Looks like we're into spring properly now. The garden is filling with flowers and I've seen lots of bumblebees all busy. Just today I got the cover off the wicker furniture ready for sitting out.
This month I've been taking part in an online version of Temp-O. This is a form of orienteering where you have to identify which of the flags visible on the ground is indicated on the map. There is a little trick, though, in that the marked point might actually not be any of them so you have to identify that in those cases. After eight events, each with about 7 stations, and 6 flags to identify at each station, I ended up 110th in the world in the urban league. Not bad for a first attempt!
And here are the books you want, and this month we've got lots of giveaways and promos at the bottom...

Being an officer means balancing many conflicting demands. Making the wrong decision can have serious consequences. It takes a special kind of person to cope with the responsibility. The Officer is an anthology of eleven science fiction short stories by writers from across the globe. It is part of the Newcomer series of scifi anthologies.

Sometimes spaceships disappear with everyone on board - the Lost Ships. But sometimes they come back, strangely altered, derelict, and rumoured to be full of horrors.
Opal is on a mission. She's been seeking something her whole life. Something she is willing to die for. And she thinks it might be on a Lost Ship. Opal has stolen Clarissa, an experimental AI-controlled spaceship, from the military. Together they have tracked down a Lost Ship, in a lonely nebula far from colonised space.
The Lost Ship is falling into the gravity well of a neutron star, and will soon be truly lost ... forever. Legends say the ships harbour death, but there's no time for indecision.
Opal gears up to board it. She's just one woman, entering an alien and lethal environment. But perhaps with the aid of Clarissa's intelligence - and an armoured spacesuit - Opal may stand a chance.

Their survival is already on the line, and now more trouble is about to find them.
Stranded in a galaxy on the brink of war, the last of the human race are trying to survive. Regulation Officer Selina Ravencraft, a pioneer’s daughter, is doing what she can to help her kind settle and keep their makeshift colony safe.
But when Selena activates a mysterious device, she brings her people into the sights of the alien race that killed her father. Ready to prove she’s more than her father’s daughter, she flings herself between the humans and their biggest enemy.
Can Selina keep the last of humanity out of harm’s way? Or will they die out forever?

Orlan Bazhaev awaits his fate on the gallows in a small backwater town on a Neg world, until a Frontier Marshal intervenes and spares his life. The price for this freedom? He has to hunt down his former gang and kill his mentor, the man who has provided him with the only home he's ever known.

Orbiting the mega-planet Magnus Prime, a Russian long-distance starship sends out a distress signal.
They’ve lost control and their orbit degrades with every pass. With life support failing and the ship threatening to burn in the planet's atmosphere, time is not on the responder's side. Flight Officer Amanda Dawn finally reaches the ship, but things aren't what they seem. The Russian cosmonaut is missing. Something stalks the corridors of the dying ship and communication to authorities is impossible.
Now, trapped abord the careening ship, Officer Dawn quickly finds herself in a fight for her life.
Alone, scared and confused, her only hope is to escape to her ship...The Helix.
Saving the Russian vessel and its crew doesn’t matter anymore.
All that matters is to get to The Helix before whatever is on the ship gets her first.

As the President of the Confederation of Planetary Explorers, Abigail Olivaw imagined she’d be just another footnote in history, until she’s thrust into defending mankind in a galactic tribunal. An alien collective arrives in Sol and insists humanity has knowingly broken its most sacred law. If true, the outcome could mean the end of our species. With the help of her A.I. companion, Abigail must learn to navigate the alien cultures to turn the tide in our favor.
Meanwhile, lightyears away, Major Lync Michaels and Director Joyce Green, part of the founding colony mission to Epsilon Eridani, are dealing with a deadly alien threat of their own. Their new world isn’t nearly as welcoming as it first appeared. They must choose to defend their colony or answer a cryptic call to arms in Sol.
At the center of it all is a family secret nearly three centuries old. Can Abigail and her team mend their fractured pasts to save humanity or are they already millennia too late?

Once Sparker was the most celebrated Squadron Leader in the Commonwealth Empire...
Unjustly discharged, he is reduced to running a freighter business on a forsaken planet.
A spate of vanishing freighters brings him in contact with Mirra, a former refugee from the Outer Terra, whose family is amongst the missing.
Can Sparker overcome the past injustice and arise to help find Mirra's family and uncover the secret behind the disappearing freighters? And, is it but a harbinger of a greater threat rising against the Commonwealth Empire?

A sentient station older than the sun ...
A torus where time stutters ...
A realm haunted by the fading wails of the ripping fabric of space ...
A band of hardy fools choose to invade it.
From the rubble of humankind’s worst wars have emerged a myriad claimants to the decadent civilization that the Powers of Solaria had administered for centuries. Collapsing systems erupt in renewed melees as agents of the underground run amok and infiltrators plague the ranks of Martian-Jovian militaries. Rumors about the destruction of systems at the hands of a mysterious invader abound. The defense against the Spacers has consumed a billion lives and counting, but Solaria finds its solace in propaganda—for the enemy has only retreated into the blackness they emerged from, and as humanity loses purpose, proxy wars tie up the Navy.
The most powerful fleet that Jupiter-Pluto can wield has decimated the Gubre System in one such proxy war, uncovering a full array of underground operations. Dozens of enigmatic Melds are found and hunted—possibly, the ruins strewn on these planets might provide some advantage in the greater conflict. The fleet settles down for occupation, and the admiral dispatches a team of what he thinks are randomly selected Marines under Lieutenant Hojaka.
Their mission: investigate a derelict transfer station drifting in the interplanetary gulf. As they get closer, however, their worlds and their minds stop seeming quite right. Is it a station? Or a frontwheeler photonic torus? A moon-sized Foot? Is it inhabited by corpses or is it the abode of the Meld? Gateways lead into a turquoise-skinned universe where the ancient exiled Representative AI has taken refuge, where others once resided. Greater others, now mauled and mangled by a mixture of their own stupidity and the influence of someone beyond, as the golden mountains on Planet Khundav detonate and the Navies of Solaria patrol.
The stakes are at levels from which causality is but superstition, ethics but an afterthought. For Hojaka, it is a desperate venture, trickery on a galactic scale. To the Meld Deluria, it is a stepping stone. A scheme has been unfolding for aeons, by the will of powers far beyond human comprehension—powers that he aims to conquer.
In his quest, the Meld has come face-to-face with an entity. An entity that has lain in wait since the first black holes uttered their birth-cries, that has witnessed suns rise and fall at the hands of desperate living things who cling to the mossy cliff of survival. It is vast and dark, its tendrils reach far and wide. Now the Meld has used the splendid drama-of-humanity he has orchestrated to poke this entity with a sharp stick. He has forced it to watch. To feel.

In a Post Apocalyptic far future, there is only one thing that can save the fragile civilizations humanity has cobbled together: the mechs. A ragtag crew of mech pilots must battle the undead hordes, cannibal tribes, and religious cults in a daily race to keep humanity safe. But now a threat worse than anything has surfaced and is growing stronger. The undead have reanimated in their own battle machines and created the rise of the Dead Mechs!

Almost a hundred years ago, a major terrestrial event reshaped the earth’s coastlines. Goodbye entire cities. Goodbye entire states. Goodbye entire countries. And when the authorities outlawed salvaging from these underwater cities, why say hello to a new breed of criminal: underwater reclamation specialists. Even a hundred years later, there’s still a whole lot of loot for the reclaiming.
But it’s not theft if you put it back, right?
After cracking an underwater vault in their first major heist in the Seattle Isles, Isa and her crew think they’re on easy street again—that is, if they can figure out what it is exactly they stole. A question, they soon learn, where their very lives hang in the balance.
Thrust into a high-stakes game of subterfuge and deception by the local mob boss, Isa and her crew must scramble to unravel the mystery of what it is they stole while unseen forces move against them.
Harried. Threatened at every turn. Isa and her crew must stay one step ahead to stay alive.

Studying ancient sites on a backwater planet, Archaeologist Nosuma Okande finds more of them than The Institute has on record.
On her first day, she digs up an odd statuette. After receiving death threats, the Institute sends Nosuma to another excavation site. Later the same night, she stumbles upon a strange ceremony in the village square.
Undeterred, Nosuma decides to unearth the mysteries the planet holds. But can she untangle the enigmatic past of an Edifice Abandoned?

We’re a world beset by crises. Climate change, income inequality, racism, pandemics, an almost unmanageable tangle of issues. Sometimes it’s hard to look ahead and see a hopeful future.
We asked sci-fi writers to send us stories about ways to fix what’s wrong with the world. From the sixty-five stories we received, we chose twelve most amazing (and hopefully prescient) tales.
Dive in and find out how we might mitigate climate change, make war obsolete, switch to alternative forms of energy, and restructure the very foundations of our society.
The future’s not going to fix itself.

One man’s vision created seven Gifted children.
One can read minds, another can shape dreams, and still another can heal battle wounds. The list goes on.
Join Jillian and her siblings as they navigate the dangers of living life as genetically Gifted people. Some, like Danielle, want to help them. Some, like Devya, want to control them. And many others just want to own them.