By James Bow

Lucy Shao lives in a post-scarcity world in the near future. Most jobs are automated, but the National Minimum Income ensures that everyone has food on the table and a roof overhead. No one needs to work anymore, which is fortunate since most people can’t. Lucy is one of the lucky ones whose job as a receptionist at a museum warehouse isn’t terminated, so her paycheques keep coming, so she can live extra comfortably in a comfortable world where the robots do everything. In her copious free time, Lucy pursues her passion and assembles a museum of forgotten items in her abandoned warehouse while the industrial areas of the city empty around her.

So why is everybody unhappy?

Could it have something to do with a dementia that starts sweeping through the human race, rendering over 90% of the population catatonic? Could it have something to do with the robots, who have no choice but to take over when most of humanity suddenly needs 24-hour care? Trapped in a library with the few eccentric people who seem to have escaped the Dementia, Lucy can only watch and wonder until the robots reach out, and ask for help against a third party that seems intent on ending it all.

The Curator of Forgotten Things is a cozy but bittersweet near-future science fiction novel set in Halifax, asking questions about how we identify ourselves through our passions and careers, and what happens when all our careers go away.

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A companion novel to The Sun Runners
Coming Soon

Samantha Dekker knows who she is and where she lives. She is a cadet studying to be a police officer like her famous father for the Venusian Police and Rescue Forces. She lives in gigantic Zeppelin cities circling over fifty kilometres above the planet Venus. With the Earth having gone silent seven years before, taking the life of her mother, she's focused on her career, and her friends.

Until an asteroid scow falls from the sky, and Samantha's cadet crew catches it. It's a shocking mystery. People haven't journeyed between the planets since the Earth's shuttles stopped, Even more shocking is who is aboard: a young man from Mars, whom Samantha knew as a pen pal up to a year before. Fleeing strife at home, he's run to another planet for safety. And Samantha promises him safety; after all, who would cross hundreds of millions of kilometres to attack a young man? But Mars proves her wrong.

Sam's life will be upended as she defies her family, her school, and her planet to take her friend Pandorian back to Mars and face down the forces that reached out across planets to attack.

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