Five Buck Fantasy Sci-fi Australia

Five Buck Fantasy Sci-fi Australia Endless fantasy & sci-fi. New or old, common or obscure, pristine or crinkled, all $5 a book.

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Richard Ford’s Faradawn trilogy is one of those older British fantasy series that seems to have quietly slipped out of v...
10/09/2026

Richard Ford’s Faradawn trilogy is one of those older British fantasy series that seems to have quietly slipped out of view, despite having exactly the sort of ingredients that should appeal to readers who grew up on Watership Down and similar animal fantasy.

Beginning with Quest for the Faradawn, the story takes place around the Silver Wood, where the animals live under threat from humans. Their hope rests on an old legend that one day a human will come to help them. When the animals discover an abandoned baby boy, they raise him themselves, believing he may be the figure they’ve been waiting for.

The story continues through Melvaig’s Vision and The Children of Ashgaroth, expanding beyond the original quest while keeping the relationship between humans, animals and the natural world at its heart. Ford gives his animals their own societies, loyalties and conflicts rather than simply turning them into furry little humans, and there’s a darker edge here than the covers might initially suggest.

If talking animals automatically makes you think children’s fantasy, Faradawn is a reminder that the British have a long tradition of putting animals in books and then making absolutely sure something traumatic happens to them.

Three books. Quest for the Faradawn, Melvaig’s Vision and The Children of Ashgaroth. A nice little forgotten trilogy to hunt down.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

Simon Haynes’ Hal Spacejock series is Australian comic science fiction for anyone who thinks space opera could do with f...
10/09/2026

Simon Haynes’ Hal Spacejock series is Australian comic science fiction for anyone who thinks space opera could do with fewer brooding chosen ones and more incompetent freighter pilots accidentally making everything worse.

Hal Spacejock is an independent cargo pilot with an elderly ship, very little money and a remarkable ability to turn straightforward jobs into catastrophes. His fortunes change when he acquires Clunk, an intelligent robot who is considerably more sensible than his new owner. Unfortunately for Clunk, being sensible mostly means recognising exactly how bad Hal’s latest idea is shortly before being dragged into it anyway.

The first Hal Spacejock novel appeared in 2005 and grew into a long-running series of interplanetary deliveries, dodgy deals, robots, criminals, bureaucracy and assorted people who really should’ve known better than to employ Hal. Haynes keeps things light, fast and funny, with the Hal-and-Clunk partnership doing much of the heavy lifting. Think classic space adventure with a distinctly Australian refusal to take the heroic space captain too seriously.

If your science fiction tastes run to Douglas Adams, Harry Harrison or the general principle that spaceships are funnier when operated by people who probably shouldn’t have the keys, Hal’s your bloke.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

Some newer trade paperbacks here. Garth Nix’s Clariel takes us back into the Old Kingdom, centuries before Sabriel’s sto...
10/09/2026

Some newer trade paperbacks here.

Garth Nix’s Clariel takes us back into the Old Kingdom, centuries before Sabriel’s story, and gives the series something a little different. Clariel is the daughter of a prominent family who wants little more than to escape the expectations surrounding her and return to the forests she loves. Instead she becomes caught up in the politics of Belisaere, Free Magic creatures and the dangerous struggle between Charter Magic and forces that very much shouldn’t be encouraged. Readers of the earlier books will also recognise that Clariel’s story has significance well beyond this novel. Nix letting us know how things eventually turn out doesn’t make watching them happen any less interesting.

Gillian Anderson’s The Sound of Seas, co-written with Jeff Rovin, is the third and final book in the EarthEnd Saga. And yes, it is that Gillian Anderson. Apparently investigating paranormal activity on television for years wasn’t enough, so she decided to start writing it as well. It’s a proper science fiction/paranormal thriller cocktail: time travel, ghosts, alien technology, ancient mysteries and strange mental powers, all wrapped around a contemporary conspiracy story. In other words, Anderson hasn’t exactly sprinted in the opposite direction from The X-Files.

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two returns to Wade Watts and the OASIS after Ready Player One, with Wade discovering a new piece of technology created by James Halliday: a neural interface capable of connecting users far more completely to the virtual world. Naturally, the revolutionary device comes with consequences, and another Halliday-created quest soon puts Wade and his friends back into a race through pop culture, games, movies and music. If the first book was Cline emptying his 1980s toy box onto the floor, the sequel discovers there were apparently several more boxes in the garage.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

SOLD Robert A. Heinlein is one of the giants of science fiction. Alongside Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, he’s gener...
09/09/2026

SOLD Robert A. Heinlein is one of the giants of science fiction. Alongside Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, he’s generally grouped among the genre’s “Big Three”, and his fingerprints are all over the SF that followed him. Military SF, libertarian SF, social speculation, generation ships, powered armour, competent engineers solving impossible problems. Heinlein got to a remarkable number of things early.

His best-known books include Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Double Star and The Door into Summer, alongside the hugely influential juvenile novels he wrote for Scribner’s. He also built his interconnected Future History, imagining humanity’s technological and social development across centuries rather than simply using “the future” as convenient scenery.

What makes Heinlein particularly interesting to revisit is that he wasn’t just predicting gadgets. He was constantly poking at politics, religion, s*x, individual liberty, social responsibility and what obligations people owe each other. Sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes provocatively. Sometimes in ways that have aged remarkably well. Sometimes in ways that have aged… interestingly.

That’s part of reading Heinlein now. One minute you’re admiring an idea that helped shape half a century of science fiction. The next you’re stopping halfway through a page to have an argument with a man who’s been dead since 1988.

Which, to be fair, is considerably more interesting than being bored.

A tiny selection here. $5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

SOLD Some vintage paperbacks here folks.John Eric Holmes’ Mordred is a fascinating little piece of Buck Rogers history. ...
09/09/2026

SOLD Some vintage paperbacks here folks.

John Eric Holmes’ Mordred is a fascinating little piece of Buck Rogers history. It’s an authorised sequel to Philip Francis Nowlan’s original Armageddon 2419 A.D., written from an outline by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. An elderly Anthony Rogers finds himself rejuvenated just as the old Han enemy resurfaces, now connected with the alien Pr’lan, and America once again requires his particular set of skills. Holmes himself is an interesting figure too. He wrote the hugely influential 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set as well as authorised Pellucidar fiction. Buck Rogers, D&D and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The man’s nerd credentials are in excellent order.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World barely needs an introduction, but it’s worth remembering just how much of its vocabulary and imagery has escaped the book and entered everyday culture. Published in 1932, Huxley’s future World State has engineered away much of the inconvenience of being human through genetic control, conditioning, drugs, consumerism and rigid social classes. Into this supposedly perfect civilisation comes John the Savage, who has the unfortunate habit of asking whether happiness without freedom, individuality or genuine emotion is actually happiness at all. Nearly a century later, people are still arguing about it. That’s a pretty decent innings for a dystopia.

Zach Hughes’ Thunderworld sends the four-person crew of the scout ship Santa Maria looking for somewhere humanity might survive. Their best candidate is a planet they promptly name Worthless, which gives you some indication of how the inspection is going. It’s cold, geologically unstable and caught between competing gravitational forces, but Earth is running out of alternatives. When Don and Zees land to investigate, a planetary upheaval strands them among its primitive life forms, and something they eat has consequences far beyond simple food poisoning. Published in 1982, Thunderworld connects with Hughes’ earlier The Book of Rack the Healer and helps establish the background to its strange post-apocalyptic humanity. Also, Thunderworld is an absolutely magnificent title for a 1980s paperback. You can practically hear the cover.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

SOLD James P. Hogan’s The Genesis Machine is early hard SF Hogan, published in 1978 and built around physicist Bradley C...
09/09/2026

SOLD James P. Hogan’s The Genesis Machine is early hard SF Hogan, published in 1978 and built around physicist Bradley Clifford and a discovery that challenges the accepted foundations of physics. What begins as theoretical research develops into technology with enormous practical and military implications, at which point governments become extremely interested and everything gets considerably less academic. Hogan was an ideas-first SF writer, and this is him happily throwing physics, scientific politics and the dangers of weaponising discovery into the same experiment. There are probably easier ways to upset the Pentagon.

Voyage from Yesteryear takes a different big idea and runs with it. With Earth facing catastrophe, an automated spacecraft is sent to the distant planet Chiron carrying genetic material and machines capable of raising a new human population. Decades later, when a ship from Earth finally arrives, its crew expects to reconnect with humanity’s colony. Instead they find a society raised without Earth’s governments, money or traditional power structures, where advanced automation has created material abundance and status has to be earned rather than bought or imposed. The visitors naturally decide this arrangement could use some management.

That clash makes Voyage from Yesteryear one of Hogan’s more provocative novels. It’s less about defeating aliens than using science fiction to ask what happens when people raised inside one social system meet humans who’ve developed entirely outside it. Whether Hogan’s answers convince you is half the fun. The Chironians, meanwhile, seem remarkably relaxed about the whole thing. Turns out authoritarianism is harder to introduce when nobody can see why they should bother listening to you.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

SOLD Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood books are among the genuinely distinctive works of modern British fantasy. No spraw...
06/09/2026

SOLD Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood books are among the genuinely distinctive works of modern British fantasy. No sprawling kingdoms, chosen-one quests or conveniently labelled Dark Lords. Instead there’s an ancient English woodland that gets considerably larger, older and stranger the deeper you go into it. Which seems unreasonable behaviour for a wood, but here we are.

The series begins with Mythago Wood, winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. After returning from the Second World War, Steven Huxley becomes drawn into Ryhope Wood, the obsession that consumed his father and increasingly his brother Christian. The ancient woodland generates “mythagos”, living manifestations of figures buried deep within humanity’s collective myths and subconscious. Robin Hood-like figures, warriors, shamans and other archetypes emerge in different forms depending on the people encountering them.

Holdstock kept returning to Ryhope in books including Lavondyss, The Bone Forest, The Hollowing, Merlin’s Wood and Avilion, exploring different characters, periods and layers of the forest rather than simply sending the same heroes out for another adventure. Lavondyss in particular became one of the most acclaimed books of the sequence, pushing much further into the strange mythology and ancient landscapes beneath Ryhope.

These aren’t always easy books, and that’s part of why they’ve endured. They’re eerie, intelligent, sometimes unsettling and steeped in the idea that the stories humanity has been telling itself for thousands of years might be much more alive than we’d like. If your local woods suddenly appear a little deeper than they were yesterday, perhaps just go to the pub instead.

Four from the series here. $5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

Barbara Hambly is one of those fantasy writers who deserves considerably more shelf space than she tends to get these da...
06/09/2026

Barbara Hambly is one of those fantasy writers who deserves considerably more shelf space than she tends to get these days. Smart characters, properly lived-in worlds and a refreshing understanding that saving civilisation is generally messy, exhausting work undertaken by people who’d occasionally quite like a day off. Two of her best-known creations are the Sun Wolf and Starhawk books and the Darwath sequence, and they’re very different flavours of Hambly.

On the top row is the complete original trilogy of The Sun Wolf and Starhawk. Sun Wolf is a seasoned mercenary captain and Starhawk his formidable second-in-command, but things take an unexpected turn when the women of an occupied city kidnap Sun Wolf and demand that he train them to fight. What follows isn’t simply swords-and-mercenaries fantasy. Hambly plays with gender, power and the realities of learning to fight, while Sun Wolf’s discovery that he possesses magical ability sends the series in increasingly interesting directions. The Witches of Wenshar and The Dark Hand of Magic continue their adventures, and Sun Wolf and Starhawk make a terrific pairing.

On the second row are three books from the Darwath series, which begins with The Time of the Dark. Two ordinary people from 1980s California, Gil Patterson and Rudy Solis, are drawn into another world being overrun by creatures known simply as the Dark. Yes, it’s portal fantasy, but Hambly is considerably less interested in handing her visitors magical crowns than in asking how modern people would actually cope in a medieval society facing extinction. Gil and Rudy join the wizard Ingold Inglorion as the survivors retreat towards the ancient Keep of Dare, with The Walls of Air and The Armies of Daylight completing the original trilogy.

If you like classic fantasy but prefer your heroes intelligent, fallible and occasionally filthy from doing actual work, Hambly is a very good person to know. And Ingold remains one of fantasy’s great wizards, proving you don’t need flowing white robes and a dramatic staff when being quietly terrifying works perfectly well.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

Peter F. Hamilton’s Void Trilogy is what happens when one of space opera’s biggest world-builders decides his already en...
06/09/2026

Peter F. Hamilton’s Void Trilogy is what happens when one of space opera’s biggest world-builders decides his already enormous Commonwealth universe could probably use a mysterious region at the centre of the galaxy, a messianic religion and what amounts to a fantasy novel happening inside his science fiction novel. Restraint has never really been Hamilton’s thing.

Beginning with The Dreaming Void, followed by The Temporal Void and The Evolutionary Void, the trilogy takes place more than a thousand years after the earlier Commonwealth Saga. At the centre of everything is the Void, an artificial universe whose expansion threatens the surrounding galaxy. When billions of people begin experiencing the dreams of Edeard, a young man living within the Void, a religious movement decides it’s time for a pilgrimage. Much of the rest of civilisation would very much prefer they didn’t.

Hamilton runs two very different stories alongside each other. Outside the Void you’ve got galaxy-spanning politics, post-human technology, alien civilisations and some familiar faces from the Commonwealth books. Inside, Edeard’s story feels closer to epic fantasy, complete with a pre-industrial city, extraordinary mental abilities and a young man gradually discovering just how powerful he might be. Eventually, of course, the two strands turn out to have rather a lot to say to each other.

Big ideas, big cast, big page counts. Very big page counts. If you like Peter F. Hamilton, this is unlikely to concern you. You’ve already accepted that buying one of his trilogies is both a reading commitment and a minor structural load test for the bookshelf.

Three sets of books 1-2. $5 a book, plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

Some more gloriously vintage paperbacks. G. R. Kesteven’s The Awakening Water is another properly obscure one from the ...
02/09/2026

Some more gloriously vintage paperbacks.

G. R. Kesteven’s The Awakening Water is another properly obscure one from the fantasy shelves. There’s surprisingly little solid information out there about either Kesteven or the book, so this one’s for the collectors who enjoy taking a punt on forgotten fantasy with almost no idea what they’re getting themselves into. At five bucks, there are worse ways to live dangerously.

Michael Kurland’s Ten Little Wizards brings Lord Darcy back for another murder mystery in Randall Garrett’s famous alternate-history universe, where magic works according to established laws and investigators treat sorcery rather like forensic science. Kurland continued the character after Garrett, and here Darcy is faced with a decidedly Agatha Christie-ish problem as members of a group of wizards start dying one by one. Fantasy, alternate history and a proper whodunnit all sharing the same room. Nobody leave until Lord Darcy works out which one of you did it.

Rosemary Kirstein’s The Outskirter’s Secret is the second Steerswoman novel, following The Steerswoman, and this is a series best approached knowing that appearances can be deceptive. Rowan is a Steerswoman, part of an order dedicated to gathering and freely sharing knowledge, whose members are entitled to ask questions and expect truthful answers. Her investigation takes her among the Outskirters and deeper into mysteries surrounding her world, its wizards and strange objects that don’t behave quite like magic ought to. Kirstein’s series has become a genuine cult favourite among readers who like intelligent speculative fiction and the slow pleasure of watching characters scientifically investigate things the reader may understand rather differently. Saying much more would spoil half the fun.

$5 each plus postage.

If it does not say SOLD at the top of this post then I probs still have copies.

Send your book wish lists to [email protected] to get notified if something comes in with a match.

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