The Traitor’s Son, a new, never-before-published science fiction novel by the late Dave Duncan, one of Canada’s most celebrated authors of science fiction and fantasy, will be released by Regina, Saskatchewan-based publisher Shadowpaw Press on May 7, 2024.
A second posthumous novel, the fantasy Corridor to Nightmare, is due out in August.
“I’m thrilled to be able to bring this terrific science fiction adventure and the upcoming fantasy novel to the many readers who have sorely missed Dave since his untimely death in 2018,” says Edward Willett, publisher of Shadowpaw Press. “I met Dave many times over the years and was a huge fan of both the man and his writing.”
At the time of his death in 2018, Duncan was awaiting final edits on The Traitor’s Son from his long-time editor, Dr. Robert Runte, who polished the novel and Corridor to Nightmare and brought both to Shadowpaw Press.
“Working with Shadowpaw Press to bring out the last novels of the late great Dave Duncan has been extremely satisfying, not just because his many fans have been waiting for these books but because it’s one of Duncan’s rare science fiction novels,” Dr. Runte says. “The Traitor’s Son is Duncan at his best: ingenious world-building, political intrigue, wry allegory, high-stakes action . . . and monster spiders. What more could one ask for?
About the book
Doig Gray is fifteen when his father is killed in a mining accident, which Doig comes to realize 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.
A fast-paced science fiction adventure, The Traitor’s Son is in the best tradition of Duncan’s Hero, West of January, and Eocene Station.
About the author
Born and raised in Scotland, Dave Duncan moved to Calgary, Alberta, after graduating from university to take up his thirty-year career as a geologist. As the oil boom faltered in the 1980s, he sold his first novel and switched careers to become one of the most prolific and popular Canadian authors of science fiction and fantasy, with more than sixty-five traditionally published novels. Early in his career, he was producing books so fast his publisher could not keep up, so he wrote a fantasy trilogy under the name Ken Hood for a different house and a historical novel about the fall of Troy as Sarah B. Franklin.
Duncan won the Aurora Award for Best Novel in 1990 and again in 2007 and was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in 2015. He died on October 29, 2018.
