You probably saw the trailers during the Super Bowl and the Grammys. As Disney ramps up its advertising for John Carter, how many people realize it is based on A Princess of Mars, a pulp fiction classic written a hundred years ago? Some fans may be familiar with the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, he created Tarzan, too!) but others may see this as a new world created by Disney. Hopefully, both will be satisfied when the movie opens March 9.

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Drew Magary’s The Postmortal (a nominee for the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award) brings us to a future where the cure for aging has been developed. And the future isn’t that far away; by the year 2019 the world is torn between people seeking the cure and people opposing the cure in the most violent of ways.

Would you take the cure? A chance to look the same for hundreds, maybe thousands of years? To never age one minute? The flip side you can still be ravaged by disease, get hit by a car, or party yourself into the ground. The answer for the majority is yes, without hesitation. As soon as the President of the United States lifts the ban on the cure, the flood gates open, but so does the backlash.

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The Valley of Fear is the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1915.

In connection to the new Sherlock Holmes movie which brings Moriarty to the forefront as Holmes’s nemesis, Tantor Audio is offering a free download of The Valley of Fear, which includes a bonus Sherlock Holmes story “The Final Problem,” and a companion PDF eBook. The audiobook is narrated by Simon Prebble, who was awarded the title of a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine.

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Written over 250 years ago, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is a beloved tale well-known around the world. For young children, it is a whimsical story of a man who travels first to a world of little people where he is a giant among them, and then into a world where the tables are reversed and he is surrounded by towering giants. For adults, it has become a classic of English literature due to its deep and lasting reflections upon the nature of mankind itself. (Its popularity even seems to have survived the recent movie remake with Jack Black.)

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Christian Cantrell’s novel Containment takes us to a future where Earth has become almost unfit for human life. In order to preserve the human race, the world’s governments form the Global Space Agency. Their project: cultivate sustainable life on other planets.

In the end, Venus is chosen, and a group of Earth’s smartest and most adaptable people are selected to colonize there, with the expectations of expanding and increasing oxygen production. Eventually, the oxygen level is stable enough to allow a generation of Venus-born children, they become known as Gen V.

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Halloween is a time to spook yourself and others, to let your imagination run free, and most importantly pull down the “what if” walls on the supernatural. For some this is almost impossible, for others it is a way of life. When I was eleven I stumbled across a genre of books that changed my entire life. For some reason, one that I still don’t understand, a teacher handed me Stephen King’s IT when I was in the fifth grade. I read it in two days, and never looked back.

[Free downloads of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein]

You can enter Morganville, but you will never leave.

Hear it here first, before the November 1 simultaneous publication! Free first chapter of Last Breath, the eleventh installment of Rachel Caine’s New York Times bestselling Morganville Vampires series.

Rachel Caine’s series follows Claire Danvers and her friends as they try to survive the town of Morganville, TX. Because unlike other towns, Morganville is run by vampires and they control everything in the town. From the local coffee shop to the bloodmobile, the vampires have a lockdown on the humans, and Claire and her friends are the only ones who hold the line between coexistence and full-out war.

[Free chapter below...]

It has been recently announced that Ray Bradbury’s semi-autobiographical Dandelion Wine will be made into a movie. While Bradbury is to be closely involved with the adaptation, the screenplay will be written by Rodion Nahapetov, the writer, director, and star of Contamination (2008). The film will be produced by Phoenix Pictures’ Mike Medavoy and Doug McKay.

Here’s a chance to get familiar with the story.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger brought the Barbarian to the mainstream in 1982. Today, Jason Momoa brings the Barbarian back to the big screen in Conan the Barbarian.

But Conan is much more than a Hollywood icon; he is the legendary Cimmerian on a quest to conquer the pages of Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria series. Now you can follow the amazing tales of Conan brought to life by narrator Todd McLaren.

[Free audio excerpts below]