Hayden Trenholm is an award-winning editor, playwright, novelist and short story writer. His first novel, A Circle of Birds, won the 3-Day Novel Writing competition; it was translated and published in French. His trilogy, The Steele Chronicles, were each nominated for an Aurora Award. Stealing Home, the third book, was a finalist for the Sunburst Award. Hayden has won five Aurora Awards – thrice for short fiction and twice for editing. He purchased Bundoran Press in 2012 and is its managing editor. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and fellow writer, Liz Westbrook-Trenholm.
Mike Rimar is a Prix Aurora award-nominated writer of speculative fiction and associate publisher of Bundoran Press. You can find his work in "OSC's InterGalactic Medicine Show," Tesseracts 15, Writers of the Future XXI, and "On Spec Magazine." For more information on Mike visit www.mikerimar.com.
Dreams of immortality and eternal youth are almost as old as human culture itself. But what would the world look like if everyone could live and be young forever? What would it look like if only some of us had that privilege? Lazarus Risen presents sixteen stories from around the world that explore the economic, political, social and psychological consequences of life extension, human cloning, the hard upload and other forms of the biological singularity.
Stories by Brent Nichols, Sean McMullen, Teri Babcock, Nancy SM Waldman, Brad C. Anderson, Fiona Moore, Felice Picano, Matthew Shean, Matt Moore, Suzanne Church, Peter Wendt, Holly Schofield, Deborah Walker, Kevin Edwin Stadt, Leigh Kimmel, and Andrew Barton.
"This book comes up with some big answers for what is a big question - what if we could live forever? And yet, the characters are the ones who become far more important than the big question and reshape that question - how do we deal with immortality, our own, our loved ones and does immortality mean a happy ever after?
Bundoran Press produces great anthologies that ask big questions. What really surprised me about this anthology was the variety of stories. They could easily have been doom and gloom stories warning of a soulless future. Instead, the stories have innovative ideas filled with warmth or horror or intrigue. This book grabbed me and made me finish it in a weekend."
– Amazon Reviewer"First, a confession: I have a story in this collection. But I have stories in about fifty anthologies and I seldom review them. I'm reviewing this one because its an extraordinary book, out of Bundoran Press in Canada and if you have any interest at all in Science Fiction or Spec. Fict. Or in fact just good short stories, get a download of this."
– Goodreads Reviewer"Lazarus Risenmakes readers confront their insecurities about the spectre of ageing, makes us examine that biological clock that keeps ticking away, reminding us that change is inevitable and that change comes with constant new wonders, excitements, and, yes, challenges."
– Derek Newman-Stille. Speculating CanadaInquisitor by Brent Nichols
I closed my eyes in a stainless steel chamber on a Dyson Sphere, and opened them in a stone-walled room eight light years away. The local gravity dragged at me, and I lay there staring up at a dark ceiling, waiting to adjust.
I had beaten the odds one more time. In a way. There was a version of me back on the sphere. He was eight years older. A version of me would stay here, hunting Joseph Kramer. Another version would continue the chase, following Joe to the next destination, and the next, until every last version of Joe faced judgment.
When I felt stronger I sat up, cradled in a familiar pod. On every world, ship, and station, I woke in the same pod. The small details varied, but the basic technology to manufacture a human body from scratch was the same across the galaxy.
Footsteps echoed, and a woman came into the room. She looked young and professional, and she eyed me with a disapproving expression. Did she think digital space travel was frivolous? More likely it was my uniform, faithfully reproduced along with the rest of me, that had her pursing her lips. The Regime was out of favour in most of the galaxy.
Well, when I was a small boy, I resented my teachers and babysitters. Wisdom only comes with age, and sometimes not even then.
"Let me help you out." She had a drawling accent, pleasant to the ear. If I ended up staying here, I would enjoy getting used to it.
If. I was staying, of course. My copy would go on.
The Life and Soul of the Party by Sean McMullen
I was in Paris when Oscar Wilde died there, on the thirtieth day of November, 1900. I'd known he was very ill and had made several attempts to visit him, but he was avoiding strangers by then. Once he was dead, I had my chance.
The preceding six years of courts, prisons and reduced circumstances had left their marks on Wilde's face and I might easily have passed for his daughter. This was indeed how I introduced myself to the doctor who was certifying his death. Who was to say that a man with his reputation might not have an illegitimate daughter in addition to his two legitimate sons?
Beside the bed there were the usual medicines that surround the dying, but I was hoping to find something more personal and significant. What author does not have a pen to hand as death approaches? Wilde certainly did, just a cheap wooden pen with a steel nib, a thing of no real value easily taken and not missed.
What an irony, the last pen of the great Oscar Wilde not missed and of no real value.
Still, for him it would have provided a final chance to be brilliant. Nothing could have been more important to Wilde.
I reached out, not with my fingertips but with the back of my hand. It was late autumn, and the air was cold, yet above the pen it was definitely colder. That was highly significant, and for a moment I actually smiled. When the doctor turned away for a moment I slipped the pen up my sleeve.
Naïve Gods by Brad C. Anderson
Daniel knew Liam was a true friend because he was the only one who called him a ghost to his face. The others said the word behind his back, hand over mouth in whispered exchanges charged with the joy of gossip, or fear of the strange, always thinking he didn't hear them.
"C'mon you old ghost," Liam said, draping his arm over Daniel's shoulder. "Drink, drink. You're only four-hundred-and-fourteen once."
"Four-hundred-and-forty," Daniel corrected.
"Four ... four-forty?" Liam's head jerked back. Liam said something about needing an extra birthday cake to hold all the candles, and Daniel laughed, not because the old joke was funny, but because after four centuries he had hoped that joke would have died. He felt as though he were outside his body, watching himself bring another drink to his lips, watching himself going through the motions of making merry in this celebration of notching up yet one more trip around the sun.
"The ghost's zoned out again," his cochlear nanomechs amplified Busang's words from the far side of the noisy room.
"Maybe I should give him something worth paying attention to," Sil said, her voice suggestive. He could almost imagine her sly smile, digital pigments in her lips flushing red.
"I thought you were married," he heard Busang say.
"I haven't been married for twenty years."
Daniel tuned the conversation out. Four-hundred-and-forty years ago this day, his mother was screaming in pain while his father handed out cigars to friends. That's what they did back then: wives would pop out babies, and men would smoke cigars. For years, the cigar box lingered on his dad's tool bench, filled with odd nuts, screws and tools, the sides and top a bright, baby blue, the words 'It's a boy' written on the lid in big white letters above the cartoon picture of a happy man. This year marked Daniel's three-hundred-and-seventy-seventh birthday without his father; the three-hundred-seventy-first without his mother.
