Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.
As his life fragments, and he is fired from his job and fights with his girlfriend, Mexican vacations cannot cheer the nameless narrator of In Light of Ray. In desperation, he decides to follow the cryptic advice of Ray, a shadowy figure whose obscure suggestions takes him away from his friends and into unemployment, poverty and then homelessness. Drifting around a grittier Vancouver, he begins to think that the only way to fix his life is to die although this is profoundly disrupted when he meets Weed, a girl abandoned on Wreck Beach. Ultimately affirming, the first novel in the series details a man’s drift from the Vancouver streets and the emptiness of dead-end jobs to a choice between embracing community and connection or disappearing into a waiting squalor.
The second novel, Working for Ray, follows these characters as they travel across Canada, and along the way learn how to reconcile their past.
Blind Fish is the first novel in a series that follows the adventures of sixteen people locked underground when an amusement park closes its doors. Trapped for what might be generations, they struggle to provide for themselves physically and keep fit mentally for the day the doors might finally open. In the meantime, there might be a way out.
Telling the other side of the adoption and fostering process in Manitoba perhaps inevitably ends up questioning the failures of the government child care system. In this study, I itemize the difficulties dealing with the foster care system that ultimately led to my unsuccessful attempt to become a Manitoba foster parent.
Building my outrigged wooden sailboat is a story about the limitations imposed by materials, space, money and time, making decisions on the spot, solving problems created by mistakes, and the daily slog which was the building process. Follow the initial idea, research through boat-building manuals, sketching out the design, purchase of the lumber, and completing a five-thousand-dollar sailboat.
Living on Nothing and Enjoying Less: An Eco-Handbook for Cheap, Sustainable Happiness is meant for anyone who has wondered how they would be able to cut back their spending and learn to better enjoy their life. I trace my own spending, along with some analysis of the impact of consumerism on society, in an argument for frugality and freedom.
Facing the same existential question as those they left behind on Earth, they debate returning to the meat bodies by way of the ape analogues, downloading permanently into a long-lasting robotic drone which can explore the oceans, sky, and jungle, or infecting the solar system with a multitude of digital forms.
Abandoned on Alpha Centauri’s second planet, our inadvertent colonists have to contend with monstrous storms, clouds of plastic-eating insects, mysterious animals haunting the coastline, and a thick forbidding jungle hiding a secret. Resilience looks like it might be in short supply as they face a planet which is both more inviting and dangerous than it first appeared.
They escaped from the Corps mining rigs in the asteroid belt as digital signals on an exploration probe. They transferred to the surface before they were found out and a virus was sent after them. Inadvertent colonizers of Alpha Centauri, they worry that one of them is conspiring against the rest, and fear that the Corps will attack at any moment in the form of robotic drones.
Join me as we sit around the family table, run from rabid relatives and friends, and make enduring friendships out of the rough clay of a more than two-month visit. This return to Argentina and Chile is meant to capture a country reeling from a market crash, a traveller coping with culture clash and bad manners, and the savage enjoyment which results from the urge to pack a bag and buy a ticket.
Although some people are using ChatGPT to write children’s books for sale, most people are looking for information or entertainment when they type in a prompt. For the most part, its stories were trite and hackneyed generalizations befitting a mere sentence generator, but when it strayed from the norm, it sometimes indulged in the wondrous and the odd.
This manual describes how to calculate your electrical needs, pick a system that works best, and how to implement that in an off-grid setting. I discuss grid-tied systems, the benefits and pitfalls of wind, micro hydro, and solar—and briefly touch upon Peltier/Seebeck, piezoelectric, and heat engines—as well as generating and storage, this study is mostly concerned with remote power.
The new ChatGPT tool from OpenAI has rapidly garnered media attention and millions of users and its novelty has drawn both the public and the reporters’ interest. Its possibilities have led to it becoming the fastest growing app in history, but when examined closely, its seemingly miraculous capabilities are ultimately disappointing, at least when it comes to academic writing in my discipline.
They’d never anticipated a battle, and still less that someone would attack them from within, but the colonists of Marée had learned to be resilient. The widespread field that remained from the long-ago exploded planet was rich in resources and they were far enough from the inner planets that they felt they could afford to experiment with engineering and biology.
Their ship Marita drifted amongst the planetary fragments, and far away, a streamer of drives showed that ships were coming as quickly as possible. Some were old friends while others were new business partners, drawn by the untold wealth in metals and volatiles. There was money to be made in the belt, and like dogs to torn flesh, the pack would soon be growling at the gate.
As soon as she heard about the new planet, Dara knew she had to get there first. She was going to lay claim to untold wealth, garner prestige throughout the belt, but most importantly, she would find a place she could dig into the rock and call her own.
At the end of my career, I notice that I’ve persisted in an industry while many of my compatriots have long since left. Here I am re-examining what has inadvertently become a career. I never intended to be a permanent contract professor, but the joy of teaching, the students’ interests and needs, as well as a life-long curiosity kept me in a field which has not always welcomed me or my kind.
Despite the stories of generalized horror and despair, there are those who attempt to preserve laws and books and machines, those who have the forethought to plan for a society when people again want it. They might only be feeding a stranger, stacking books in a library, or banding together for protection, but that is how the cultural edifice is rebuilt, one brick at a time.
My forty-day trip involved both Silvio and the Canary Islands. The outside world was still struggling with Covid, but the Canaries were a kind of haven. We moved in a complacent bubble through historical villages and freshly painted hotels and poolside bars. We traveled to lush and beautiful La Palma and more rustic and traditional La Gomera, but mainly we spent our days on Tenerife.
In this idiosyncratic study I imagine the scientific enterprise to be an edifice of reasoning and experimentation that we share with every animal all the way back to the protozoa. In both the scientific and fantastical world, this more than ten-thousand-year-old story is about our striving, our recent missteps, and our greatest accomplishments.
This analysis of narcissism and the breakdown of relationships begins with Narcissus, as well the history of narcissism’s presentation on American television. After a brief foray into Freud's work the case study follows a relationship from its inception and details the signs of narcissism along the way, such as prostitution, extra-marital affairs, hypochondria, mendaciousness, and greed.
International students are a growing demographic in the west, and are a delight in the classroom, but the instructor must approach their pedagogy with a self-reflexive understanding of what they hope to accomplish and the students need to learn. I hope this book will be useful for instructors interested in the amount of forethought that goes into pedagogy in the international student classroom.
This cookbook is an examination of the cookbook genre, as well as a text savoured as an exercise in writing even while people try making the dishes. I hope that people will modify my recipes to make their own creations and that my recipes will come back, changed.
For the rest of the world, the comet hanging over them like the glory of the Milky Way had shoved aside the moon, the trudge of daily existence proved to be too entrancing. Even while they turned away from the sight, they would never have been able to predict—if they had even heard of the place—that Boltzman would be the most affected by the comet’s coming.
Cast as a child into a headlong race, he ran from degradation to triumph, suspecting that the profound insight he was meant to uncover wouldn’t materialize, and terrified that it might.
As if to respond to the Martian colonist’s final message, the remaining space agencies combined to send a team of fifteen. The mistakes of the past would be overcome. Hero pioneers for the starving millions on Earth, they would be supplied and supported. The Brave Fifteen would be considered the first real colonization effort, and the other colonist’s tale would become no more than a footnote.
With as many projects as there are people to suggest them, Earth is either on the cusp of a galaxy-wide civilization or is merely making technological noise before it falls into mayhem and biosphere collapse. In the centre of the struggle, Denni connects people with technology, ideas with those who can fund them, and vision with those brave enough to carry them to fruition.
This study investigates and encourages the inherent playfulness of language. By examining several case studies where the written word has gone astray, I intend this tongue-in-cheek discussion of errors to be both a fun exposition about language and a way to enjoy learning about effectiveness in communication.
With his retirement looming and the sea his only goal, Sam could finally buy a boat. He would combine his pension and his dream to sail around the world. But when he begins to troll through the boatyards and docks he begins to rethink his imagined future.
Hired without qualifications, and surrounded by suspicious and silent colleagues, Sam frantically fished through his desk and paperwork, trying to lift anything into the light which would explain where he was. When Amy showed up at his door, his initial reluctance to take on crew softens.
Vancouver hovers on the edge of riot and lockdown. The police are incarcerating people with new quasi-legal claims of criminal activity like sitting in a public place; he has to decide between fight or flight. Should he confront those promoting human testing, rage and burn in a city where his violence will merely add to the growing chaos, or join the mass exodus of those leaving the city?
Planeville, A History of the Lost Village tells the story of Wilhelm, who, an enigma to his peers, went into the woods and built his village, and his descendants lived there for four generations until Planeville was abandoned.
Sam felt like he lived in an aquarium. Like he was circling eastern Canada waiting for a bored child to tap on the glass. Under such scrutiny, his plans were a temptation to the fates instead of a way to define his possible future. He tried to keep his hand firmly on the tiller, but sudden rocks under the hull, treacherous currents, or cross breezes, constantly seemed to shift his course.
Coronavirus looked like it was going to radically change the world. But if it managed to bring people together as they commiserated about their common fear, it also let loose a shuddering flood of suspicion and generosity, xenophobia and acceptance, hatred and tenderness, superstition and investigative potential.
My latest trip to South East Asia differed from other trips in that I was older, my traveling companion was younger, and Thailand had changed. I didn’t plan to return to the country, but my friend had taken a teaching practicum in Bangkok, and we both thought we would enjoy exploring the north of the country before her term began. Like most trips, it didn’t turn out exactly as we had planned.
When I was holding the sword in my hand again, I could only guess where it had been. Its faded, cracked sheath and rusty blade told a story of neglect, but beyond that was another tale of how it had disappeared, how its absence had been explained, and how its return undermined that version of events. We need background.
I lived in the Cook Islands for four months, landing in Rarotonga and then teaching high school on Manihiki. I travelled to the north by ship, by way of Aitutaki, Palmerston and Suwarrow, and visited the neighbouring island of Rakahanga. After, I flew to Fiji where I learned something of Fijian history and culture, and dreamed of floating a bamboo raft down the Sigatoka River.
I use the lyrics and music to tell the story waiting in the wings to come on, the one that the songs either avoid or never intended to let loose. These most recent releases tell the poignant story of the war’s effect on the warrior, the aging musician up against the constant rejuvenation of his craft, and the twinges in the muscles which is the love that sprawls through the stories in later albums
This guide is meant to assist the student of literature and the creative writer in their understanding of how literary techniques and narrative devices can inform a reader’s interaction with text. This study is an attempt to examine more closely the ways that literary techniques assist or frustrate the reader’s attempt to understand the author’s intentions.
The stories in this collection are more concerned with the everyday events which try our values, the choices we are faced with on a daily basis which are not featured in Hollywood movies or famous novels, but nonetheless prove to exercise our ethical selves. Follow along as people you recognize are faced with choosing between good and evil.
Raising their tangled stories like belladonna in the garden, I hope that the nightmare rides through Tom Waits' albums and their seemingly antithetical stories somehow combine with the narrative I am trying to pull out from his exploration of Middle America, with its losses, its joys, and the cars everyone was driving when we went over the cliff.
This trip to South America was much more than just a return to the continent. Silvio had readied his RV for the three-country excursion, and more importantly, planned particularly enticing meetings with alligators and presidents. After arriving in Buenos Aires we almost immediately crossed to Uruguay where we spent an hour with José “Pepe” Mujica and then drove north for Brazil's pantanal.
This second volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs series follows the shifts in his music as Reagan’s eighties tumbled into the nineties. The narrative voice shifts with his music as the stories drift outside the personal to examine the world around him just as much as it does his reactions to it.
The machine was given three commands: Keep Amy alive, safe, and happy. The first two were easy enough, but the third meant understanding humans far better than they did themselves.
The year is 2045 and over fifty thousand people live on Mars, with more arriving all the time. In this anniversary of the planet’s first landing, the Mars Historical Society has chosen to return to the travails of its most famous colonist.
This collection unearths the stories that run parallel to those of Tom Waits’ early songs. They do not retell as much as push the envelope wider, strain the meaning of a few lines, and stretch the place the song occupies so that the river rats and abandoned dogs, crying children on the street and shifty-eyed suits, salesmen with their patter and hobos with their rags, can shoulder out a space.
This annotated edition of H. G. Wells’ second novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, is meant to encourage the pursuits of scholars who are either encountering Wells’ influential classic for the first time or are returning to it in order to delve more deeply into its antecedents and influences. I include an introduction to Herbert George Wells and his work, as well as the novel’s critical background.
This annotated and introduced edition of H. G. Wells' first and justly most famous novel, The Time Machine, is meant to encourage the pursuits of scholars who are either encountering Wells' influential classic for the first time or are returning to it in order to delve more deeply into its antecedents and influences.
This annotated edition of World Brain, with an introduction to his life and work, is meant to stimulate scholars to return to this giant intellect, a writer who, with only microfiche to inspire his understanding of the possibilities of communications technology, imagined a connected and coordinated world sharing a huge knowledge base.
A report from the hidden corners of countries that are only accessible when you travel by RV: searching for a ghost in an abandoned saltpeter town in the Atacama, crossing into the high altitude ranges of Peru to Machu Picchu where we helped the Argentinian government search for a body, and daring the snow-choked Paso de Jama into gaucho country in Northern Argentina.
This guide is meant to assist those who want to learn the basics of writing English essays, as well as how to use research to support their academic arguments. Accordingly, it explains the general purpose of the academic English paper, the rationale for its structure and how to incorporate quotes and separate arguments, as well as offers research tips.
Using Marshall McLuhan’s insights as an impetus, this meandering tale draws upon novels, radio and television shows, film, and trending internet platforms and gaming to discuss the influence of media in a world increasingly wrapped in the fibre optic cables of the technological age. This idiosyncratic examination is an interrogation of media's cultural influence and subsequent societal change.
Follow Blier and Linder as they struggle through a world of farming villages and political dogma to Shiptown where they hope to trace his chaotic thoughts to The Perdu. In a race against time, with the mindless beasts of his gnawing memories clawing back into consciousness, Blier’s trek across a desiccated landscape transforms both himself and his world.