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

The Shari'a are an ancient race. They are un-warlike and they are ruled by their shamanic witches. The Allemanii are more recently arrived in their locale and are both awed and made fearful by the magical powers of the witches. After generations of peaceful coexistence, a cataclysm occurred out of nowhere and the Allemanii turned on their neighbors and hosts, slaughtered most of them and scattered the survivors. Suddenly, to be a Shari'a is proscribed and to be caught practicing their magic is to be hunted to the death.

Brierly, thinking herself to be the last of her long-lost kind, practices the forbidden ancient healing art at constant risk of her life. Execution is the penalty if she is caught but her need to help those who are themselves in need is stronger than any fear for her own safety. "If I am the last, I will be a flame to the end." But her attempt to save the wife of a nobleman sworn to wipe out her kind plunges her into a conspiracy of deceit and a hidden power struggle more deadly than anything she has ever known. Her fight for survival may lead her to a love for the ages and, perhaps, to discover the surviving remnants of her people… if she lives.

The ten stories collected in The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind take us to places that are awesomely new yet achingly familiar. Terence M. Green skillfully examines the thorny bonds of family in the tale of one man’s strange journey into the past to find a vanished uncle, as well as in the story of a son who is legally mandated to unearth a murderer by communicating with his dead father. The intricate workings of memory and the human heart are explored in the account of a space traveler’s decision to end his life after one final resurrection, and in the unforgettable title story in which a lonely hospital worker on a colonized planet 420 light years from Earth becomes entranced by a newborn alien-human hybrid child.

In a radiant world of endless summer, the Intercept keeps the peace. Violet Crowley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of New Earth’s Founding Father, has spent her life in comfort and safety. Her days are easy thanks to the Intercept, a crime-prevention device that monitors emotion. But when her long-time crush, Danny Mayhew, gets into a dangerous altercation on Old Earth, Violet launches a secret investigation to find out what he's hiding. An investigation that will lead her to question everything she's ever known about Danny, her father, and the power of the Intercept.

In a distant future, humans are extinct, but their successors—animals uplifted into walking, talking, sentient beings—thrive across the galaxy. The Fant are anthropomorphic elephants, exiled to the rainy ghetto world of Barsk. Though they are ostracized by other races, they develop essential medicines upon which all species depend. The most coveted is the drug Koph, which allows users to interact with the recently deceased and learn their secrets.

Now a shadowy group is forcing the Fant to surrender their knowledge and claim Koph for themselves. A Fant named Jorl is compelled to question his deceased best friend, who years ago mysteriously committed suicide. But in so doing, Jorl unearths a secret the powers that be would prefer to keep buried forever.

The aliens wanted to use their world for war games. The humans were ordered to leave or die. Some left. Some died. Some didn’t.

This is the story of Lieutenant Darcy Lee. She and her comrades in the human military found themselves in a desperate face-off against giant alien vessels. Against impossible odds and incomprehensible alien technology, they had their imagination, guts…and maybe a little bit of blind luck.

Michael Karl’s dreams for the future do not include becoming the monarch of an obscure Morvanian kingdom, but he soon discovers he has no say in the matter. He, the result of a misalliance between a Morvanian Prince and an American girl, is now the sole heir to the throne; however, not all of his future subjects are welcoming. On his way to his capital, Michael Karl is captured and threatened by a rebel leader known as the Werewolf, apparently because he is one! 

Escaping Michael lands on the doorstep of an American journalist in the guise of a distressed fellow citizen resolutely concealing his royal identity. All Michael wants is to go home to America, but even incognito he can’t help but get caught up in the political turmoil of his ancestral land and begins to wonder if maybe the Werewolf doesn’t have a point after all.

Rookie Genrenaut Leah Tang gets her first taste of space flight when the team scrambles to fix a story breach in Science Fiction World, the domain of starships, weird aliens, and galactic intrigue.

On the space station Ahura-3, Ambassador Kaylin Reed is on the verge of securing a peace treaty to guarantee the end of hostilities between some of the galaxy's most ferocious races. When Ambassador Reed is kidnapped the morning before the signing, it throws the station into chaos.

So now it’s up to Leah and her team to save the day and put the story to rights.

At any cost.

Tom Mishkin is piloting another routine supply flight when he hears an unusual noise and gets the distressing news: He’s about to be stranded on a backward planet and forced to hike across unknown and probably hostile terrain to find a cache of spare parts and get going again. Mishkin’s journey introduces him to strange aliens like a five-headed man-eating snake with Mob connections as his trek slowly warps into a metaphysical search for his soul and the meaning of human existence…

From the very beginning of his career, Robert Sheckley was recognized by fans, reviewers, and fellow authors as a master storyteller and the wittiest satirist working in the science fiction field. Open Road is proud to republish his acclaimed body of work, with nearly thirty volumes of full-length fiction and short story collections. Rediscover, or discover for the first time, a master of science fiction who, according to the New York Times, was “a precursor to Douglas Adams.”