This week on my podcast, I read the second and final part of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14.

Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986

It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. -Bing Crosby, 1927.

I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and also because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration.

Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future.

I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the back of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain.

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This week on my podcast, I read part one of my short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” a story set in the world of my forthcoming pre-apocalyptic Green New Deal novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14.

Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. -Fred Rogers, 1986

It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. -Bing Crosby, 1927.

I arrived in Oxford with the first wave of Blue Helmets, choppered in along with our gear, touching down on a hospital roof, both so that our doctors and nurses could get straight to work, and also because it was one of the few buildings left with a helipad and backup generators and its own water filtration.

Humping my bag down the stairs to the waterlogged ground levels was a nightmare, even by Calgary standards. People lay on the stairs, sick and injured, and navigating them without stepping on them was like an endless nightmare of near-falls and weak moans from people too weak to curse me. I met a nurse halfway down and she took my bag from me and set it down on the landing and gave me a warm hug. “Welcome,” she said, and looked deep into my eyes. We were both young and both women but she was Black and American and I was white and Canadian. I came from a country where, for the first time in a hundred years, there was a generation that wasn’t terrified of the future. She came from a country where everybody knew they had no future.

I hugged her back and she told me my lips were cracked and ordered me to drink water and watched me do it. “This lady’s with the Canadians. They came to help,” she said to her patients on the stairs. Some of them smiled and murmured at me. Others just stared at the back of their eyelids, reliving their traumas or tracing the contours of their pain.

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This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column, “Microincentives and Enshittification” (open access link), about how Google went from being a company whose products were eerily good and whose corporate might was more often on the side of right than wrong, to being a company whose products are locked in a terminal enshittification spiral and whose lobbying might is firmly on the wrong side of history.

Small wonder there are so few search alternatives — and small wonder that the most promising ones are suffocated for lack of market oxygen.

This week on my podcast, I present the prologue and first chapter of The Lost Cause, my forthcoming solarpunk novel of Green New Deal world threatened by seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and their white nationalist militia shock-troops. The book comes out on November 14 from Tor/Macmillan (US/Canada) and Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury (UK/Australia/NZ/SA, etc). As with all my books, I’ve had to produce my own audio edition, because Amazon refuses to carry my work in audio form. You can pre-order the DRM-free audio and ebook and the hardcover through my Kickstarter.

If you like my work and have ever wanted to say thank you, this is the best way to do so. These kickstarters don’t just pay my bills, they also provide the financial cushion that lets me produce all the free work I’ve done for decades, including this podcast. What’s more, they help me show other authors and the publishing world that when writers have their readers’ backs, readers will return the favor.

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