Nebula-nominated and wildly original fantasy novel available for 99 cents.

[Sam]

Purely on my own I wanted to promote a novel I thinks deserves to be more widely read, Walter Jon Williams's Metropolitan. Basically it asks what would happen if magic could be harnessed and distributed like electric power and gives the answer in a planet-wide city riven by political and ethnic conflict. Or, as Williams puts it:

"One of the first things to consider about Metropolitan is that it’s a product of megalomania. Having subdued the cosmos in Aristoi, I decided with my next novel that I was going to fix fantasy.

It’s not like anyone asked me to do this. It’s not like readers were demanding that I repair their favorite genre. It was just something I decided to do, as a favor to the universe.

When I cast about for fantasy to read in the early 1990s, I always hoped to find a something that would give me the same thrill as reading Tolkien for the first time, or (a personal favorite) E.R. Eddison. But I wasn’t much finding it. Fantasy was being written by normal people— as normal as writers get, anyhow— instead of the great eccentrics who founded the genre. And fantasy writers I admired, like Jonathan Carroll and John Crowley, were being marketed not as fantasy writers, but as writers of literary fiction . . . it’s as if the genre had cast them out as unworthy to write for the Dragonlance franchise."

Anyway, it's available for .99 wherever ebooks are sold. Williams also has a nice post about it on his blog: http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2014.... Just ignore the really hideous cover. Maybe if he sells enough copies he'll finally write a third book in the series (the second, City on Fire, is even better and was nominated for a hugo and a nebula).