Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
Fuzzy Dice by Paul Di Filippo
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How badly could you screw up when granted access to infinite worlds conforming to your heart’s most intimate desires? No matter how much of a disaster you or I might make of such a miraculous gift, rest assured that Paul Girard, hapless middle-aged bookstore clerk, can hilariously surpass your worst fumblings and missteps. Visited one morning by a dimension-hopping artificial intelligence named Hans, Paul is given the ability to jump instantly to any world he can envision. But without truly knowing himself, Paul soon discovers that framing a wish that gets the expected results is not as easy as it first appears. From the depths of the Big Bang to a world where hippies rule; from a land of Amazons to one where life is a video-game; from a society where cooperation means everything to one where individual chaos rules. Across these bizarre dimensions and many others, Paul races in the search for happiness, love, wealth, status and the answer to the Ontological Pickle. Acquiring comrades and enemies along the way, our feckless alternaut reaches a cul-de-sac from which the only exit is death. And then his adventures really begin.
Gears of War: Anvil Gate by Karen Traviss
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Continuing the saga of the bestselling game series!
With the Locust Horde apparently destroyed, Jacinto’s survivors have begun to rebuild human society on the Locusts’ stronghold. Raiding pirate gangs take a toll—but it’s nothing that Marcus Fenix and the Gears can’t handle. Then the nightmare that they thought they’d left behind begins to stalk them again. Something far worse, something even the Locust dreaded, has emerged to spread across the planet, and not even this remote island haven is beyond its reach. Gears and Stranded must fight side by side to survive their deadliest enemy yet, falling back on the savage tactics of another bloody siege—Anvil Gate.
The Hounds of Avalon (Dark Age, Book 3) by Mark Chadbourn
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The Hounds of Avalon are coming …These are the twilight days, when eternal winter falls and the gods destroy themselves in civil war; when an invasion force of ghastly power threatens to eradicate all life. Humanity’s last chance lies with two friends, as different as night and day, bound together by an awesome destiny. Hunter: a warrior, a rake, an assassin; Hal: a lowly records clerk in a Government office. They must pierce a mystery surrounding the myths of King Arthur to find the dreaming hero who will ride out of the mists of legend to save the world. But time is running out, for when the Hounds of Avalon appear, all hope is lost… HOUNDS OF AVALON is the latest installment in Mark Chadbourn’s brilliant new sequence: exciting, evocative, terrifying and awe-inspiring.
More in Part III