I always wish Humble Bundle would tell you more about the books they offer in their bundles without all the clicking. It's barely worth the time it takes to look up which of the books I might like -- at that point, I might as well just spend the cash on something I know I'd like. Why they don't get the info (descriptions and prices) off of Amazon or elsewhere when they put up a new bundle, I have no idea.

So I decided I'd do it this time for the current SciFi bundle. Here we go. No obvious gems (like the time an unpublished Frank Herbert novel was included in the "pay more than the average" bundle extras. Wow. Yes, please), but these are the books you get for a dollar five dollars (you also get a SciFi fiction magazine, Lightspeed, issue 28):

Book
 		Kindle Price
 		Amazon rating
The Rock by Bob Mayer $4.99
 4.2  (91 customer reviews)
In Australia...a U.S. Air Force computer operator receives a terrifying radio transmission out of Ayers Rock that knocks out the world's communications. In New Mexico...a boozy college engineering professor is suddenly escorted into a waiting car by two armed military men. In New York...a tall, slender woman leaves her husband a note on the refrigerator saying that she's leaving -- but can't tell him where she's going. In Colombia...a Special Forces officer breaks into a drug kinpin's bedroom and puts a bullet into a woman's brain before running to a waiting helicopter. And in England...a beautiful twenty-three-year-old mathematician prepares for a journey that will change her life forever.

The team assembles in Australia on a mission that can save the world. But first, they must figure out who is the message coming from? What are they trying to tell mankind? And can it be deciphered in time before Armageddon overtakes the world?

Itโ€™s about a bomb, itโ€™s about a world about to be shattered. Itโ€™s about the last few days they have to save us all.

Bob Mayer is a West Point Graduate and a former Green Beret.
Fiction River: Time Streams (apparently a magazine)
 $6.99
 4.8  (5 customer reviews)
Time-travel stories open the entire world and all of time to writersโ€™ imaginations. The fifteen writers in this third original anthology in the Fiction River line explore everything from Chicago gangsters to Japanese tsunamis, and travel from 2013 to the nineteenth century to a vast future. Featuring work from award winners to bestsellers to a few newcomers whose time will come, Time Streams turns the time-travel genre on its head. "Fiction River is off to an auspicious start. It's a worthy heir to the original anthology series of the 60s and 70s. ... It's certainly the top anthology of the year to date." โ€”Amazing Stories on Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds
Parallelogram Book 1: Into the Parallel by Robin Brande
 $4.99
 4.6  (5 customer reviews)
Audie Masters is a 17-year-old girl who doesn't have it all: not a lot of money, not much confidence around guys, she can't seem to pass algebra, and she's desperate to get into the college she's been dreaming of for years.

But what Audie does have is a knack for physics that's about to catapult her into the adventure of a lifetime. 

Now all she has to do is survive it.
Time's Mistress by Steven Savile (apparently a short story collection)
 $4.99
 5.0 (3 customer reviews)
Steven Savile's popular fantasy stories embrace all aspects of the fantastic. Be it the wonder of magical realism, the darkness of the macabre, or the mythological, these stories have one thing in common: faith. Savile offers up tales of hope and wonder in equal measure, whilst treating sadness as a long lost friend. Nothing in his world is quite as it seems. The world you think you know isn't the world you're about to enter. Everything you think you've learned about life is about to be unlearned. These are stories of love. These are stories of loss. In some you will find redemption, in others the simple act of memory is treacherous and cannot be trusted. But in all of them there is an aching sense of loss and love. Savile's stories here speak to the part in all of us who still dares to fall in love again after a broken heart.
Alternitech by Kevin J. Anderson
 $2.99
 3.7, (3 customer reviews)
โ€œAlternitechโ€ sends prospectors into alternate but similar timelines where tiny differences yield significant changes: a world where the Beatles never broke up, or where Lee Harvey Oswald wasnโ€™t gunned down after the Kennedy assassination, where an accidental medical breakthrough offers the cure to a certain disease, where a struggling author really did write the great American novel, or where a freak accident reveals the existence of a serial killer. Alternitech finds those differencesโ€”and profits from them.

Well, it's useful to me. ;^) Probably worth a dollar. The last scifi bundle I got, Anderson's was the only decent book in the bunch (though I may have only spent a dollar), but it was obviously his first novel.

Labels: ,