Recommended: GRRM's TUF VOYAGING, in ebook for $2.99

George R.R. Martin has been one of my favorite authors for a long, long time, and one of my favorite among his books is TUF VOYAGING, science fiction about an eccentric cat-loving character who comes into possession of the last remaining seedship of Earth's Ecological Engineering Corps, giving him... well, some pretty awesome power as he travels from planet to planet. Which he doesn't use to declare himself Emperor or some other familiar plot twist you might expect.

The ebook version of TUF VOYAGING, normally 11.99, is available for the bargain price of @2.99 until September 26th from Amazon, B&N, and other ebook retailers.

I will, however, temper my recommendation with a creeb about the cover Bantam put on this 2013 edition. I can understand why someone at Bantam might have thought, "Hey, let's do the cover for this in the same style as George's Song of Ice and Fire books. That will get us extra sales." But I don't understand why no one said, "That idea kinda sucks." The free-floating spacesuit helmet on the new Bantam cover is dreadfully generic for a book that stands out for being non-generic and confounding expectations, and the... thing... behind the helmet looks like a random spatter pattern unless you zoom the image up to actual printed book size, when you can finally tell its made of silhouettes of animals and spaceships.

I thought the cover from an earlier printed edition (Baen, 1987), actually showing Haviland Tuf himself, was much better:

If you do a Google Images search on "Tuf Voyaging", you'll also get to see covers for a lot of other editions, domestic and foreign, almost all of which picture Tuf and are better than the Bantam cover. I especially liked this one, from a Spanish edition:

But regardless of which cover you prefer, it's a damn good book, and $2.99 is a great bargain.