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..
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.
“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 Runners, Tales 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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 survivors, Skating 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.
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.
“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 Hero, West 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 .
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.
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 Fiction. Let 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.
A chat with Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer about his latest novel, The Downloaded, now available as an Audible original audiobook and coming in print from Shadowpaw Press on May 7, 2024.
The new novel by Canada’s top Science Fiction writer
In 2059 two very different groups have their minds uploaded into a quantum computer in Waterloo, Ontario.
One group consists of astronauts preparing for Earth’s first interstellar voyage. The other? Convicted murderers, serving their sentences in a virtual-reality prison.
But when disaster strikes, the astronauts and the prisoners must download back into physical reality and find a way to work together to save Earth from destruction.
The Downloaded debuted in a six-month exclusive window as an Audible Original narrated by Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser promoted by national TV and radio ad campaigns. This print edition is coming out immediately after Audible’s exclusivity ends and is being supported by a six-city cross-Canada author book tour.
“The Downloaded absolutely sizzles with fascinating ideas. You want space travel, a ruined Earth, virtual worlds, a cast of relatable characters, and a glimpse into the labyrinth of human destiny? Look no further: this book has all that and more.” —Robert Charles Wilson, Hugo Award-winning author of Spin
“The Downloaded is a wonderful demonstration of Sawyer’s deep understanding of — and compassion for — people, regardless who or what they are, or even what they have done. It’s a rare and potent humanity that elevates his work high above the rest.” —Julie E. Czerneda, Aurora Award-winning author of To Each This World
“In The Downloaded, Sawyer proves he’s not just a master at using science fiction to address social issues but also a master at portraying diverse characters.” —James Alan Gardner, Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning author of Commitment Hour
“The Downloaded is a wicked-smart thrill ride from start to finish. I loved it.” —Sylvain Neuvel, bestselling author of A History of What Comes Next
“One of the best SF novels I’ve read in years.” —Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Coyote
About Robert J. Sawyer
Photo by Carolyn Clink
Robert J. Sawyer–“the dean of Canadian science fiction,” according to the CBC, and a Globe and Mail and Maclean’sbestseller–is the only Canadian to have won all three of the world’s top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A member of both The Order of Canada and The Order of Ontario, Rob has won more Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“Auroras”) than anyone else in history. The ABC TV series FlashForward was based on his novel of the same name; The Downloaded is his twenty-fifth novel.
A popular TEDx and keynote speaker with over 700 radio and TV interviews under his belt, Rob physically lives in Mississauga, and in cyberspace, he’s at sfwriter.com.
