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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The Atlantis Equation (The Traveler #7) – Vaughn Heppner

Ever want revenge so bad you’d cross the galaxy for it?

U.S. Marine Jake Bayard does. After a telepathic killer executes his pregnant wife, he hunts the psycho through warp gates—straight to Atlantis.

This Atlantis is an ocean world drowning in secrets. Under the waves lurk genetically altered horrors, airship-riding reptilian warriors, and relics of Nazi U-boats. Worst of all, something vast and hungry stirs in the deepest trenches—a cosmic evil the Atlanteans once sank their whole civilization to contain.

Now Bayard faces an impossible choice: keep chasing his wife’s murderer or stop an ancient horror from escaping its watery prison. One wrong move could doom humanity to cosmic annihilation.

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Chaos Terrain – Joel Gaines

Alien life awaits humanity in the deepest of cold…

Propulsion scientist Dr. Todd Cunningham was an astronaut headed for outer space, until budget cuts killed the mission—and his lifelong dream. Now he’s just an obscure expert in fusion-powered space travel, a professor buried in an ever-increasing pile of work.

But when a daring mission is approved to travel to Europa, Jupiter’s frozen moon, Cunningham is thrust back into the spotlight by the very man he blames for ending his NASA career, and he finds himself joining the ranks of NASA astronauts on a groundbreaking journey to challenge humanity’s understanding of life in the universe.

As the crew ventures into the unknown, their mission to uncover alien life beneath the icy surface quickly turns perilous. Battling treacherous terrain, unforeseen threats, and the ghosts of his own past, Cunningham must navigate a deadly landscape where survival is anything but guaranteed.

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The Dreaded Return (The Beastcaller Chronicles #3) – Dan Michaelson and D. K. Holmberg

The Call of the Beast summons. He fears failing.

Leo Stormrider never expected to be humanity’s last hope. When the Supreme Realm Lord becomes infected by an Unbeast parasite, Leo volunteers for a desperate mission to the Silent Grave—a legendary burial ground where the realm’s darkest secrets lie buried with its dead.

But what begins as a quest for salvation becomes a race against time when Leo discovers the true threat: the followers of a tyrannical Beastcaller from the past seek to use Leo’s body to resurrect their master. With his Familiar Shadowshine at his side and the ghost of an ancient hero as his guide, Leo must master a forbidden combination of life and soul magic that hasn’t been attempted in a thousand years.

As the Supreme Realm Lord battles the parasite consuming him and the servants of the long-dead Beastcaller plot their master’s return, Leo faces an impossible choice: risk everything on an untested theory or watch as both the realm’s greatest defender and Leo’s humanity slip away forever.

In a graveyard where every shadow holds a secret and death itself is not the end, Leo must prove that a Beastcaller can do more than speak to animals—he can change the very nature of life and death itself.

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The Everything Machine – Jeff Duntemann

Carrying 800 passengers and their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth’s first interstellar colony, starship Origen’s hyperdrive self-destructs, marooning its passengers near an Earth-twin planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. While settling in, the inadvertent colonists name their world Valeron, and discover that Valeron is scattered with hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines—but there are no aliens nor any other trace of them.

The artifacts are dubbed “drumlins,” for the sounds the pillars make, and the replicators called “thingmakers.” Drumlins have strange properties. Although virtually indestructible, drumlins can change shape, especially when doing so will protect a human being from injury. Drumlin knives will not cut living human tissue, but they will cut living animal tissue or human corpses. Press a drumlin knife against your palm, and it will flow and flatten out to a disk. Pull the knife away, and it will slowly return to its form as a knife. Some claim that drumlins read human minds and grant wishes. Others insist they are haunted by invisible and perhaps hostile intelligences.

After 250 years on Valeron, the colony prospers. Starship Origen is still in orbit, and a cult-like research organization called the Bitspace Institute vows to repair Origen’s hyperdrive and return to Earth. With millions of drumlins catalogued using the thingmakers, Valeron’s people live well and begin to lose interest in returning to Earth. This threatens the Institute’s mission, prompting it to launch a covert effort to undermine public faith in drumlins. A low-key war begins between the Institute and those who value drumlins–including farmers, rural folk, an order of mystical women, and several peculiar teen girls who have an unexplained rapport with the thingmakers and their mysterious masters.

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Rage World (Undying Mercenaries #23) – B. V. Larson

The Rebellion against Earth expands to new worlds. Left to die on a volcanic world by the Skrull, McGill and his mercenaries face waves of missile attacks with nowhere to hide. When the Skrull seal themselves inside an impenetrable energy dome, McGill knows he has to get creative. Even if that means sabotaging alien power plants, blackmailing his superior officers, and using his own troops as bait in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

But the real enemy isn’t the dome, or even the Rebel Blue Skrull forces trying to overrun the planet. It’s McGill’s commanding officers, who are looking for any excuse to execute him for insubordination. Now McGill has to pull off his riskiest gambit yet—turning certain defeat into victory while staying just barely on the right side of mutiny.

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Star Blade – J. N. Chaney and Scott Moon

What would you do if you found a living, alien weapon?

During an invasion on the Las Vegas Strip, a working man named Jake Fox is thrust into a battle beyond imagination, fighting the terrifying shock troops of a sprawling galactic empire.

To protect a terrified child, he seizes a strange weapon of a fallen hero—an ancient, sentient sword—and is catapulted far into the future and across the stars.

Now trapped on a foreign world, he must master his new weapon, uncover the secrets of an ancient civilization, and ultimately find his way home.

But time is running out for humanity, and there’s more to the sword than he knows.

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Starbreaker #1 – Luke Chmilenko

“Born of a pyre ten thousand souls strong. When stars are right his home will die.
Hollow of heart; black hunger unending. Eater of light. Vanquishing kings.
Doom in hand; pour loose the sands of time. Ender of hope. Feller of storms.
Twinmaidens blood stains; on sorrowful soles. Fast claimed war’s domain. Glad of war. Glad of pain.
Beast eyes close for him. Vault’s gates open.
Starbreaker, thrice named.
Starbreaker, awake.”

—Prophecy of Aion Origin, date unknown

Sylvas Vail is a big fish in a small pond, the most powerful mage on his planet. But when the doors to the cosmos come crashing open and all the untold wonders and terrors of the universe come pouring in, he is left with only two options:

Ascend or die.