Every week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp, and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.

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Combat Frame Ƶ XSeed (Combat Frame XSeed: S #3) – Brian Niemeier

The Epic Mech Saga’s World-Rending Conclusion

Betrayed by their makers …

… their sole hope is vengeance.

Humanity reels from the disastrous Battle of Earth. Blamed for the crushing defeat, the Guardian Angels are branded as traitors.

Jehu, Dex, and Kaiser must make a daring escape to save their families from a resurgent terror.

To clear their names, they must lead the rebel ExSols they once fought.

But against the combined might of the UCP and the Ynzu, do even Angels have a prayer of victory?

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Companion to Darkness (Four Horsemen Universe: The Phoenix Initiative #5) – Casey Moores

“I don’t give a d**n about negotiation!”

Khatash has been retaken, but the price was steep, and Okeo, Dama of Clan Shadow Fury, and Zatohachi, her blind swordsman companion, are working to rebuild it. But when the father of Okeo’s kits goes missing on a mission to track down information on the illicit Malluma Songo trade on a pleasure planet, Okeo and Zato head out to investigate.

What they don’t know is that her rebellious, sole remaining kit and the kit’s teenage companion are tagging along for the trip, and they have a much different approach to the search. While Okeo and Zato lay low and follow a more traditional path, her kit plans to step out of the shadows and broadcast the secrets of the Hunters to the galaxy.

And maybe become a star along the way.

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A Corrupt Alliance (The Chain Breaker #11) – D. K. Holmberg

Can Gavin ever be more than the Chain Breaker?

Tenender has been stopped, but his plan is still in motion.

Gavin knows the key to what Tenender planned is tied to scholars of ancient magic, but Gavin is a fighter, not a thinker.

Impossible power is at stake, and if he fails, everything that he’s worked to save will fail with him.

With his fighting prowess neutralized, how can the Chain Breaker stop a plan that has been in motion for centuries before all is lost?

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Dark World (The Travelers #3) – Nathan Hystad

When Elliot returns to Bell Island the summer of ‘84, he doesn’t expect to be thrust into the middle of an alien invasion. But he won’t let them win…

Another year passes, and the Spheres are restless. The Travelers have invaded.

It’s become impossible for the powers that be to ignore the fact that aliens are real, and Earth is under an imminent threat.

Buzz is ordered to create a team to save the world. For some reason, he elects Elliot and his friends to accompany him.

After the shocking revelation that someone close to Elliot has betrayed them, his loyalties are tested in the epic conclusion to The Travelers.

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The Wild Adventures of Sherlock Holmes #2 – Will Murray

Sherlock Holmes confronts the unknown in ten baffling tales that test his formidable mental powers, as well as his unshakable conviction that the world is a sane and rational place.

From the enigma of spontaneous human combustion to the possibility that coins minted during the era of supposedly mythical Atlantis survived into Victorian times, London’s premier consulting detective is tested and tried as never before, as his investigations cross the path of Algernon Blackwood‘s famed psychic physician, Dr. John Silence.

Will Holmes’s firm belief in an exclusively scientific reality hold––or must he at last give ground to the detested possibility that supernatural forces operate at will, unseen and only suspected?

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Gemini Man: The Complete Series – a Kickstarter by J. D. Cowan

The Gemini Man stars young adult Matthew White and teenager Jason Vermilion as they find themselves attached to bracelets named Castor and Pollux, both of which give them strange powers unlike anything on Earth . . . or other planets! The trilogy starts with the two escaping an experiment and landing in a whole new world where magic lives and an unknown people roam. Can they escape their pursuers, or are they destined to be fuel for some warped alien being? The trilogy traces their journey from captives to free men, in more ways than one.

The crowd-funded campaign will close on 2 June, 2023.

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Ghost of the Badlands – a crowd funding campaign by Razorfist and George Alexopoulos

Who is the Ghost? Man or myth? Flesh or phantom? Is he a ghostly stranger who wandered out of the Arizona desert to deal divine judgment upon the modern Gomorrah of Canyon Diablo? Or is he a survivor of godless effrontery… plucked from his grave by beings unknown, to visit upon evil men the ravages to which they subject the weak? Whatever his origin, the result is the same: Gunfight after gunfight, body after body, coffin after coffin, legend soon grows of this phantom of the high desert.

The badlands swirl with whispers of a lone pistoleer. A one-man vendetta ride, wielding a mechanical weapon of the Old World, to cleanse the heathen with hails of gunfire. Rumors soon circulate of an entire army, cloaked in shadow, his faceless foot soldiers. Eventually, folk find a name for this mute, masked missionary of death…

THE GHOST OF THE BADLANDS.

Inspired by storytelling traditions both East & West, the team will be pleased to release TWO versions of this first edition: A Softcover inspired by manga, and Hardcover inspired by Bande Desinee.

The crowd-funded campaign will close on 21 May, 2023.

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Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds – a Kickstarter from Cirsova

Ours is a culture that adores the elephantine, the cyclopean, the Brobdingnagian. Bigger is better, we are told, and the biggest is the best. People love big stories, with a cast of thousands, and Vista-vision widescreen special effects. Heroes must be larger than life, and devils blacker than they are painted, and entire worlds must be set aflame to create an ever-growing hunger for spectacle.

Oh, says I, that’s interesting. But that’s not what I do.

I write short stories, about little people in small worlds. That’s what you’ll find in this collection. In a couple of cases, they are literally small worlds, flyspeck heavenly bodies far out in space. In others the constraints are more metaphysical, worlds bounded by the vision of their inhabitants, an event horizon close enough to almost touch.

But one mustn’t suppose that the Lilliputian character of these stories means that nothing of significance happens in them.

Small worlds need saving, too.

The crowd-funded campaign will close on 31 May, 2023.