In the Name of Honor by Courtney & Clarke Collins

What would you risk to save someone you loved from a fate worse than death? A half-elven princess, grieving the loss of one father and fearing for the other. A loyal guardsman, torn between his oath to the king and her safety. And a creature so bent on revenge, he’ll make the world kneel to hurt them all. Of all the messages Dimitar’s carried, he now delivers the worst of all: vile Corrupted creatures have returned and murdered the king’s best friend. The king leaves to seek retribution, and gives Dimitar an order he doesn’t expect: guard the princess, Kaleela. When Corruptors then kidnap her father, she insists on rescuing him. Dimitar must break his vow to keep her safe in the kingdom, and together infiltrate the enemy’s lair… unless the Corrupted capture Kaleela first. Fans of epic fantasy with romance will fall into this character-driven world and thrilling new adventure, where a rescue mission turns into a chase, and only the princess or the king can be saved.

Of Mycelium and Men by William C. Tracy

SPSFC 2022 SPSFC 2023

The generational fleet planned to make landfall after eighty years, but eleven planets and four centuries later, they still had not found a home. Finally, they landed on Lida, but something already lives there, and it's big. Agetha and her husband have spent their whole lives in the fleet’s zero-G. Now all is turmoil as the fleet lands, discovering they are surrounded by a single fungal biomass spanning the entire planet. To build a new home, the fleet must confront a dangerous organism, and Agetha must decide if she can raise a family in this inhospitable landscape. Jane Brighton holds tenuous command over the colony and its administrators. She and the other gene-modded leaders emerged from their four-hundred-year suspended animation to find a crew much different to the one that departed Old Earth. Jane must direct the colony’s fragile growth, and defend it against being overrun by the fast-growing biomass. But there is something none of the colonists know. The massive organism that spans the planet is not simply a fungal mass, nor even a chimerical combination of species that once roamed the planet. The biomass has desires and goals, and one is to know these strange beings carving out a home in its midst.