanned the galaxy, and a young man's dreams could take him to the stars. So when an old, sick spacer named Paddy Enderton showed Jay some very strange devices and told him that he had found a Godspeed base out in the asteroid belt, Jay was eager to believe, despite the doubts of his uncle Duncan and his friend, Dr. Eileen Xavier. But when Jay's farm was raided, his animals killed and his mother beaten, by men searching for Enderton, he became convinced that there was some truth in Enderton's ravings.

They won financing from the university, and have chartered a ship to take them out to the asteroid belt, in search of a small moving rock marked as Paddy's Fortune in Enderton's navigation device. But the ship is not what they think it is. And the crew and captain have a very different, and deadly, agenda once they find the Godspeed base.

After worldwide war and economic collapse, a group of mercenary negotiators arose to bring order to chaos. Theirs was the most sophisticated intelligence network in the world, and soon the Traders were in demand all over to work out important deals and negotiate sensitive treaties.

Mikal Asparian owed his life to the Traders, who had rescued him from desert barbarians and trained him as one of their own. But the more missions he completed, the more he began to question just what it meant to be a Trader. He never suspected that his labors might have had a hidden purpose...

There were problems with the Form Change process. One or two malfunctions at first: people emerging from the tanks in an incorrect form or completely unchanged. For three years it had been getting worse. Now there had been deaths, and on the space farms, panic was setting in. People were refusing to go into the tanks. Yet out in the Cloudlands, they needed continuous small form corrections just to stay effective. As the faults increased, their society was on an exponential curve to disaster.

In the twenty-second century, Earth is desperately over-populated and over-stressed, but technology has eased this somewhat by allowing humanity to expand into the Solar System, and biofeedback machines have made people's physical shape a matter of choice and taste.

But now underground experiments have started that may alter forever the very definition of "human", and which menace the delicate balance on which Earth's survival depends.

Charles Sheffield Bundle Volume I

Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

Proteus Unbound

by Charles Sheffield

Proteus in the Underworld

by Charles Sheffield

Trader's World

by Charles Sheffield

Godspeed

by Charles Sheffield

Number four in the collected adventures of the legendary John Grimes of the Galactic Rim series, including four novels:

The Anarch Lords: John Grimes' short career as a somewhat benevolent space pirate is over, but he has sunk even lower, becoming a politician. He's now the governor of a planet of anarchists, where term limits are unnecessary, what with all the assassinations taking place. The Last Amazon: Back on Sparta, the formerly all-male planet, Grimes is waiting for his own ship to arrive when he's caught up in yet another revolution—and you can't tell the good guys (or gals) apart except by who wants to kill you at any given moment. The Wild Ones: Back on Earth was the last place that Grimes expected to be. Another thing he hadn't expected was accusations of witchcraft being taken seriously. Catch the Star Winds: An experimental sailing ship of space was intended to exceed the speed of light. Then strange things happened involving time itself, and the crew wasn't sure they would ever see home, or even their own home time, again.

Plus six interrelated short stories starring the indefatigable John Grimes, rounding out a large volume of space adventure with a dash of humor, and a likable hero who always manages to gamely muddle through.

Lyonesse: a world formed by magic, where a dark power struggle is underway between an ancient sorceress with her shadow army and the human subjects of Lyonesse's power-mad wizard. The only spark of hope is a prophecy that tells of a Defender who will one day come and set things to right.

Young Meb doesn't think she's obligated to be the prophesied Defender of Lyonesse, but she is adept at the universe-folding skill of Planomancy and has been trained by a world-walking trouble shooter of the multiverse, the great Dragon Fionn himself—a dragon who is desperately searching the universes for his lost Meb, whom he's come to love.

As the legions of Shadow Hall gather and with the Dragon Fionn fast on the way, magical battle is joined, and the destiny of universes hangs upon the courage in one young woman's heart.

Armor up for a metal-pounding explosion of action, adventure and amazing speculation by topnotch writers—including Nebula-award winner Jack McDevitt, Sean Williams, Dan Abnett, Simon Green, and Jack Campbell—on a future warrior that might very well be just around the corner. Science fiction readers and gamers have long been fascinated by the idea of going to battle in suits of powered combat armor or at the interior controls of giant mechs.

It's an armor-plated clip of hard-hitting tales featuring exoskeleton adventure with fascinating takes on possible future armors ranging from the style of personal power suits seen in Starship Troopers and Halo to the servo-controlled bipedal beast-mech style encountered in Mechwarrior and Battletech.

Captain Daniel Leary with his friend—and spy—Officer Adele Mundy are sent to a quiet sector to carry out an easy task: helping the local admiral put down a coup before it takes place. But then the jealous admiral gets rid of them by sending them off on a wild goose chase to a sector where commerce is king and business is carried out by extortion and gunfights.

With anarchy and rebellion in the air, a rogue intelligence officer plots the war that will destroy civilization and enlists the help of a brute whom even torturers couldn't stomach.

And, of course, it's up to Leary and Mundy to put a stop to the madness.

Listen to the author discuss the book on the Baen Free Radio Hour: Part 1 | Part 2.

W201204 April 2012 Monthly Baen Bundle

The Road of Danger

by David Drake

Dog and Dragon

by Dave Freer

Ride the Star Winds

by A. Bertram Chandler

1636: The Saxon Uprising

by Eric Flint

Armored

edited by John Joseph Adams

To the Galactic Rim

by A. Bertram Chandler

1767: In the three years since defeating the Tharyngians at Anvil Lake, the Crown Colonies of Mystria have prospered. Colonists, whether hunting for new land or the Promised Land of prophecy, have pushed beyond the bounds of charters granted by the Queen of Norisle. Some of these new communities have even had the temerity to tell the Crown they are no longer subject to its authorities. To survey the full extent of the western expansion, the Crown has sent Colonel Ian Rathfield on an expedition, accompanied by Nathaniel Woods, Owen Strake, and Kamiskwa, into the Mystrian interior.

They discover a land full of isolated and unique communities, each shaped in accord with the ideals of the founders. Conflicts abound among them, and old enemies show up at the least useful moments. Worse yet, lurking out there is a menace which the Twilight People only know from folklore as the Noragah; and westward penetration stumbles into their lands and awakens them.

Alerted to this threat by his men, Prince Vlad petitions the Crown to send troops and supplies to destroy this new and terrifying enemy. The Crown refuses, citing massive debts from the last war. They dismiss Vlad's claims as fantasy, and impose a series of taxes on Mystrian trade to finance their own recovery.

Faced with fighting an inhuman foe in a land seething with resentment against the Crown, Vlad must unite the Colonies in a common cause, or preside over their complete destruction.

The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith gathers together the adventure, juvenile, and other non-fantastic fiction of Smith. While he is known best for his fantastic work, these adventure and mainstream stories shed light on the development of Smith’s writing and his constantly evolving style. The Miscellaneous Writings is a perfect companion to the five-volume Collected Fantasies set. As with that set, editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger compared original manuscripts, various typescripts, published editions, and Smith’s notes and letters in order to compile this volume’s definitive set of texts.

NS201112 December 2011 Night Shade Books

The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

by Clark Ashton Smith

Of Limited Loyalty

by Michael Stackpole

Peril and strife strike on a double front for Honor Harrington and company. After a brutal attack on the Manticoran home system, Honor Harrington has rooted out a plan designed to enslave the entire human species. Behind that plan lies the shadowy organization known as the Mesan Alignment. Task number one for Honor is to shut down and secure the wormhole network that is the source of the Star Kingdom's wealth and power—but also its greatest vulnerability. Yet this is an act that the ancient and corrupt Earth-based Solarian League inevitably takes as a declaration of war.

The thunder of battle rolls as the Solarian League directs its massive power against the Star Kingdom. And once again, Honor Harrington is thrust into a desperate battle that she must win if she is to survive to take the fight to the real enemy of galactic freedom—the insidious puppetmasters of war who lurk behind the Mesan Alignment!

MUSIC HAS CHARMS . . .

Eric Banyon was a talented music whose lady had left him singing the blues and playing his flute in a deserted corner of the Renaissance Faire. He couldn’t have known that the desperate sadness of his music would free Korendil, a young elven noble, from the magical prison he had been languishing in for centuries.

Suddenly, Eric had no time to be in the dumps, as he had to help his new acquaintance fight against the evil elf lord who had first imprisoned Korendil and now seeks to conquer all of California.

And that was only the beginning.

Two Andre Norton novels in her Forerunner series featuring young alien/human hybrid Simsa, collected for the first time in one volume. A heroic young woman seeks her origins as she comes of age on worlds of peril and alien mystery.

Forerunner: On the ancient planet Kuxortal, young Simsa grows up among the ancient ruins of a fallen galactic civilization—the Forerunners. But Simsa has always been different, with iridescent blue-black skin and a telepathic bond with her bat-like zorsal. When her mentor dies, her future looks bleak—until Thom, a star ranger, arrives and leads Simsa on a new path that takes both through danger to the ultimate revelation, which will change her life, and perhaps galactic civilization itself, forever.

Forerunner: The Second Venture: Simsa has been captured by starfaring humans intent on discovering the secrets of the Forerunners. With the aid of her pet zorsal, Simsa escapes her captors and crash lands on another world touched by ancient Forerunner civilization. Now Simsa must battle the spirit within her that seeks to transform her into something utterly inhuman. But the ancient Forerunners, however scientifically advanced, have not reckoned with the courage of this young woman who is determined to keep her freedom and write her own destiny among the stars.

Lummox has been the pet of the Stuart family for generations. With eight legs, a thick hide and huge (and growing) size, Lummox is nobody's idea of man's best friend. Nevertheless, John Stuart XI, descendant of the starman who originally brought Lummox back to Earth from a distant planet, loves him. John isn't about to let the authorities take his pet away and, with his best friend Betty, determines to save Lummox even if it takes leaving the life he's known forever. However, what John and Betty don't realize is that the survival of the Earth itself may depend on the true nature of The Star Beast.

An all-time great science fiction coming-of-age classic from seven-time Hugo winner and Dean of Science Fiction, Robert A. Heinlein.

Download the comprehensive Teacher’s Guide here.

Listen to the Robert A. Heinlein Roundtable 1 here on the Baen Free Radio Hour.