Episode 207: Sal Amato – Hidden Powers

A conversation with actor, writer, and producer Sal Amato about his upcoming debut science fiction novel, Hidden Powers.

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salamato.com

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@hiddenpowersofficial

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@HiddenPowersUSA

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@hiddenpowersnovel

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@hiddenpowersofficial

About Hidden Powers

Investigative journalist Sarah Moore has exposed government corruption for years. Still, nothing prepared her for what killed her father: $47 trillion in unaccounted federal spending hidden across seventy years of black budgets. 

Her father, David Moore, a government accountant, discovered the pattern in 2009—the same representatives approving secret budgets, the same shell corporations receiving them, the same suppressed technologies that would have eliminated scarcity. He died of a “heart attack” at fifty, alone in his office at 2:17 AM.  

Sarah follows the money to 127 phantom corporations, 6,000 coordinated elites, and 847 murdered researchers whose discoveries would have freed humanity from controlled resources. Then Victoria Sterling contacts her with the answer: 

In 1954, world leaders agreed with an extraterrestrial species called the Greys—not for technology, but for permission to manage humanity as property.  Sterling, a former architect of this control system, explains there’s no grand conspiracy—just thousands of people worldwide who believe they own everyone else, coordinating through a shared worldview rather than direct communication. They’ve suppressed cures, buried innovations, and murdered whistleblowers, all while convincing the “owned” to defend the systems harming them. 

The cruelest part: people have been taught to root for their oppressors, by becoming ‘fanatical’ in trusting the shiniest marketed bulbs.  

On October 17, 2026, Sterling stands at the Washington Monument and reveals everything with irrefutable documentation that will change the course of humanity. 

About Sal Amato

Sal Amato

Sal Amato is an actor, writer, producer, and now novelist whose career has been defined by an insatiable curiosity about human nature and the stories we tell ourselves. With a long career that included attempts to develop streaming media platforms in the mid-’90s to 2000s, and a music industry insider with moderate success, Sal has never felt he’s achieved what he set out to do, but that has never stopped him.

As a performer, Sal began his journey in 1978 doing a Betty Crocker commercial. From there, he’d move on to movies (Bad Boys 1982) as well as being one of the youngest members ever at The Second City, one of the most prestigious comedy institutions in the world where he would learn the craft under the late, famed Don DePollo As time went by, Sal developed his voice performing stand-up and improvisation, learning to read audiences and craft narratives that resonate. With very odd jobs along the way, including a DJ, broadcasting, and working at grocery stores, Sal continued to try to find his way, never giving up. This foundation led to a moderate success in acting in both film and television, with appearances in The Untouchables, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Chicago Overcoat, Where It Gets You, Chicago Fire, The Big Leap, and numerous other productions, including commercials.

As a creator, Sal expanded beyond performance into writing and producing. His animated series Bakers In The Burbs, a project blending comedy with social observation, has been optioned by a production company actively seeking placement on major streaming platforms.

When not writing, Sal continues to work in entertainment, bringing stories to life across multiple platforms and as an analog-to-digital transfer specialist.

Episode 206: Alan Smale – Burning Night (Apollo Rising: Book 3)

A conversation with Sidewise Award-winning novelist (and former NASA astrophysicist) Alan Smale, talking about Burning Night, Book 3 in his Apollo Rising alternate-history science fiction trilogy.

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alansmale.com

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@alan.smale

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@alansmale.bsky.social

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@AlanSmale

About Burning Night

On July 4, 1983, Vivian Carter and her NASA crew of seven set off on an audacious double flyby of Venus and Mars, a two-year mission with repurposed Apollo technology that will push their ingenuity and resourcefulness to the limit. Meanwhile, superpower conflicts escalate on Earth, mirrored by a dangerously unstable arms race and battles for valuable mineral resources on the Moon. Full-up lunar military actions and treacherous sneak attacks decimate Vivian’s friends, allies and colleagues on both sides of the Iron Curtain and threaten everything she has worked to achieve.

Vivian’s odyssey is a high adventure that will bring mankind new knowledge and unimagined insights … just as the risk of worldwide nuclear war has never been greater. Now, on her triumphant return in 1985, Vivian Carter’s path inevitably brings her back to where she began: a desperate rescue mission with no NASA support and no safety net, to a dangerous, war-torn Moon where she will be hard pressed to tell friend from foe.

In the concluding volume of Alan Smale’s highly acclaimed Apollo Rising series (“A nail-biting thriller.” – Publishers Weekly) humanity faces a stark choice: a bright new interplanetary future … or nuclear apocalypse on two worlds.

Praise for the Apollo Rising series

“A nail-biting thriller.”Publishers Weekly 

“I loved it. Great ‘hard’ science fiction with convincing space battles.”−Larry Niven

“Will delight and enthrall.”Library Journal

“A provocative science fiction novel.”Foreword Reviews

“Alan Smale is one of the brightest stars in the hard-SF firmament, and Hot Moon is his best novel yet. ”Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author

“Intriguing, adrenaline-fueled, and engaging, author Alan Smale’s Hot Moon is the perfect sci-fi meets political thriller.”Anthony Avina

“A superb mind-expanding sci-fi novel!”Grady Harp (Amazon Hall of Fame Top 100 Reviewer)

About Alan Smale

Alan Smale

Alan Smale writes alternate history, historical fantasy, and hard SF. His novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, “A Clash of Eagles,” won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and his novels set in the same universe, Clash of Eagles, Eagle in Exile, and Eagle and Empire (2015-2017) are available from Del Rey in the US and Titan Books in the UK and Europe. His “Roman baseball” collaboration with Rick Wilber, The Wandering Warriors, came out from WordFire Press in 2020, and Hot Moon, his alternate-Apollo “technothriller with heart,” set entirely on and around the Moon, was launched by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy in 2022, with sequel Radiant Sky following in 2024 and the grand finale, Burning Night in 2025.

Alan has sold more than fifty stories to Asimov’s and other magazines and anthologies, and his short story “Gunpowder Treason” earned him a second Sidewise Award in 2022. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Lightspeed, Journey Planet, and Galaxy’s Edge.

Alan grew up in Yorkshire, England, and earned degrees in Physics and Astrophysics from Oxford University. Until recently, he performed astronomical research into galactic neutron star and black hole binary systems at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and served as the Director of one of NASA’s big-three astrophysical data archives.

Episode 205: Betty Jane Hegerat – Elephants in the Room

A conversation with award-winning Calgary author Betty Jane Hegerat about her latest collection of literary short stories, Elephants in the Room.

Website
bettyjanehegerat.com

Facebook
@bettyjh

About Elephants in the Room

Fourteen jewel-like stories unveil the tender chaos of lives unlived and loves unspoken

In Elephants in the Room, Betty Jane Hegerat masterfully uncovers the quiet fractures of ordinary lives—the unspoken regrets, the buried griefs, and the fragile threads of connection that bind families across generations.

From a devoted son’s frantic dash to help his mother glimpse the Queen to a reluctant father’s stunned reunion with the daughter he never knew, from a woman dressing her mother-in-law for an eternal rest to a boy’s guilty reckoning with a bully’s untimely death, these unforgettable stories illuminate the elephants in our lives we ignore at our peril.

With tender wit and unflinching insight, Hegerat explores the weight of what we leave unsaid: the ache of lost chances, the solace of small mercies, and the stubborn grit that carries us through. As poignant as a stolen glance, as resonant as a half-forgotten lullaby, the stories in Elephants in the Room whisper the unvarnished secrets of family ties—where regrets loom large, and small acts of grace light the way home.

Praise for Elephants in the Room

“Betty Jane Hegerat is a meticulous observer of the human condition, and the family in particular. The stories in Elephants in the Room are written with succinct, unadorned prose and a gentleness that belies the strength of their messages. With warmth, humour, empathy, and intimacy, her characters search for the connection and remembrance we seek in those moments of heartbreak that punctuate all of our lives. A most moving collection of short fiction.” – Lori Hahnel, author of Flicker and Vermin: Stories

Elephants in the Room is a gorgeously beguiling collection. Individual stories are beautifully paced, with a skilful interplay between past and present. Delightful.” – Peter Midgely, writer, editor, and translator

“Betty Jane Hegerat tells her stories with intense care and in a soft-voiced, clear way that is lean on descriptions, explanations, and emotional fireworks. Even the passages of dialogue are kept short. The stories range from family members struggling to deal with everyday problems familiar to most of us that are nevertheless inescapable and painful, to the heart-shattering issues in the aftermath of broken marriages, to what to do with the willfully (or not) unfailingly incompetent family members of whom most families have at least one, to the deep love for friends whose suffering one is helpless to alleviate. In this collection, Hegerat examines with admirable restraint the serious and mostly unanswerable questions about living the ordinary life with dignity and kindness. This is a book to be loved.” – Sharon Butala, award-winning author of Leaving Wisdom

About Betty Jane Hegerat

Betty Jane Hegerat

Calgary author Betty Jane Hegerat was a social worker in a long-ago life. The stories she has written since she left that career behind reflect an ongoing need to make sense of conflict and chaos in relationships, and to find moments of laughter and even glimmers of redemption.

That seriousness aside, she loves the Calgary writing community. She has taught at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre, the Fernie Writers’ Conference and for Continuing Education at the University of Calgary, and was Writer in Residence for the Calgary Public Library. In 2015 she was honoured to receive the Writers Guild of Alberta Golden Pen Award for lifetime achievement in writing

Betty Jane’s stories have been published in anthologies and magazines. She has five previous books: a novel, Running Toward Home (Newest Press), a collection of stories, A Crack in the Wall (Oolichan Books), another novel, Delivery (Oolichan Books), and two YA novels, Odd One Out (Oolichan Books) and The Boy (Oolichan Books). The Boy is a French braid of investigative journalism, fiction, memoir, and meta-fiction. The book was shortlisted for the Calgary Book Prize, the High Plains Book Awards, and the Alberta Writers Guild Wilfrid Eggleston Non-Fiction Award.

Episode 186: Brad C. Anderson – Ashme’s Song

A chat with award-nominated author Brad C. Anderson about his new science fiction novel, Ashme’s Song.

Website
bradanderson2000.com

Facebook
@bradanderson2000

Shadowpaw Press link
The Sun Runners

Amazon links
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

About Ashme’s Song

Violence has an echo, growing louder with each reverberation . . . how do you stop its echo once it starts ringing?

Ashme is a New Mesopotamian—a “Meso.” She dreams of being a hero, fighting against the brutal Ostarrichi ruling her country. She is an indigo child, her DNA modified by sentient AI, enabling her to control computer systems at will. With this power, she has something to offer the Meso resistance. Her twin brother, Shen, however, suffers from a neurological disorder and needs someone to care for him. Increasingly, that task falls on her.

How can she become the hero her people need when her brother’s needs are overwhelming? If she continues caring for Shen while joining the resistance, she risks leading Ostarrichi forces to her home. If she leaves, then looking after Shen will fall to her cousin, who is already overworked caring for his frail grandmother.

As her society collapses into violence, Ashme must choose between her fellow Mesos, her family, and her values.

About Brad C. Anderson

Brad C. Anderson

Brad C. Anderson, author of Duatero and Ashme’s Song, lives with his wife and puppy in Vancouver, Canada. He teaches undergraduate business courses at a local university and researches organizational wisdom in blithe defiance of the fact most people do not think you can put those two words in the same sentence without irony. Previously, he worked in the biotech sector, where he made drugs for a living (legally!).

His stories have appeared in a variety of publications. His short story “Naïve Gods” was longlisted for a 2017 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. It was published in the anthology Lazarus Risen, which was itself nominated for an Aurora Award..

Episode 185: James Bow – The Sun Runners and Tales from the Silence

A chat with Aurora Award-winning YA author James Bow about his new science fiction novel, The Sun Runners, and its companion anthology, Tales from the Silence.

Website
bowjamesbow.ca

Facebook
@james.bow

Shadowpaw Press links
The Sun Runners
Tales from the Silence

About The Sun Runners

“Hello, people of Mercury. This is planet Earth. Are you receiving this? Please respond.”

Lieutenant Adelheid Koning was only twenty-three when the Earth’s long fight against its environment ended in collapse and nuclear war. Earth’s sudden silence leaves the colonies of the inner solar system without lifelines, in various stages of self-sufficiency.

Or, in Mercury’s case, not.

To help her fellow stranded colonists of Mercury survive starvation and a breakdown of order, Adelheid fights some cold equations and makes some hard choices, ending up wearing an iron crown as queen of one of the rail cities of Mercury, constantly moving to stay ahead of the Sun.

Fifty years later, Adelheid’s granddaughter, Frieda, is a seventeen-year-old princess who would rather be an engineer. Frieda’s life is shattered when a suspicious accident takes one of her arms—and is then turned upside-down when her mother dies from that accident. Frieda is left a young and vulnerable queen, locking horns with her grandmother, who is now regent and dowager.

When the Earth makes contact again, after fifty years of silence, Frieda is eager to end Mercury’s isolation, but Adelheid is suspicious of the Earth’s sudden return, and wary of the other latitude towns’ desires to accept all that the Earth is offering, without question.

With thousands of lives on the line, is it wise to hope for healing? Or are we forever defined by what we do in the dark?

About Tales from the Silence

On August 4, 2151, the world will end.

It’s been a long time coming: climate disasters brewing conflict, conflict breeding chaos. But on that fateful day, someone will set off the nukes. On August 4, 2151, human civilization on Earth will fall silent.

There are survivors, of course—and not just on Earth. There are scientists on the Jovian moons. Miners in the asteroid belt. Thriving colonies on the surface of Mars and above the clouds of Venus. Far more precarious ones on Mercury. When the silence falls across human space, one thing is clear: Earth’s space-born children are on their own. No more supplies are coming. No more orders. No more meddling. No more help.

Set in the universe of James Bow’s new novel, The Sun RunnersTales from the Silence is a gathering of award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and YA authors who explore the worlds the Earth left behind, as well as the Earth itself, as they struggle through Earth’s new dark age.

Join James Bow, Phoebe Barton, Kate Blair, Cameron Dixon, Mark Richard Francis, Jo Karaplis, Kari Maaren, Fiona Moore, Ira Nayman, Kate Orman, and Jeff Szpirglas as they tell the stories of what happens after the end of the world.

About James Bow

James Bow

James Bow writes science fiction and fantasy for both kids and adults. He’s been a fan of science fiction since his family introduced him to Doctor Who on TV Ontario in 1978, and his mother read him classic sci-fi and fantasy from such authors as Clifford Simak and J.R.R. Tolkien. James won the 2017 Prix Aurora Award for best YA Novel in Canada for Icarus Down.

By day, James is a communications officer for a charitable land trust protecting lands from development in Waterloo Region and Wellington County. He also loves trains and streetcars. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with his two kids, and his spouse/fellow writer/partner-in-crime, Erin Bow.

Episode 184: Arthur Slade – I, Brax: 1. A Battle Divine (A Dragon Assassin Adventure)

A chat with award-winning author Arthur Slade about his latest middle-grade/YA fantasy adventure, I, Brax: 1. A Battle Divine (A Dragon Assassin Adventure)

Website
arthurslade.com

Facebook
@arthursladefan

Twitter
@arthurslade

Instagram
@arthurslade

YouTube

Shadowpaw Press link for I, Brax: A Battle Divine
The Glass Lodge: 20th Anniversary Edition

About I, Brax: A Battle Divine

Brax, hero of several Dragon Assassin tales, finally gets to tell his own story . . .

On a diplomatic mission from Drachia, the country of dragons, Brax and his rider, Carmen, encounter a ghostly vision of the Nameless Goddess, who warns them she is coming to conquer their world.

When the duo arrives at the Akkad empire, they discover that the emperor has been killed by what looks to be a servant of that goddess, and his young nephew ascends to become the emperor. Both Brax and Carmen swear to protect the young man from the Nameless Goddess, which involves fighting creatures in the real and netherworld.

But once they discover the true name of the Nameless Goddess, the hunt is on. Will they be able to destroy her name before she rises to take over their world?

Praise for I, Brax: A Battle Divine

“There is so much fun in this book, even with the big battles, fires, destruction, and evil creatures being unleashed throughout the story. . . . It is a great story from the masterful and ever-entertaining pen of Arthur Slade. A great read in the Dragon Assassin universe!” – Steven R. McEvoy, Book Reviews and More

About Arthur Slade

Arthur Slade

Arthur Slade was raised on a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. He is the author of twenty five novels for young readers including The Hunchback Assignments, which won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and Dust, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. His lifetime of work has also received the prestigious Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence.  All of these awards mean that when he drinks tea he has to raise his pinky. It’s very fancy. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada. 

P.S. He does all of his writing on a treadmill desk. And he listens to heavy metal. At the same time.

Episode 183: John Brady McDonald – The Glass Lodge: 20th Anniversary Edition

A chat with noted Indigenous poet and artist John Brady McDonald about the new twentieth-anniversary hardcover edition of his acclaimed debut poetry collection, The Glass Lodge.

Website
artbyjohnmcdonald.weebly.com

Facebook

Shadowpaw Press link for The Glass Lodge
The Glass Lodge: 20th Anniversary Edition

About The Glass Lodge

John Brady McDonald, MBSFA, a Nêhiyawak-Métis multidisciplinary artist and writer from Treaty Six Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada, is an award-winning author of multiple books who has presented at literary festivals around the world.

Before all this, however, he was a young, urban Indigenous youth, struggling with addictions, the streets, and the pain and turmoil of intergenerational trauma as a residential school survivor and the child of residential school survivors.

While his struggle was not uncommon, what made it unique was that he documented it through free-verse poetry, filling countless notebooks and paper boxes with hundreds of poems over a ten-year period, providing a glimpse into the life of young man who had to overcome so much and grow up way too fast.

These raw, lyrical poems are a glimpse of the birth of a poet, recklessly using language and words with abandon and without restraint. It is the poetry of an individual experimenting with the language, mixing the influences of Shakespeare and Jim Morrison with the teenage-Goth writing style of youth—the base metals from which a lifetime of words was forged.

Originally published by Kegedonce Press in 2004, The Glass Lodge was presented across Canada and the United States at esteemed festivals. Chosen for the First Nations Communities Read program, it was also nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal Book of the Year in 2005.

Now, here is that seminal work in a brand-new edition, re-edited and restored, illustrated with images of many of the original, handwritten poems, and with author’s notes providing frank, fascinating insight into what gave rise to each of these verses: the outpouring of language that marked the birth of a remarkable writer.

Praise for The Glass Lodge

The Glass Lodge transcends all the cliches of the angst-ridden Urban Indian. McDonald’s verse is a brilliant fusion of the brutality and hope that is inherent in the Aboriginal experience. I have never read poetry that so closely resembles my own experience as a First Nations man.”Darrell Dennis, Writer, Tales of an Urban Indian, Moccasin Flats

About John Brady McDonald

John Brady McDonald

John Brady McDonald is a Nehiyawak-Metis writer, artist, historian, musician, playwright, actor and activist born and raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak. The great-great-great grandson of Chief Mistawasis of the Plains Cree, as well as the grandson of famed Metis leader Jim Brady, John’s writings and artwork have been displayed in various publications, private and permanent collections and galleries around the world, including the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

John is one of the founding members of the P.A. Lowbrow art movement, and served as Vice President of the Indigenous Peoples Artists Collective for nearly a decade. John also served a term as vice-chair of the Board of Directors for Spark Theatre, and as a Senator with the Indigenous Council Committee of CUPE Saskatchewan.

The author of several books, John studied at England’s prestigious Cambridge University, where in July 2000 he made international headlines by symbolically “discovering” and “claiming” England for the First Peoples of the Americas. John is also an acclaimed public speaker, who has presented in venues across the globe, such as the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival, the Black Hills Seminars on Reclaiming Youth, The Appalachian Mountain Seminars, the Edmonton and Fort McMurray Literary Festival, the Eden Mills Writers Festival and at the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

His artwork and writing have been nominated for several awards, including the 2022 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Awards, the 2022 High Plains Book Awards, and the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards. John was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Saskatchewan).

Episode 182: Lynda Monahan – The Door at the End of Everything

A chat with poet Lynda Monahan about her new collection, The Door at the End of Everything, which features poems focused on those who struggle with mental health.

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@lynda.monahan.92

Lynda Monahan’s Amazon Page

Amazon Links for The Door at the End of Everything
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

About The Door at the End of Everything

Written while Lynda Monahan was hospital writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, working often on the adult and youth mental health wards, the tight, pared poems in The Door at the End of Everything give voice to and honour those living with mental illness, speaking to not only the suffering but also the courage and hope that is so clearly there as well.

Several of the poems and poetry sequences have seen publication in various literary journals, including Grain, The Society, The New Quarterly, Transition, Bareback, and Dalhousie Review, and in the poetry anthologies Writing Menopause (Inanna Publications), Lummox Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press), the Apart pandemic anthology (Saskatchewan Writers Guild), and Line Dance (Burton House Books), and in various tanka publications such as Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds, and Gusts.

Praise for The Door at the End of Everything

“a generous and mature poetry” — gillian harding-russell 

“This is a terrific poetry collection . . . with a light, lyrical touch . . . the poems explore mental illness, not in a clinical way, but from the inside, as well as aging, grief, loneliness, and loss. The poems are infused with lovely imagery and a sense of hope.” — Dave Margoshes

About Lynda Monahan

Lynda Monahan

Lynda Monahan is also the author of four other collections of poetry, A Slow Dance in the Flames (Coteau Books, 1998), What My Body Knows (Coteau Books, 2003), Verge (Guernica Editions, 2015), and a cowritten collection, A Beautiful Stone: poems and ululations (Radiant Press 2019). She facilitates a number of creative writing workshops and has been writer-in-residence at a St. Peter’s College facilitated retreat, Balfour Collegiate in Regina, and the Prince Albert Public Library, and writer-on-the-wards at Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert.

She is editor of several books, including Second Chances: stories of brain injury survivorsSkating in the Exit Light, a poetry anthology, and With Just One Reach of Hands, an anthology of the writing of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, which she also facilitates.

She has served on the council for the League of Canadian Poets, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. She recently completed a year as lead artist for an Artists in Communities project through the Sask Arts Board, mentoring local artists to develop long-term community arts programming.

Episode 181: Dr. Robert Runté – Dave Duncan’s The Traitor’s Son and Corridor to Nightmare

A chat with editor Robert Runté, Ph.D., about the last two novels by the late, great Dave Duncan’s, The Traitor’s Son and Corridor to Nightmare, which he edited and which were just released by Shadowpaw Press.

Website
essentialedits.ca

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@runte

Facebook
@dr.robert.runte

Instagram
@drrunte

Dave Duncan’s Amazon Page

Amazon Links for The Traitor’s Son
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

Amazon links for Corridor to Nightmare
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

About The Traitor’s Son

“They know the world is dying, but they hope not in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, they’re top dogs and will do anything to stay that way.”

Doig Gray is fifteen when his father is killed in a mining accident, which Doig comes to realizes was no accident. Torn from his mother and sister, Doig is sent off to college, his every movement monitored in case he has inherited his dissident father’s unacceptable attitudes . . . or passwords. Doig has nothing but his own sense that there’s something desperately wrong with the world—and a last name that evokes the assumption that he’s destined to be the next traitor-hero.

The Traitor’s Son is a science fiction novel about a colony world where everything that could go wrong already has. Stuck on the wrong world at the wrong site, with the wrong leaders, the colony is doomed to extinction unless immediate steps are taken to correct—everything. But 500 years of hiding from the reality of their situation has created an unchallengeable status quo—and the Accident Squad, determined to ensure it remains that way.

The Traitor’s Son is a fast-paced SF adventure in the best tradition of Duncan’s HeroWest of January, and Eocene Station.

About Corridor to Nightmare

The never-before-published final novel by the late Dave Duncan, one of Canada’s most beloved authors of fantasy and science fiction

When one life ends, another begins.

After forty years as the village school teacher in the idyllic valley of Greenbottom, Agatha is looking forward to a quiet retirement. Instead, an enigmatic stranger arrives to drag her through a long-closed portal to another world.

Confronted with a completely foreign culture steeped in magic and violence, Agatha finds herself a crucial pawn being played between rival factions. The only way forward through the rigid traditions and convoluted politics of the Archons of Otopia is to remain true to herself and her Greenbottom ideals.

But will it be enough to save, not only herself, but the man to whom she is now magically bound in love?

Praise for Dave Duncan

“Dave Duncan writes rollicking adventure novels filled with subtle characterization and made bitter-sweet by an underlying darkness. Without striving for grand effects or momentous meetings between genres, he has produced one excellent book after another.” – Locus Magazine

“Duncan is an exceedingly finished stylist and a master of world building and characterization.” – Booklist

“Dave Duncan has long been one of the great unsung figures of Canadian fantasy and science fiction, graced with a fertile imagination, a prolific output, and keen writerly skills.” – Quill & Quire

“When you’re looking for a good adventure, Dave Duncan is a sure thing . . . [with] his sly and fast-paced plotting, his ability to construct intriguingly different worlds, and his knack for quick and entertaining characterization and dialogue.” – Eclectic Ruckus

About Dr. Robert Runté

Dr. Robert Runté

Robert Runté, Ph.D., is Senior Academic Editor with EssentialEdits.ca and freelances at SFeditor.ca. He was, for nearly a decade, senior editor at Five Rivers Publishing, where he acquired and edited more than thirty books, primarily speculative fiction.

A retired professor, he has won three Aurora Awards (Canadian SF&F) for his literary criticism, wrote the Canadian speculative fiction entry for the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, published the NCF Guide to Canadian SF, and has given more than a hundred presentations and workshops at writers’ conferences. He currently reviews for the Ottawa Review of Books .

As a writer, he has published more than sixty  short stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies, six of which were reprinted in “best of” collections, and one of which was short-listed for an Aurora Award.

About Dave Duncan

Born and raised in Scotland, Dave Duncan moved to Calgary, Alberta, after graduating from university to take up his thirty-year career as a geologist. As the oil boom faltered in the 1980s, he sold his first novel and switched careers to become one of the most prolific and popular Canadian authors of science fiction and fantasy, with more than sixty-five traditionally published novels. Early in his career, he was producing books so fast his publisher could not keep up, so he wrote a fantasy trilogy under the name Ken Hood for a different house and a historical novel about the fall of Troy as Sarah B. Franklin.

Duncan won the Aurora Award for Best Novel in 1990 and again in 2007, and was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in 2015. Duncan had just finished Corridor to Nightmare and was awaiting final edits on The Traitor’s Son when he died, on October 29, 2018. 

Robert Runtés memorial speech outlining Dave Duncan’s contribution to Canadian SF can be watched here.

Episode 180: Erna Buffie – Let Us Be True

A chat with author Erna Buffie about the new edition of her critically acclaimed debut novel Let Us Be True, just released by Shadowpaw Press.

Website
ernabuffie.com

Facebook

Amazon Links for Let Us Be True
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

About the Book

Finalist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, 2016 Manitoba Book Awards

From the killing fields of Europe to the merciless beauty of the Canadian prairies, Let Us Be True tells the story of three women whose lives have been shaped and damaged by secrets—their own and those that stretch back through time, casting their shadow from one generation to the next.

Pearl Calder, a woman in her seventies, has thrown away her past and kept it a secret from her daughters. But as Pearl confronts her own mortality, she begins to understand what her dead husband, Henry, always knew: Secrets are like dark and angry ghosts. And they don’t just haunt you. They haunt everyone you love.

With a life that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the deep conservatism of the postwar boom, Pearl’s secrets are rooted in events over which she had no control: the death of her mother; a father destroyed by war; a brother who adores her but who dies on the beaches of Dieppe, and a sister who abandons Pearl to save herself.

Alternating between the past and present, and between Pearl’s voice and those of her family members, both living and dead, Let Us Be True explores how all of our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, are shaped by secrets: our own as well as ancestral secrets we may know nothing about, but which affect who we are and who we become

Praise for Let Us Be True

Let Us Be True is an engaging story with a cast of complex characters about how the secrets we keep can have repercussions for years to come . . . A wonderful book that deserves more readers.”  – Consumed by Ink

“. . .  Let Us Be True remains vital, present and taut throughout. A story as starkly beautiful as a prairie landscape.”The Globe and Mail

“. . . deliciously vivid prose . . .” CBC Books

“Buffie has crafted a stunning addition to the Canadian literary canon . . .”The Calgary Journal

About Erna Buffie

Erna Buffie

Short stories by Erna Buffie have appeared in Room, Prairie Fire, Pottersfield Portfolio, and The Vagrant Review of New FictionLet Us Be True, her first novel, originally published by Coteau Books in 2015, was nominated for the Margaret Laurence Fiction Prize. 

Erna is also an awarding-winning documentary filmmaker who has worked for  CBC’s The Nature of Things and a variety of other national and international broadcasters. Her film Smarty Plants won “Best Direction” at the Canadian Screen Awards and aired on PBS’s Natureunder the title What Plants Talk About