The Based Book Sale is back. From now through Tuesday May 26, 2026, more than a hundred titles from independent and culturally conservative authors are available for $0.99 or free across science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, horror, and nonfiction. The catalog is enormous, and most readers will not have time to sift through every entry.
So we did the work. Below are Fandom Pulse’s nine curated picks, including two of our own titles, with notes on why each one earned a spot.
Space Fleet Academy Year One (Jon Del Arroz with Vox Day)
Space Fleet Academy is what Vox Day and I wrote as the answer to Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy and the wave of woke nostalgia television trying to drag the Trek brand further into the dirt. The book brings real science back to the academy setting and drops cadets into a dark universe where survival of the fittest is the operating principle, not the consequence-free utopia modern Trek pretends the Federation is. If you have wanted military science fiction that takes the academy concept seriously instead of using it as a launching pad for sermons, this is the book for you.
Dakiti: Ziva Payvan Book 1 by EJ Fisch
EJ Fisch’s Dakiti opens the Ziva Payvan series, a five-book military science fiction run that built its reputation through reader word of mouth rather than publisher push. Ziva Payvan is a Haphezian assassin working black ops for her government, and Dakiti drops readers straight into the kind of covert operations and squad-level action that fans of the genre keep coming back for. The book holds a 4.3 average on Amazon across 185 ratings and 3.9 on Goodreads across 235 ratings, numbers that signal a loyal readership rather than a flash-in-the-pan release. Fisch has already completed the full arc, with Books 4 and 5 (Fracture and Embers) appearing as New Arrivals elsewhere in this sale, so readers who get hooked can run the entire series without waiting on a slow author. Dakiti is the entry point, and at sale pricing it’s the cheapest way to test whether the Alpha team is your kind of crew.
Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós (Castalia Library Edition)
We covered this one in a full feature article last week and the news is still worth amplifying. Castalia Library has launched a translation project that no major English-language publisher has ever attempted: the complete 46-volume Episodios Nacionales by Benito Pérez Galdós, the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Trafalgar is volume one. October 1805, off the coast of Cádiz, the combined fleets of Spain and France sail out to meet Nelson, and by nightfall the Spanish navy will have ceased to exist as a fighting force. Fourteen-year-old Gabriel Araceli watches the catastrophe from aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world. Vox Day confirmed to Fandom Pulse that Castalia is translating all 46 volumes. For fans of Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell who want to see the age of sail from the Spanish side of the line, this is the entry point.
Boy’s Own Starship by Christopher G. Nuttall
Christopher G. Nuttall’s novel reads like a lost Heinlein juvenile, and that is the highest praise this column can offer. Nuttall is one of the most prolific independent science fiction authors working today, with dozens of military SF and space opera titles to his name, and Boy’s Own Starship is his explicit love letter to the Scribner’s-era young adult tradition that built the genre. The book carries the spirit of Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Rocket Ship Galileo: brainy young protagonists, real science, real consequences, and an adventure that respects the intelligence of the reader instead of talking down to them. If you grew up on the Heinlein juveniles and have been waiting for someone to write more of them with the same craft and the same confidence in young readers, Nuttall delivers. The sale price makes it an easy gateway into one of independent SF’s most reliable catalogs.
Midnight’s War: Out Of The Shadows by Vox Day
Midnight’s War is the prose continuation of one of Arkhaven Comics’ strongest properties, a vampire dark fantasy from Vox Day and Chuck Dixon. In the year 8466 of the Cainite calendar, a catastrophic global economic crisis ends with the vampire tribes emerging from 2,600 years in the shadows. They already control the banks, the media, the governments, and the major international institutions. A new world order called the Great Concord of Gomorrah replaces the global financial system with a currency backed by human blood, enforced by an annual blood tax. Resistance survives in one place: the Knights of Saint Michael and of the Catacombs of Rome, a twelve-man military order modeled on the medieval crusading orders, armed with faith and blood that is poison to their enemies. The vampire courts are decadent, ancient, and lethal, and Vox Day builds the kind of suspense that comes from heroes who are outmanned at every turn in a world where the institutions all answer to the enemy. Readers who follow the Arkhaven run already know the tone, and new readers can step in here without the comic.
Stand Alone (Wolfhounds, Book 1) by John Van Stry
John Van Stry is the bestselling military science fiction author readers have never heard of, and the situation is genuinely strange given his output. Stand Alone opens with Chase, a gang lieutenant in one of the emperor’s capital cities, planning to do a four-year prison stretch to cement his street credibility. Instead, the bastard father he has only seen once shows up on the bench and sentences him to ten years in the Imperial Navy among the Wolfhounds, the Emperor’s Own. Mech armor combat, fleet politics, AI conspiracies, and a protagonist who is exactly as ruthless as the man who sent him there. Van Stry delivers the kind of military space opera that used to define the genre before Tor decided message fiction was more important than action.
Reaper’s Crawl and the LitRPG turn of C.J. Carella
C.J. Carella is one of the great workhorses of independent science fiction. The Warp Marine Corps series put him on the map with star-spanning action and a reborn USA fighting alien invaders, and the Bicentennial War trilogy continued it. Now Carella has pivoted into LitRPG, and the genre is better for it. He brings the same action-adventure pacing, the same instinct for combat geometry, and the same workmanlike reliability to the dungeon-crawl format. If you have not picked up a Carella book yet, the sale is the moment to fix that.
Starquest: Secret Agents of the Galaxy by John C. Wright
John C. Wright has some of the best prose of any living science fiction author, and Starquest is his answer to the gutted husk Disney made of Star Wars. The series brings space opera back to its pulp roots: Pirate King Ahab, Dark Sun Weapons quenching living stars, Space Princess Lyra Centauri, the Crime Syndicate corrupting consuls and fixing votes, an iron-masked vigilante called the Ancient Mariner hunting a pirate captain through a Murder Mansion. Wright told Fandom Pulse he built a 12,000-year galactic history to undergird the universe, and the discipline shows on the page. Secret Agents of the Galaxy is volume two, the entry where the series finds its own voice apart from Lucas, and it is the strongest place to either start or continue the run.
The Stars Entwined (The Aryshan War, Book 1) by Jon Del Arroz
Another of mine. The Stars Entwined opens an interstellar war between humanity and the Aryshan Empire and follows Lieutenant Sean Barrows, an internal affairs agent who gets surgically transformed and dropped into Aryshan territory as a spy. The complication: he falls in love with the enemy commander he was sent to deceive. C.J. Carella called it “warfare, diplomacy and espionage… plenty of action and intrigue. Highly recommended.” Richard Fox called me “the future of military science fiction.” Readers compare it to Old Man’s War, Vatta’s War, and the Vorkosigan Saga. If you want military space opera with romance, espionage, and an alien culture built to feel actually alien, start here.
For Steam And Country (Adventures of Baron Von Monocle, Book 1) by Jon Del Arroz
One final book of mine, because the sale is the right time to bring new readers into the Von Monocle series, which I’ll be releasing The Steam Knight 2 of later this year and then working on the big finale book. For Steam And Country won the CLFA Book of the Year Award and built the #1 Bestselling YA Steampunk series on Amazon. Sixteen-year-old Zaira von Monocle has been farming her family’s land alone for two years when a lawyer arrives to inform her that her father, the legendary adventurer Baron von Monocle, is legally dead and his airship Liliana is now hers. The invading Wyranth Empire is wielding both gunpowder and sorcery, and the Kingdom of Rislandia’s only chance is a sixteen-year-old girl who has never commanded an airship. Swashbuckling, chaste, fast-paced, and accessible to teen and adult readers alike.
You can peruse dozens of more books on the Based Book Sale substack.
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