Great Deals on the Kepler Anthologies

The annual Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale is underway. It gets its name because where I live in the northern hemisphere, readers are loading up their e-readers for great beach reading and vacations. In the southern hemisphere, it’s the middle of winter and people are spending time in a warm and cozy place reading. All of Hadrosaur’s titles are available at deep discounts this month and I’ll be highlighting them all month long here at the Web Journal. If you’re looking for a specific title, you don’t have to wait for me to highlight it, just visit http://www.hadrosaur.com/bookstore.php and click on the book you’re interested in. On its page is a link to Smashwords if its available there. The coupon codes for these discounts are automatically applied at checkout. One of the things I love about Smashwords is that they provide ebooks in all popular formats and they’re DRM free, so you can download them to your favorite device.

In the late nineteenth century, as astronomers began to describe Mars as a place with clouds, polar caps, and possibly even canals and vegetation, writers began to imagine it as a place people could visit. Now, early in the twenty-first century, we’re discovering planets around other stars. These anthologies imagine what those planets might be like.

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A Kepler’s Dozen is an anthology of action-packed, mysterious, and humorous stories all based on real planets discovered by the NASA Kepler mission. Edited by and contributing stories are David Lee Summers, author of The Pirates of Sufiro, and Steve B. Howell, project scientist for the Kepler mission. Whether on a prison colony, in a fast escape from the authorities, or encircling a binary star, thirteen exoplanet stories written by authors such as Mike Brotherton, Laura Givens, and J Alan Erwine will amuse, frighten, and intrigue you while you share fantasy adventures among Kepler’s real-life planets.

“… the stories represent a glimpse of where science fiction might go if real exoplanets are taken as inspiration.” Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today

Also, in case you missed it, A Kepler’s Dozen was mentioned in the July/August issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. In the article “Biosignatures – The Biggest Blunder in SF,” author Valentin D. Ivanov discusses how science fiction routinely gets the process of planet discovery, and understanding which planets may have life, wrong. He cites A Kepler’s Dozen as one of the anthologies that gets it right.

You can buy A Kepler’s Dozen for just 99 cents at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/325583

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• NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered thousands of new planets.
• Visiting, much less settling, those worlds will provide innumerable challenges.
• The men and women who make the journey will be those who don’t fear the odds.
• They’ll be Kepler’s Cowboys.

Saddle up and take an unforgettable journey to distant star systems. Meet new life forms—some willing to be your friend and others who will see you as the invader. Fight for justice in a lawless frontier. Go on a quest for a few dollars more. David Lee Summers, author of the popular Clockwork Legion novels, and Steve B. Howell, head of the Space Sciences and Astrobiology Division at NASA Ames Research Center, have edited this exciting, fun, and rollicking anthology of fourteen stories and five poems by such authors as Patrick Thomas, Jaleta Clegg, Anthony R. Cardno, L.J. Bonham, and many more!

“If you’re in the mood for science fiction that’s heavy on the science, pore over this enjoyable collection that takes exoplanets and the American West as its inspirations. The stories and poems in Kepler’s Cowboys imagine wild and risky futures for the first generations of exoplanet explorers as they grapple with harsh environments, tight quarters, aliens, and one another.” Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today.

Kepler’s Cowboys is available for just $1.24 at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/698694