Titan Books Holiday Gift Guide 2015 — Horror & Sci-Fi
Published on 9 November, 2015
Dawn breaks over Vancouver and no-one in the world has slept the night before, or almost no-one. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand can still sleep, and they've all shared the same golden dream. A handful of children still sleep as well, but what they're dreaming remains a mystery. After six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis will set in. After four weeks, the body will die. In the interim, panic ensues and a bizarre new world arises in which those previously on the fringes of society take the lead. One couple experience a lifetime in a week as he continues to sleep, she begins to disintegrate before him, and the new world swallows the old one whole...
In the near future, children are tested for the defective gene. Those who possess it are taken from their homes, torn from their families and sent to the Death House.
Standing alone on a remote island, it looks like a 1940s boarding school. But a school prepares children for life, and these children are destined to die. Idling their time away in pointless classes, supervised by cold matrons, their days have no purpose, because neither do their futures.
When the sickness hits, death comes quickly. Children are taken from their dormitories in the night and never seen again. Forced to confront his own mortality, 16-year-old Toby tries to block out his past, and the terrifying unknown that is his future. Until a van arrives with a group of new kids, and everything changes.
Death may be certain, but Toby discovers that his fate is up to him.
‘Power, grace, deadliness defined. Always cunning, endlessly victorious…’
One seat on the intergalactic Sakien Empire’s supreme ruling body, the Council of Seven, remains unfilled: that of the Empress Apparent. The seat isn’t won by votes or marriage. It’s won in a tournament of ritualized combat. Now the tournament, the Empress Game, has been called and the women of the empire will stop at nothing to secure political domination for their homeworlds. Kayla Reunimon, a supreme fighter, is called by a mysterious stranger to battle it out in the arena.
The battle for political power isn’t contained by the tournament’s ring, however. The empire’s elite gather to forge, strengthen or betray alliances in a dance that will determine the fate of the empire for a generation. With the empire wracked by a rising nanovirus plague and stretched thin by an ill-advised planet-wide occupation of Ordoch in enemy territory, everything rests on the woman who rises to the top.
“Mason delivers an old fashioned space opera—passion, politics, and the fate of Empires hanging on the strength and courage of a single woman. You’ll want to reach immediately for book two.” Tanya Huff, author of A Confederation of Valor
“Fast, smart, complex, and fun as hell… one of the best books I’ve read this year. A near-perfect blend of romance, action, and interstellar politics in a well-thought-out and original universe, with a tough-as-nails heroine you can’t help but root for.” Rachel Bach, author of Fortune’s Pawn
The Terran military, the Astral Force, launches a mission to crush a colonial rebellion on the Centauri colony. Although Expeditionary Force 15 succeeds, the surviving veterans remain scarred—physically and emotionally, and the consequences of their actions follow them back to Earth when terrorists seek to exact catastrophic revenge.
Lieutenant Katja Emmes is a platoon commander, leader of the 10-trooper strike team aboard the fast-attack craft Rapier. Although fully trained, she has never led troops in real operations before, and lives in the shadow of her war-hero father. Sublieutenant Jack Mallory is fresh out of pilot school, daydreaming about a fighter pilot position in the space fleet. He is in for a rude awakening.Lieutenant Commander Thomas Kane uses a six-month deployment in command of Rapier is to secure his rise to stardom within the Astral Force. He also plays the subtle politics of the military.