May and Isak used to live in a quiet suburban neighbourhood on Holly Street. Since the mysterious Event erased the world around them, they’ve lived alone, surviving off of canned food and memories. Isak sometimes skips forward in time, a strange new ability caused by the Event that he has a hard time controlling. May on the other hand sometimes hears a humming that she cannot explain.

Listen to an excerpt from The Patch Project by Brittni Brinn.

Ed is caught is a similar situation, the only occupant of a roadside convenience store. The Event not only left him stranded, it also gave him the ability of manipulating electronic devices using only his mind. Since that day, he hasn’t been able to speak a word. So when he finally reaches someone after calling half of the landlines in North America, he comes up with a way to communicate.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

The Patch Project is written by Brittni Brinn

Published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

Copyright by Brittni Brinn

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Chip Michael from The cast of Sage & Savant

Learn more about Brittni Brinn

Website: Brittni Brinn

Follower her on Facebook and Twitter

Brittni Brinn was born Brittni Ann Carey in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She studied English and Drama at Concordia University College of Alberta (now Concordia University of Edmonton) before moving to Windsor, Ontario for graduate studies. She received her M.A. of Creative Writing in 2015. She co-hosted Hardcover: A Literary Podcast for two years and has written three plays for Paper-Knife Theatre. Besides books, her interests include coffee, songwriting, and cyborgs.

Is time travel real? Doctor Petronella sage is determined to find out. So is Justin Bremer, the young scholar in the far future tasked with reviewing Dr. Sage’s timeline. Justin observes as the Doctor repeatedly electrocutes herself in order to fling her consciousness through time and space, claiming death is no barrier to science

Listen to an excerpt from TransMIGRATIONS by Eddie Louise.

Nearly 2000 years in the future, scientists have developed a virtual reality machine whereby historians can watch the past unfold. Justin, a young scholar is tasked by the Les Charges de L’Affaires to study Doctor Petronella Sage, a Victorian galvanist. Dr. Sage, in an effort to advance the science of limb reattachment is electrocuted in a laboratory accident and her consciousness is transferred into a dead body on the battlefield of Auerstedt. This discovery makes her question if she has discovered time travel and wins her unlimited funding from the Charges du ‘affairs. Justin and Petra, separated by two thousand years, become entangled by the machinations of this mysterious agency and by their shared obsession with time itself. Frankenstein meets Quantum Leap.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

TransMIGRATIONS is written by Eddie Louise

Published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

Copyright by Eddie Louise

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Eddie Louise, head writer of The Tales of Sage & Savant

Learn more about Eddie Louise

Website: Eddie Louise

Follower her on Facebook and Twitter

Eddie Louise has had a lot of experience writing. For example, as a child, she composed dozens of nonsense songs to keep herself company as she herded cattle across the lonely plains of Wyoming. By the time she was sixteen years old she had written nearly one hundred Memoranda of Understanding to various teachers and school administrations. She wooed her high-school sweetheart with overly dramatic poetry, and short stories full of pathos and ennui. Marriage and children precipitated a move to California where discovering the theater led her to write melodramatic plays full of artful alliterations. This in turn, led to composing the book for her first musical as she relaxed on the beaches of Monterey. A temporary career writing soul-sucking corporate literature sent her running far away to Edinburgh Scotland, where the atmosphere, the castle and the alcohol combined to inspire a jazz vocal fantasia based on plainchant, a string quartet about a dripping faucet, a short dramatic film about a magical camera, an opera based on the Fates, an autobiography that was not her own, and two novels that live happily in a trunk where they have settled down and started a family. Since that time, she and her lifelong love have landed in sunny Southern California where she makes a living...

Detective Carson “Mac” MacHenry can’t figure out why the Darmes are so interested in this one dead girl or why the secretive federal police have rushed the autopsy or why, a few days later, the records of the dead girl’s murder have been erased from all official government channels.

Even stranger to the detective is the manner of death – injuries consistent with a violent beating and sexual assault. Crimes rarely seen in current society. Crimes eradicated decades earlier.

Listen to an excerpt from The Bathwater Conspiracy by Janet Kellough.

Investigating the brutal murder of a young girl, the protagonist Carson MacHenry goes into the Decayed Zone or “the DK” as it’s commonly called, an area on the outskirts of the city that used to be an industrial zone and is now a ruin populated by bandits, scavengers and weird religious groups. She has been warned not to go snooping, and as a result has left her official police Fone at home, leaving her vulnerable to whoever – or whatever – she finds in the DK.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

The Bathwater Conspiracy is written by Janet Kellough

Published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

Copyright by Janet Kellough

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Chip Michael from The cast of Sage & Savant

Learn more about Janet Kellough

Website: Janet Kellough

Follower her on Facebook and Twitter

Janet Kellough is the author of six novels in The Thaddeus Lewis Mystery series, set in mid-19th century Upper Canada: On the Head of a Pin, Sowing Poison, 47 Sorrows, The Burying Ground, Wishful Seeing (short-listed for the 2017 Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel) and The Heart Balm Tort. She has also written two contemporary novels, The Palace of the Moon and The Pear Shaped Woman, as well as the semi-non-fictional Legendary Guide to Prince Edward County and the speculative fiction/thriller The Bathwater Conspiracy. Also a storyteller, Janet has released two audio recordings, Swear On My Mother’s Grave and Fowke Tales Live at Lang. She lives in an old farmhouse in the middle of a red cedar fen in rural Ontario, Canada.

The foundation of Westminster Abbey rests upon what was once an island — an island that was holy to the Celts and the Romans long before the first Christian Church was built upon it in the eighth century. The church is now home to a community of dead monarchs, nobles, scientists, composers, soldiers, authors, poets and politicians buried within the Abbey. And their ghosts are all under the command of Reverend Poda-Pirudi.

But leading the dead isn’t challenging enough for the good Reverend and he invites a hapless architect, Wallace Butterfield, to visit him at his office in the Triforium of Westminster Abbey with a promise to pay for some much needed work.

Listen to an excerpt from The Triforium by Mark Patton.

Butterfield, who thinks it’s the offer of a lifetime, believes he is finally moving up in the world – even though the meeting is scheduled at Westminster’s Triforium in the middle of the night!

Unbeknownst to the architect, a coven of absinthe-drinking witches conspires to intervene in Butterfield’s strange meetings with the Reverend. They want what Butterfield has (though Butterfield doesn’t know what it is) and they are willing to do anything (kidnapping, torture, even burning him at the stake) to get it.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

The Triforium is written by Mark Patton

Published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

Copyright by Mark Patton

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Chip Michael from The cast of Sage & Savant

Learn more about Mark Patton

Follow Mark Patton on Facebook and Twitter or find him on Amazon.

At nineteen Mark Patton shipped aboard the Research Vessel Chain as a helmsman for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. By his mid-twenties he was flying out of Otis Air Force Base for the National Marine Fisheries Service on weekly North Atlantic Fisheries patrols. After graduating from Northeastern University, he became a roughneck for Delta Drilling in the Texas oil patch. He left Texas to become a police officer and later a head of Natural Resources on Cape Cod. Now retired, he devotes his time between the mountains of northern New Hampshire and his home on Cape Cod, where with his cellist wife, he composes music and pursues his longtime passion for writing.

Eliezer ben-Avraham, wizard, Kabbalist, and kvetch, not only can but must help. Because he poked around in areas of forbidden knowledge, he is obliged to wander the world and use the powers he gained to perform good deeds—mitzvot—for anybody who asks, no matter how bizarre the task. Ably assisted by his trusty but cynical steed, Melech, Eliezer does what he can, although transforming into a bird and flying around is difficult when you have arthritis in your shoulder.

Humorous, philosophical, and very weird, Eliezer’s adventures as he makes his rounds demonstrate how important it is to be generous with your gifts, even to the craziest goyim.

Listen to an excerpt from Making the Rounds by Allan Weiss.

Eliezer is asked to light eight giant candles on a giant menorah for Chanukah—but where is he going to find giant candles in the middle of a desert? The strange little man who lives in the menorah, a kind of Father Time figure, is going to summon bees from the beyond to create beeswax.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

Making the Rounds is written by Allan Weiss

Published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing

Copyright by Allan Weiss

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Chip Michael from The cast of Sage & Savant

Learn more about Allan Weiss

Website: Allan Weiss

Allan Weiss was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto, where he teaches English and Humanities at York University. He has published over two dozen short stories, both mainstream and genre, in various periodicals and anthologies, including Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Windsor Review, On Spec, and Tesseracts 4, 7, and 9. His story collection Living Room appeared in 2001.

He earned his B.A. (1979) and M.A. (1980) in English from Concordia University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1985. As a scholar, he specializes in Canadian fiction and fantastic literature, and has published numerous articles on these topics and on the short story. He has also delivered papers at conferences in various countries in Europe and Asia as well as North America. He is the Chair of the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is held every two years in Toronto, and edited a recent volume of proceedings of that conference, The Canadian Fantastic in Focus (McFarland, 2014).

With the Vacation Jury Duty system, jurors can lounge on a comfortable beach while watching the trial via virtual reality. Julio is loving the beach, as well as the views of a curvy fellow juror with a rainbow-lacquered skin modification who seems to be the exact opposite of his recent ex-girlfriend back in Chicago. Because of jury sequestration rules, they can’t talk to each other at all, or else they’ll have to pay full price for this Acapulco vacation. Still, Julio is desperate to catch her attention. But while he struts and tries to catch her eye, he also becomes fascinated by the trial at hand.

Listen to an excerpt of Murder in the Generative Kitchen by Meg Pontecorvo

At first it seemed a foregone conclusion that the woman on trial used a high-tech generative kitchen to feed her husband a poisonous meal, but the more evidence mounts, the more Julio starts to suspect the kitchen may have made the decision on its own.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

Murder in the Generative Kitchen is written by Meg Pontecorvo

Published by World Weaver Press

Copyright by Meg Pontecorvo

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Eddie Louise from The cast of Sage & Savant

Find out more about Meg Pontecorvo

Webpage: Meg Pontecorvo, GoodReads, and Amazon

Follow her on Facebook

Something is rotten in the town of Widget, and Rags-n-Bones knows it’s all his fault. Ever since he snitched that avocado from Miss Ascot’s pack, things have been going wrong. Armed with a handful of memories he never realized he had, Rags-n-Bones searches for a way to put right whatever he did to Widget in the past. If only he knew what it was! Unfortunately, the only person who seems to have answers is a half-mad youth that only Rags can see.

Listen to an excerpt of The Meddlers of Moonshine by A.E. Decker

Widget is also suffering from a ghost infestation that has the townsfolk almost as spooked of outsiders as they are of actual spooks. While Rags-n-Bones seeks answers in the past, Ascot offers the town leaders her service as an exorcist, only to be handed an ultimatum: banish the ghosts or be banished herself!

Who’s meddling with Widget? To catch the culprit, Ascot and Rags-n-Bones must match wits with a shifty sorcerer, a prissy ex-governess, and a troublingly attractive captain before the town consigns itself to the graveyard of history.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

The Meddlers of Moonshine is written by A.E. Decker

Published by World Weaver Press

Copyright by A.E. Decker

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Emily Riley Piatt from The cast of Sage & Savant

Find out more about A.E. Decker

Webpage: Words Meet World, GoodReads, and Amazon

Follow her on Twitter

For years, Elise has been donning corsets, sneaking into castles, and lying through her teeth to enforce the Place in Time Travel Agency’s ten essential rules of time travel. Someone has to ensure that travel to the past isn’t abused, and most days she welcomes the challenge of tracking down and retrieving clients who have run into trouble on their historical vacations.

Listen to an excerpt of The Continuum by Wendy Nikel

But when a dangerous secret organization kidnaps her and coerces her into jumping to the future on a high-stakes assignment, she’s got more to worry about than just the time-space continuum. For the first time ever, she’s the one out-of-date, out of place, and quickly running out of time.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

The Continuum is written by Wendy Nikel

Published by World Weaver Press

Copyright by Wendy Nikel

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Della Rose from The cast of Sage & Savant

Find out more about Wendy Nikel

Webpage: Wendy Nikel, GoodReads, and Amazon

Follow her on Facebook and Twitter

An essay by Sam Keegan, as provided by Judith Field

(Originally published in Mad Scientist Journal: Autumn 2014)

Listen to an excerpt of Weather is a Zero-Sum Game by Judith Field

Sam Keegan lives in the south of England, with his live-in girlfriend and business manager, Cara. He’s still a designer, his most successful item to date has been a combined hand-held generator and umbrella. You might remember seeing him and Cara on the news, following their attempt to draw down electricity from the jetstream using a giant kite that exploded, striping the clouds in rainbow colours and jamming the streets with sight-seers. But that’s another story.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

Weather is a Zero-Sum Game is written by Judith Field

Published by Mad Scientist Journal

Copyright by Judith Field

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Chip Michael from The cast of Sage & Savant

More about Mad Scientist Journal

Find out more about Judith Field

Judith Field was born in Liverpool, England and lives in London. She is the daughter of writers, and learned how to agonise over fiction submissions at her mother’s (and father’s) knee.

Her fiction, mainly speculative, has appeared in a variety of publications in the USA and UK. She speaks five languages and can say, “Please publish this story” in all of them. She is also a pharmacist, freelance journalist, editor, medical writer, and indexer.

She blogs at www.millil.blogspot.com.

Amazon author website

An essay by Dr. Henrik Ahlstrom, as provided by Dantzel Cherry

(“Birthing Fire” previously appeared as the 2nd place winner in the Story Star Publishing Short Story Contest in 2012; reprinted in Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2017)

Listen to an excerpt of Birthing Fire by Dantzel Cherry

After earning a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Stanford University, Dr. Henrik Ahlstrom completed a post-doc at University of Virginia Center for BioTechnology and another at Scripps Research Institute as the primary investigator for the groundbreaking paper, Directed Induction of Foreign Tissue Growth in any Eukaryotic Host. After a short stint as Chief Scientific Officer for Bilon Therapeutics, he has since been involved in an undisclosed research project for a private laboratory in Belgium.

This excerpt is available on iTunes.

Birthing Fire is written by Dantzel Cherry

Published by Mad Scientist Journal

Copyright by Dantzel Cherry

Audio Copyright Twinstar Studios

Read by: Chip Michael from The cast of Sage & Savant

More about Mad Scientist Journal

Find out more about Dantzel Cherry

By day, Dantzel Cherry teaches Pilates and raises her daughter by day. By night and naptime, she writes. Her baking hours follow no rhyme or reason. Her short stories have appeared in Fireside, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Galaxy’s Edge, and other magazines and anthologies.

Webpage: Dantzel Cherry

Follow her on Twitter