Fledgling by Lee and Miller now a free ebook

[rolanni]

To the best of my understanding, which is a little shaky on certain bits, the ebook edition of Fledgling, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, is now available from the Baen Free Library in all ebook formats known to Man. Here's the link.

Also? There's a Fledgling Second Edition which will soon be for sale at the Kindle Store (it is, in fact for sale here as of this moment), the iBookstore, and at Baker & Taylor (Blio)  for $6.99. The second edition is available as an ebook only and includes The Authors' Working Notes as new content.

Everybody confused? Good. Me, too.

What's not confusing is that Fledgling is another portal book into the Liaden Universe®, so!  If the friend you offered Agent of Change (still available for free! from Amazon and from the Baen Free Library) to felt that Giant Sentient Turtles, gunfights, space battles, and True Love were a Little Too Much, here's a nice, quiet coming-of-age story, with a little academic intrigue to keep things interesting, and no sentient aliens at all, unless you count norbears, which I certainly do.

Comments

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

The Fledgling that I see at Kindle at the moment is marked as released September 1, 2009. Is that the second edition already, or still the first one? It is all very confusing.

You do need to do some deductive reasoning, you're right. The second edition actually SAYS "Second Edition"on the cover, so that may help you out.

And I just can't imagine anybody reading Fledgling without reading the Main Sequence

Yep, you're right, you can't; and neither can anyone else who has read the books from the first. Your experience is working against you, and unless you have a Very Powerful Imagination, you just can't imagine experiencing the books in any other way, save the way in which you experienced them.

Despite this, we did get many new readers from Fledgling, who then went on to read the rest of the universe. They had a different reading experience from the experience of people who have been with us from the first, but it is neither an incorrect reading experience nor an impoverished experience.

is the "Theo on a skoot" scene returned into the book in edition 2? I never could understand, why it was taken out...

I can't help you there, since I can't remember such a scene.

[vythe.livejournal.com]

Well, you see, my deductive reasoning is feeble (when it comes against Kindle), and my imagination is not Very. That's part of the reason why I enjoy your books so much - it lets me feed off your imagination and reasoning both.

I found both versions of Fledgling on Kindle now, so that question is resolved.

As for skoots, we have this reference in chapter 19:
"No," she said, looking down to stroke Mandrin. She looked up and met his eyes. "I ran it on manual."
One eyebrow rose. "Forgive me, Theo. The fact that you've had training on the Skoots momentarily slipped my mind."
"Well, I haven't," she blurted. "And I did have a couple seconds where I thought maybe I'd made a mistake. But then—it was easy."
There was a small pause while he sipped his tea. "Just so," he murmured. "Easy."

There is no episode itself, however, where Theo does those things. I really wish you wrote about it in more detail, since I found it to be one of the most inspiring scenes in the book.