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 164: Kristen Ciccarelli – Heartless Hunter

A chat with New York Times bestselling YA author Kristen Cicarelli about Heartless Hunter, The Crimson Moth Book 1, a “dangerously romantic Scarlet Pimpernel-inspired fantasy.”

Website
kristenciccarelli.com

Facebook
@AuthorKristenCiccarelli

Instagram
@kristenciccarelli

Pinterest
@kciccarelli

Kristen Ciccarelli’s Amazon Page

Amazon Links for Heartless Hunter
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca

About the Book

Enemies-to-lovers doesn’t get more high stakes than a witch and a witch hunter falling in love in bestselling author Kristen Ciccarelli’s latest romantic fantasy.

On the night Rune’s life changed forever, blood ran in the streets. Now, in the aftermath of a devastating revolution, witches have been diminished from powerful rulers to outcasts ruthlessly hunted due to their waning magic, and Rune must hide what she is.

Spending her days pretending to be nothing more than a vapid young socialite, Rune spends her nights as the Crimson Moth, a witch vigilante who rescues her kind from being purged. When a rescue goes wrong, she decides to throw the witch hunters off her scent and gain the intel she desperately needs by courting the handsome Gideon Sharpe – a notorious and unforgiving witch hunter loyal to the revolution – who she can’t help but find herself falling for.

Gideon loathes the decadence and superficiality Rune represents, but when he learns the Crimson Moth has been using Rune’s merchant ships to smuggle renegade witches out of the republic, he inserts himself into her social circles by pretending to court her right back. He soon realizes that beneath her beauty and shallow façade, is someone fiercely intelligent and tender who feels like his perfect match. Except, what if she’s the very villain he’s been hunting?

Kristen Ciccarelli’s Heartless Hunter is the thrilling start to The Crimson Moth duology, a romantic fantasy series where the only thing more treacherous than being a witch…is falling in love.

About Kristen Ciccarelli

Kristen Ciccarelli

Kristen Ciccarelli is a New York Times-bestselling author whose books have been translated into over a dozen languages. She is the author of Heartless Hunter (Book 1 in The Crimson Moth duology), Edgewood, and the internationally bestselling Iskari series.

Before writing books for a living, she dropped out of college and worked as a baker, a potter, a bookseller, and an NGO worker. She currently resides in the NIagara region of Ontario with her husband and toddler.

Episode 161: Jared N. Michaud – Brightstar

A chat with new author Jared N. Michaud about his upcoming YA science fiction novel Brightstar, first book in the Energematric6 space adventure series.

Website
energematrice6.com

Facebook
@Energematrice6

X
@Energematrice6

Instagram
@jarednmichaud

Jared N. Michaud’s Amazon Page

Amazon Links for Brightstar
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca

About the Book

Brightstar is the beginning of an epic space-adventure series that introduces readers to Nate, a boy desperate to escape the prison of an ordinary life made unbearable by his autism. When he is unexpectedly transported to another universe, Nate’s perceived disability is transformed into a near superpower. In the Aurora Galaxy, where his arrival has been prophesied for thousands of years, Nate finds the weight of expectations difficult to bear.

After being greeted by an ancient ally, Nate begins gathering a misfit group of “odds” from every corner of the universe. Nate’s odyssey, which starts in the most prestigious school in civilization, will end with battling monsters from the darkest imaginations of an ancient, captive Earth.

Coping with greater and greater adversity, Nate finds himself confronted by enemies who all seem to be connected in suspicious ways. In the end, Nate must stand before the Lightmaker Himself, who sent Nate to the Aurora Galaxy in the first place.

About Jared N. Michaud

Jared N. Michaud is a devoted fiction writer driven by a passion for writing that began before he reached age seven. Influenced by literary giants like C.S. Lewis and Orson Scott Card, he discovered the transformative power of storytelling, and at twelve he began crafting his first novel.

Today, Jared writes from a little house in a little town in Wyoming, where he lives with his wife and six children. As a Christian with a deep love for the truth and appreciation for the values that underlie Western civilization, he endeavours to create myths that will inspire future generations.

Episode 153: Mark Morton – The Headmasters

A chat with author Mark Morton about his new young adult dystopian science fiction novel, The Headmasters, published by Shadowpaw Press.

Website
markmorton.ca

X/Twitter
@NotromKram

Facebook
@Mark.Morton.Author

Amazon Links
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com

Publisher’s Book Page

About the Book

How do you learn from the past if there isn’t one? 

Sixty years ago, something awful happened. Something that killed everyone except the people at Blue Ring. Something that caused the Headmasters to appear. But Maple doesn’t know what it was. Because talking about the past is forbidden.

Everyone at Blue Ring has a Headmaster. They sink their sinewy coils into your skull and control you, using your body for backbreaking toil and your mind to communicate with each other.

When someone dies, their Headmaster transfers to someone new. But so do the dead person’s memories, and if one of those memories surfaces in the new host’s mind, their brain breaks. That’s why talking about the past is forbidden.

Maple hates this world where the past can’t exist and the future promises only more suffering. And she hates the Headmasters for making it that way. But she doesn’t know how to fight them – until memories start to surface in her mind from someone who long ago came close to defeating the Headmasters.

But whose memories are they? Why aren’t they harming her? And how can she use them to defeat the Headmasters? Maple has to find the answers herself, unable to tell anyone what she’s experiencing or planning—not even Thorn, the young man she’s falling in love with.

Thorn, who has some forbidden secrets of his own . . .

Praise for The Headmasters

“Mark Morton’s The Headmasters is a brilliant science-fiction debut from one of Canada’s best-loved nonfiction writers. This compelling YA novel is a spot-on updating of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic The Puppet Masters for the new millennium, with intricate world-building, a great science-fiction puzzle, and — ironic for a novel about suppressed memories — a main character you’ll never forget. I loved it.” — Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of The Downloaded

About Mark Morton

Mark Morton is the author of four non-fiction titles: Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (nominated for a Julia Child Award); The End: Closing Words for a Millennium (winner of the Alexander Isbister Award for nonfiction); The Lover’s Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex (republished in the UK as Dirty Words), and Cooking with Shakespeare. He’s also written more than fiftycolumns for Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (University of California Press) and has written and broadcast more than a hundred columns about language and culture for CBC Radio.

Mark has a PhD in sixteenth-century literature from the University of Toronto and has taught at several universities in France and Canada. He currently works at the University of Waterloo. He and his wife, Melanie Cameron, (also an author) have four children, three dogs, one rabbit, and no time.

The Headmasters is his debut novel.

Episode 146: L. Jagi Lamplighter

An hour-long chat with L. Jagi Lamplighter, author of the YA fantasy series The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment and the Prospero’s Children series.

Website
ljagilamplighter.com

SuperversiveSF Blog

Fantastic Schools and Where to Find Them

X/Twitter
@lampwright4

L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

L. Jagi Lamplighter is the author of the young-adult fantasy series The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment, the third book of which was nominated for the YA Dragon Award in 2017, the fourth book of which won the first YA Ribbit Award, and the fifth book of which also won two small literary awards. She is also the author of the Prospero’s Children series: Prospero LostProspero In Hell, and Prospero Regained, and has published numerous articles and short stories as well as an anthology of her own works, In the Lamplight. She also edits for Superversive Press and teaches The Art and Craft of Writing.

When not writing, she switches to her secret identity as wife and stay-home mom in Centreville, VA, where she lives with her dashing husband, author John C. Wright, and their four children, Orville, Ping-Ping Eve, Roland Wilbur, and Justinian Oberon.

Episode 140: Edo van Belkom

An hour-long chat with award-winning Canadian horror writer Edo van Belkom, author of the Wolf Pack YA books, now a Paramount+ TV series.

Website
edovanbelkom.com

Twitter
@edovanbelkom

Instgram
@edovanbelkom

Facebook
@edo.vanbelkom

Edo van Belkom’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Edo van Belkom is an award-winning Canadian author who began his career as a reporter for newspapers in and around Toronto, mainly covering crime and sports. His first sale as an author of fiction was a short story called “Baseball Memories” in 1990, which earned him his first Aurora Award nomination and was published in both the Year’s Best Horror Stories edited by Karl Edward Wagner and The Grand Slam Book of Canadian Baseball Writing

He went on to win the Aurora Award for his novel Wolf Pack in 2005. The novel was subsequently awarded the Silver Birch Award from the Ontario Library Association after participating students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 voted it their favourite novel in 2006. The novel and its sequels has now been turned into a TV series from Paramount+, the first season of which released in January of this year.

The author of numerous novels and some 200 short science fiction, horror, and mystery short stories (and, mostly under the pen name Evan Hollander, erotica), Edo has also won the Bram Stoker Short Fiction Award.

He lives in Brampton, Ontario.


Episode 132: D.J. Williams

An hour-long chat with D.J. Williams, author of Hunt for Eden’s Star, Book 1 of the new Beacon Hill series: “Harry Potter meets Young Indiana Jones.”

Websites
djwilliamsbooks.com
thebeaconhillseries.com

Twitter
@djwilliamsbooks

Instagram
@djwilliamsbooks

Facebook
@djwilliams316

D.J. Williams’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

With the DNA of a world traveller, D.J. Williams was born and raised in Hong Kong, igniting an adventurous spirit as he ventured into the jungles of the Amazon, the bush of Africa, and the slums of the Far East. His global travels submerged him in a myriad of cultures, providing a unique perspective that fuels his creativity.

As a fresh voice in mystery, suspense, and YA fantasy, his novels have garnered stellar reviews from Kirkus Reviews and climbed the charts on Amazon Hot New Releases, ranking as high as #1. Leading up to the launch of his latest YA series, Beacon Hill, and an eighteen-city book tour, the trailers and web series teasing the first book, Hunt For Eden’s Star, have reached more than one million views. Hunt For Eden’s Star is also currently under consideration for film & television optioning by the producers, production companies, and studios who created the most successful YA franchises of all time.

Residing in Los Angeles, Williams continues to develop new projects for television, film, and print.

Episode 126: Robin Stevens Payes

An hour-long chat with Robin Stevens Payes, author of four novels in the Edge of Yesterday series, intended to entertain young adult readers and spark an interest in STEM/STEAM careers, especially for girls.

Website
edgeofyesterdaybook.com

Facebook
@RobinStevensPayesAuthor

Twitter
@robinstevenspayes

Instagram
@robinstevenspayes

Robin Stevens Payes’s Amazon Page

About the Author

Robin Stevens Payes is the author of four novels for middle-grade to YA readers. She offers workshops on storytelling and is in the process of launching a company that focuses on relationship solutions for mothers and their teen daughters. She was founding editor-in-chief of LearnNow, an online publication on the science of learning, and has written for The American Leader, Discovery Education, the National Girls Collaborative Project, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Her Edge of Yesterday series is intended to entertain young adult readers and spark an interest in STEM/STEAM careers, especially for girls. Robin lives around the DC beltway in Maryland.  

Episode 121: Joan He

An hour-long chat with Joan He, bestselling author of The Ones We’re Meant to Find, Descendant of the Crane, and Strike the Zither, the first in a duology, recently released by McMillan.

Website
joanhewrites.com

Instagram
@joanhewrites

Twitter
@joanhewrites

Joan He’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Joan He was born and raised in Philadelphia but still will, on occasion, lose her way. At a young age, she received classical instruction in oil painting before discovering that storytelling was her favourite form of expression. She studied Psychology and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and currently splits her time between Philly and Chicago.

She is the bestselling author of The Ones We’re Meant to Find, Descendant of the Crane, and Strike the Zither, the first in a duology, recently released by McMillan.

Episode 112: R. S. Mellette

An hour-long chat with R.S. Mellette, author of the Billy Bobble middle-grade science fiction novels and the new YA science fiction novel Kiya and the Morian Treasure, and writer of the first web-to-television intellectual property, “The Xena Scrolls,” for Universal Studio’s Xena: Warrior Princess.

Website
rsmellette.com

Facebook
@MelletteRS

Twitter
@RSMellette

R.S. Mellette’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

R.S. Mellette, originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, now lives in San Clemente, California, where he toils away at turning his imaginary friends into real ones. While working on Xena: Warrior Princess, he created and wrote “The Xena Scrolls” for Universal’s New Media department and was part of the team that won a Golden Reel Award for ADR editing. When an episode aired based on his “Xena Scrolls’” characters, it became the first intellectual property to move from the internet to television.

Mellette has worked and blogged for the film festival Dances With Films as well as the novelist collective, From The Write Angle, and he is on the board of the L.A. region of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators.