Book picks similar to
A Halo of Mushrooms by Andrew Hiller


fantasy
science-fiction
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Forget the Alamo!


Drew McGunn - 2017
    Alive is good. Except he finds himself at the Alamo in 1836 in the body of another man doomed to die. If history repeats itself, Santa Anna is coming soon and the Alamo will fall, along with himself and 189 others. In a race against time itself, Will uses his knowledge of the future to change the past. He will use every means necessary, even if it means abandoning the fort. He is determined to forget the Alamo!

Her Royal Runner


Joey Anderle - 2016
    He is selected to act as her bodyguard during a political crisis in her land. Which isn't part of our Earth. Although tasked with keeping her out of trouble for forty-eight hours, Booker is finding Her Royal Princess Auralee to be a little more adventurous than he had expected. Join Runner Sterling Booker Wells as he attempts to keep the Elven Princess out of harm's way.

The Legacy


Melissa Delport - 2013
    One woman prepared to sacrifice everything to stop him.One war that changed the world.“Eric Dane has segregated the wealth and resources that remain, giving a select few the highest chance of survival and leaving the rest to starve!”World War 3 lasted twelve days and almost eradicated the human species. Growing up in post nuclear America, Rebecca Davis remained blissfully ignorant of the despotic leadership that had seized what was previously the most powerful nation in the world. When the truth is revealed and Rebecca discovers that everything she has been taught is a lie, she is determined to fight for the life that she has not been allowed to live.In order to do this, Rebecca has to cross the boundary fences and venture out of the safety of the New United States, into the barren wastelands. It is there that she finds allies she never dreamed existed. In Rebecca, the Resistance has finally found the ultimate weapon.“You were given this life Rebecca, because you alone are strong enough to live it.”An action-packed, adrenalin inducing thrill ride that will have you riveted until long after you have turned the last page.

More Walls Broken


Tim Powers - 2019
    What follows is the sort of dizzying, mind-expanding entertainment that only the always reliable, always astonishing Tim Powers could have written.These three men, professors in the "Consciousness Research" department at Cal Tech University, have come together to perform a seemingly impossible task. Their goal: to open a door between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and to capture the ghost of the recently deceased scientist Armand Vitrielli. For their own desperate reasons, they hope to avail themselves of the secrets Vitrielli left behind at the time of his death. Their experiment, naturally, fails to come off exactly as planned. A door between the worlds does, in fact, open, letting in something—someone—completely unexpected, and setting in motion a chain of events that will reverberate throughout the narrative.Intricate, intelligent, and always thoroughly absorbing, More Walls Broken mixes fantasy and quantum physics in utterly unique fashion. The result is a brilliantly imagined account of multiple realities and unintended consequences that is pure dazzle, pure storytelling, pure—and unmistakable—Tim Powers. In book after book, story after story, Powers has set the standard for literate imaginative fiction. With this essential, beautifully realized novella, he has done it once again.

Exhulm: Celestial Chronicles Book 1


Xander Jade - 2021
    He woke up without his memory in a world that is filled with Demons, Djinns, Phoenix, Fire Giants, and many others.During his time on Exhulm, he is bullied for being a non-magical being, making his life difficult. Around his 18th birthday, things change. HIs magic presents itself and makes his life even more problematic. Kristjan realizes that maybe not having magic wasn't so bad after all.

Wizard Dawning


C.M. Lance - 2011
    Chicago Post V3.1 Global warming affects life on earth in unexpected ways. Magic intensifies, spreads and goes public. GOVERNMENTS REGULATE MAGIC. LA Tribune, 9.0.2 Danger from Dark Magic swells. Politicians panic. Ten years ago the world was shaken with the discovery that White and Black magic existed. Despite the headlines, like most people, nothing magical has happened in Sig’s life. As he prepares to leave for college, mysterious Great-Grampa Thor shows up with injuries sustained in a battle with a Dark Wizard. He bestows upon Sig, his only male heir, a magical family heirloom. He’s to lead in the fight against Dark Magic. Unfortunately, Sig can only access a small portion of the talisman’s power. His only magic is the ability to change into a 9 foot tall, 700 pound warrior. It’s small benefit in the age of machinery, rockets, and computers. The Dark Wizard comes after Sig. He escapes, but Great-Grampa falls victim to a demon induced coma before he can teach Sig what he needs to know. Sig joins with a group of fellow supernaturals. His new friends help him fight off more attacks while he searches desperately for his greater magic. If he can’t stand on his own against a Dark Wizard, how can he take his place at the front of the world’s fight against black magic?

Out of the Woods


P.S. Power - 2016
     Willum Baker, a humble boy from deep in the forest, is pulled into a war that no one even knows about. Now, he either learns to become the perfect spy, or everything, everywhere, will have never been at all. He has help from a family he never knew, but in the end, Will is on his own. Fighting to understand hundreds of alien worlds, before it’s too late. If it’s possible, which is far from assured. *Note: This story takes place in the Young Ancients, Infected, Shortcuts and Mr. Hartley universes. If you've ever wanted a really satisfying cross over that moved past the first few minutes of meetings, this series is for you!

Nightmare City


Jack Conner - 2014
     Lavorgna is a city of fog and shadows, undead servants soaring zeppelins, where mad scientists prowl the alleys, mob bosses strive for power and the dreaded Guild of Alchemists holds the land in an iron grip, while below the city lies a network of black caverns embedded with the ruins of an ancient race known as the Elders that worshipped Lovecraftian horrors. To survive and save the world from an unimaginable fate, Katya must navigate all these dangers and more. Running from the loan shark, she seeks out the local mob boss Ravic, only to learn that he’s embroiled in a vicious gang war with his rival Loqrin, a conflict that has supernatural overtones. A new horror has gripped the city, with mysterious creatures called haunts killing people by the dozen, and Ravic believes Loqrin is behind it. If Katya wants Ravic’s help, she must find out what Loqrin is up to – and stop him! To do this, Katya must use all her thieving skills and cunning, because if she doesn’t and Loqrin accomplishes his endgame, the whole world will suffer an awful fate. No pressure, Kat.

Birthright


B.J. Keeton - 2013
    As a technomage of the Charonic Archive, Damien had the power to create entire universes. Then, five hundred years ago, he gave it all up. He suspended the nanites that made up his bloodstream and began to age—and eventually die—like anyone else. For centuries, Damien has lived among those who once worshipped him, his real identity fading into myth and legend. Hundreds of years later, when Ceril Bain finds Damien’s old sword buried in his grandfather's garden, he is put on the fast-track to follow in Vennar's footsteps. Over the next six years, Ceril trains as a technomage aboard the Inkwell Sigil, a ship with the ability to travel between dimensions. Just as Ceril is preparing to undergo his Rites and finish his training, the Inkwell Sigil loses power. Stranded in space with no way back home, Ceril and four of his classmates are given their final assignment: go into uncharted territory, find a way back home, and bring back the one person who can fix the ship—Damien Vennar himself.While away, Ceril and his team find themselves in a predicament when they confuse an attempt at first contact with an attack and kill two of the world’s winged inhabitants. They are shortly captured and imprisoned, and the only thing keeping them alive is their angel-like captors’ belief they may be the subjects of an ancient prophecy about a group of magic-wielding messiahs. But that’s impossible. Isn’t it?

Jurassic Jail (Time Wars Book 1)


William Alan Webb - 2018
     Future America is dangerous and bankrupt. The interstate highways are littered with the rusted hulks of ambushed cars and trucks, and only Mad Max would dare travel the back roads. When an arms race with Russia and China to develop time travel for military purposes achieves success, the body count skyrockets as both patriot and enemy try to hijack the new technology. Like the Manhattan Project and Operation Overtime before it, such a project attracts the best and the brightest as well as the worst and the psychotic. But not everyone has given up on the rule of law. In Tennessee, Fayette County D.A. Pete Dance wants to prosecute the murder of a man whose fossilized remains turn up after a series of devastating earthquakes. The problem is that the victim is still alive. When the violence starts, it doesn’t stop until the final whirlwind of teeth and claws and lasers. The first spinoff series from William Alan Webb’s immensely popular series The Last Brigade is described by one critic as “…Spectre agents chasing Fast and Furious through Jurassic World,” while another reviewer added “…with a heavy dose of Harry Bosch for good measure.” “After the heart-pounding finale, you won’t see the shocking ending coming. Guaranteed to keep you awake at night.”

The Ghost in Love


Jonathan Carroll - 2007
    They are delicious treats—with devilish tricks inside them."—Michael Dirda, The Washington PostNeil Gaiman has written: "Jonathan Carroll has the magic. He'll lend you his eyes, and you'll never see the world in quite the same way ever again."Welcome to the luminous and marvelously inventive world of The Ghost in Love. A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a curb, and dies. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die, and the ghost that's been sent to take his soul to the afterlife is flabbergasted. Going immediately to its boss, the ghost asks, what should I do now? The boss says, we don't know how this happened but we're working on it. We want you to stay with this man to help us figure out what's going on.The ghost agrees unhappily; it is a ghost, not a nursemaid. But a funny thing happens—the ghost falls madly in love with the man's girlfriend, and things naturally get complicated. Soon afterward, the man discovers he did not die when he was "supposed" to because for the first time in their history, human beings have decided to take their fates back from the gods. It's a wonderful change, but one that comes at a price.The Ghost in Love is about what happens to us when we discover that we have become the masters of our own fate. No excuses, no outside forces or gods to blame—the responsibility is all our own. It's also about love, ghosts that happen to be gourmet cooks, talking dogs, and picnicking in the rain with yourself at twenty different ages.Stephen King has said that "Jonathan Carroll is as scary as Hitchcock, when he isn't being as funny as Jim Carrey." Jonathan Lethem sees Carroll as the "master of sunlit surrealism." However one regards this beguiling original, two facts are indisputable: It's tough being a ghost on an empty stomach. And The Ghost in Love is a triumphant return.

The Scout


Eric Tozzi - 2012
    It's heading for Earth at twelve thousand miles per hour...and it will land virtually undetected. For Jack McAllister, a young writer who has finally launched a career for himself, it begins tragically: his estranged father, a former NASA engineer, dies suddenly at his home in Merriweather, Indiana, leaving Jack's Alzheimer's-stricken mother a widow. But in the wake of personal heartbreak, he's confronted by an even more astonishing event--the covert landing of an alien machine in the forest just a few miles outside of town. Now Jack must unmask the true purpose of the otherworldly device that has begun a detailed environmental survey of the woods. Aided by the town's young and resilient female deputy sheriff, he soon discovers that the alien scout is only one small part of a much larger operation, and the countdown to a terrifying global catastrophe is about to take place. Drawing deeply from his father’s scientific influence, all while attempting to avoid the snares of a sexy, seductive and scheming local TV reporter, Jack uncovers—and ultimately finds himself an unwilling component of—an alien plan set to terminate life on Earth as we know it.

Fracture


Craig Andrews - 2013
    As a first year associate at a prestigious Portland law firm, his professional life is on the rise. All that is turned upside-down by a mysterious attack on his life by strange people with stranger abilities. Thrust into an underground world of magic where rival Families are on the brink of war, Allyn wants only to return to his normal life and thriving career. But distancing himself from this new reality is nearly impossible. Haunted by the attack and questioning why he was targeted to begin with, Allyn's questions only deepen with the sudden disappearance of his sister. The only place to turn for answers, and for help, is a Magi Family whose agenda he wants no part of. Yet with his sister's life on the line, he may have no choice but to pick a side.

Titans


Niall Teasdale - 2021
    Men and women with abilities science cannot explain. Heroes and monsters. Both beloved and feared, the Titans are the new superpowers in the post-Wave world.Into this changed world are thrust Mercy Garner and her crew, trapped in time for fifty years and thought to be dead. They were the first to detect the Wave, the first to be hit by it, and the last to discover the changes the Wave brought to their world.

Shadowrun: Doc Wagon 19


Jennifer Brozek - 2015
    Willing to go anywhere, rescue anyone, as long as that “anyone” has forked out enough advance cash to justify the effort. Reporter Simone Hart has embedded herself with a DocWagon team to see what their life is really like, and she’s in for a wild ride. From an OD’ing celebrity to an aggressive team of hackers, from pesky gangs to an extremely rich and powerful client teetering at death’s door, this night will give the team all they can handle. But will they survive long enough to remember that in the Sixth World, nothing is truly random? Full of memorable characters and rich Sixth World flavor, DocWagon 19 is a thrilling ride with the people struggling to save lives in a sprawl with a million ways to make people dead. Strap in, hold on, crank up the siren, and get ready for a crazy ride-along through the full chaos of the Shadowrun setting.