Ships of Stone and Iron

More Fantastical Tales of Imagination by Edward Willett

Aurora Award-winning author Edward Willett returns with a second collection of short stories, a follow-up to 2018’s Saskatchewan Book Award finalist Paths to the Stars.

On a sleet-lashed Monday night in Regina, a brewpub owner older than she looks pours a pint for a man who threw away the only job that ever mattered, and then pours one for an angel. Beneath the white shroud that swallowed the Earth, a private submarine that has outlived its passengers and its purpose still cruises the empty ocean. In a prairie pothole outside a small Saskatchewan town, a black stone awaits the touch of the next child on the verge of growing up, as it has waited for thousands of years.

A Guardian keeps a walled kingdom innocent of the fact that its magic is machinery and its vanished king is an administrative convenience. In a government sub-basement, a man uploads the daily Truth into a nation’s neural implants, knowing every word of it is false. A spy gets ten seconds behind a palace door to undo the assassination that started a war. In the Dust Bowl years, an itinerant actor feeds on members of his audience, hunted by the widower of one of his victims, a man who has worked out everything but one detail. And on Luna, a charming thief is hired to talk a cat out of blowing up Parliament, a prequel to Willett’s novel The Tangled Stars.

Throughout, Willett writes with warmth, a crooked sense of humour, and the occasional bad pun. But tread these paths carefully all the same. Some may lead to dark places . . .