Review of Dave Duncan's The Traitor's Son by Toby Welch

Happy for this positive review, even if Toby Welch is not a regular SF reader. https://reviews.skbooks.com/traitors-son-the/

Book Launch of Dave Duncan's The Traitor's Son

May 7, 2024 was the official launch of the late great Dave Duncan's novel, The Traitor's Son, which I edited and shepherded through to publication on his behalf.

The Traitor’s Son is one of Dave’s few science fiction novels, and his most political. It’s about a narcissistic leadership that knows the (distant colony) world is dying but hopes not in their lifetimes and continues to ignore the problem for their personal enrichment. It’s a pretty obvious allegory, but wrapped in a daring-do adventure novel.

It’s also about people’s assumptions about inherited identities and how that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The launch was held in Calgary in the 300+ seat Patricia A. Whelan Performance Hall in the main branch of the public library.

The launch was from publisher Edward Willtett's Shadowpaw Press, and organized by Robert J. Sawyer, whose trade paperback edition of The Downloaded is similarly from Shadowpaw. Sawyer was kind enough to share his launch with Duncan's. Turn out was good (especially given the terrible weather that day).

I reviewed The Downloaded for The Ottawa Review of Books. Given I was the editor on The Traitor's Son I can't really review it for ORB but can say here I thought it up to Duncan's usual high standards.

Duncan's next book, Corridor to Nightmare will launch Saturday, August 17, at Calgary's When Words Collide convention.

Posthumous Two-Book Deal for Dave Duncan with Shadowpaw Press

The Late Dave Duncan Canadian Author

Edward Willett Shadowpaw Press

Robert Runté Editor

From Shadowpaw Press (Edwart Wilett):

I'm thrilled to announce that Shadowpaw Press has obtained the rights to publish two previously unpublished novels by the late, great Canadian author Dave Duncan, one of the first authors I met in the field, long before I was a published novelist--he gave a reading at the Saskatchewan Science Centre while I was communications officer there. Edited by Robert Runte, THE TRAITOR'S SON and CORRIDOR TO NIGHTMARE will be released late this year or early in 2024.

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.

CORRIDOR TO NIGHTMARE

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.

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The agent for the deal was Wayne Arthurson of The Rights Factory.

Aurora Nomination

My memorial essay, "Dave Duncan's Legacy" in On Spec magazine #111 has been shortlisted for an Aurora Award, in the "Best Related" category. It is an honour to be nominated, but it is up against five magazines, an anthology, and a podcast, all of which are extremely worthy and all of which represent much more sustained effort than my one essay. So, happy to take being shortlisted as validation of the essay, but the others need their much more substantial contributions to be validated by the win. Good luck to them all, I know I will have difficulty choosing which of them to vote for.

Dave Duncan Website

The late Dave Duncan's website has been hacked...his family has moved the content to a new address: https://www.essentialedits.ca/Duncan/updates.htm

I am editing Dave Duncan's unfinished manuscripts for publication. (He's not done yet!) The first of these releases will be The Traitor's Son from Five Rivers in August 2021.