Science Fiction and Fantasy Books You Can Read for $5 or Less

Van Dorn is eighteen and running solo, dodging the bloodthirsty hordes and militias that have emerged since the country went haywire. His dead father’s voice rings in his head as he sets his sights on something more than survival: an old-fashioned sense of justice.

Meanwhile, a leader has risen among the gangs. Around him swirls the cast of brawlers from the days of Donnybrook, with their own brutal sense of justice through strength. In this frighteningly plausible vision of American apocalypse, Frank Bill turns his shotgun prose on our addiction to technology, the values and skills we’ve lost, and what happens when the systems of morality and society collapse.

The soldiers of the Simulant Operations Programme are mankind's elite warriors. Veterans of a thousand battles across a hundred worlds, they undertake suicidal missions to protect humanity from the insidious Krell Empire and the mysterious machine race known as the Shard.

Lieutenant Keira Jenkins is an experienced simulant operative and leader of the Jackals, a team of raw recruits keen to taste battle. They soon get their chance when the Black Spiral terrorist network seizes control of a space station.

Yet no amount of training could have prepared the Jackals for the deadly conspiracy they soon find themselves drawn into -- a conspiracy that is set to spark a furious new war across the galaxy.

He signed up to fight with visions of honour and glory, of fighting for king and country, of making his family proud at long last.

But on a battlefield during the Great War, Robert Jones is shot, and wonders how it all went so very wrong, and how things could possibly get any worse.

He'll soon find out. When the attacking enemy starts to shapeshift into a nightmarish demonic force, Jones finds himself fighting an impossible war against an enemy that shouldn't exist.

Dale Sampson is used to being a nonperson at his small-town Midwestern high school, picking up the scraps of his charismatic lothario of a best friend, Mack. He comforts himself with the certainty that his stellar academic record and brains will bring him the adulation that has evaded him in high school. But when an unthinkable catastrophe tears away the one girl he ever had a chance with, his life takes a bizarre turn as he discovers an inexplicable power: He can regenerate his organs and limbs.

When 18-year-old Jake Lukin holds a personal object, like a pet rock or a ring, he has the ability to "tunnel" into the owner. He can sense where they are, like a human GPS, and can see, hear, and feel what they do. It's an ability the government would do anything to possess: a perfect surveillance unit who could locate fugitives, spies, or terrorists with a single touch.

Jake promised his dad he'd never tell anyone about his ability. But his dad died two years ago, and Jake slipped. If he doesn't agree to help the government, his mother and sister may be in danger. Suddenly he's juggling high school, tennis tryouts, flirting with Rachel Watkins, and work as a government asset, complete with 24-hour bodyguards.

In the depths of space, a beacon has awakened. And an ancient technology has begun to stir. As its memory returns, with it comes a terrifying knowledge—a grave warning about the future of the Spin that has been concealed for ten thousand years.

Ten thousand years after the events of Creation Machine, the Spin is in decline and the beleaguered slave economy of the Inside is surrounded by rebel civilizations. A group of escapees from the vast forced-labor unit known as the Hive have stolen the last of the Inside's ancient warships and woken it from an enforced trance that had lasted for millennia. And someone has destroyed a planet that didn't exist, and halfway across the Spin, something has gone wrong with the sky.

In the spellbinding conclusion to Storm Constantine's Chronicles of Magravandias, the sudden death of the Emperor Leonid has plunged the empire into chaos. To preserve order, Valraven Palindrake, Dragon Lord of Caradore, reluctantly pledges his support to the young Crown Prince, Gastern.

Concerned for the fate of her adopted country, Varencienne Palindrake, Valraven's wife and Leonid's daughter, embarks on a perilous journey to Magrast to confer with her mother, the Empress Tatrini. But en route, she is captured by the dark magus Taropat and his student Shan, who hope to use her as a pawn in their own intricate game to revive three lost implements of power: the Dragon's Eye, the Dragon's Breath, and the Dragon's Claw.

As Magravandias descends toward a holocaust of bloodshed and warfare, a dark cabal of Firemages schemes in secret to engineer the coronation of their own chosen successor. And in Caradore, the twin children of Valraven Palindrake summon ancient magics to open the Way of Light and place a True King on the throne.

On the night of her middle school graduation, Margot Jean Johnson wrote a high school manifesto detailing her goals for what she was sure would be a most excellent high school career. She and her best friend, Sybil, would be popular and, most important, have boyfriends. Three years later, they haven't accomplished a thing!

Then Margot and Sybil arrive at school one day to find that most of the student body has been turned into flesh-eating zombies. When kooky Principal Taft asks the girls to coexist with the zombies until the end of the semester, they realize that this is the perfect opportunity to live out their high school dreams. All they have to do is stay alive....