Showing results by narrator "Richard Walker" in All Categories

Hi, I’m Richard Walker, and I wrote Who Cares? A decade ago. The climate crisis and the financial crisis of 2008 were the main motivators for me. Now in 2021, we are still hurtling toward a climate disaster, despite more than 30 years of dire warnings. And we’ve been devastated by a virus even though scientists have been warning governments for the past 40 years. One early warning came from a Nobel Prize winner. Joshua Lederberg he said: “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus.”

With Tyvian Reldamar feigning his death, the forces that still carry his banner are left to fight a vicious battle against the warlord Banric Sahand and the noble houses that flock to his side. Led by Myreon and Artus, this band of freedom fighters and angry rebels is faced with an enemy the likes of which they’ve never faced before: one who will do anything, no matter how brutal, to secure victory.

With Tyvian Reldamar feigning his death, the forces that still carry his banner are left to fight a vicious battle against the warlord Banric Sahand and the noble houses that flock to his side. Led by Myreon and Artus, this band of freedom fighters and angry rebels is faced with an enemy the likes of which they’ve never faced before: one who will do anything, no matter how brutal, to secure victory.

In the tenth year of the Change, the survivors in western Oregon live in a world without technology. Michael Havel’s Bearkillers hold the lands west of Salem in peace and order. To the east, the Clan Mackenzie flourishes under the leadership of Juniper Mackenzie, bard and High Priestess. Together, they have held Norman Arminger - the warlord of Portland - at bay. With his dark fantasies of a neofeudal empire, Arminger rules much of the Pacific Northwest, spreading fear with his knights, castles, and holy inquisition.

Lou Prophet is in mixed company these days. He doesn’t mind being close to his pretty pistol-packing partner, Louisa Bonaventure. Known as the Vengeance Queen, she has his back — and dare he say it, part of his heart. But accompanying the vile outlaw Blanco Metalious back to Nugget Town to see him hang isn’t exactly Lou’s idea of a good time.

"Work Sets You Free" by David Barnett is an original short story featuring the protagonist of the forthcoming novel Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl. Gideon is a young fisherman in Yorkshire, England, in an alternate 1890, who embarks on a journey to find Captain Lucian Trigger, the famed Hero of the Empire, to deal with a mystery plaguing his home village.

Back in London, Gideon and his colleagues: journalist Aloysius Bent, airship pilot Rowena Fanshawe, and Maria, the mechanical girl to whom Gideon has lost his heart, are dragged into a case that is confounding the Metropolitan Police. For the city is on the edge of mass rioting due to the continuing reign of terror by the serial killer known only as Jack the Ripper, who is rampaging though London's less salubrious quarters.

Lady Juniper recounts the capture of one of the Lord Protector’s most precious treasurers, the Princess Mathilda Arminger. While Sir Nigel reveals that the Lord Protector has procured a deadly new weapon. Will Signe Havel ever forgive her husband for fathering Juniper Mackenzie’s son Rudi? Will Sir Nigel find a home in the Willamette Valley? And what will happen when the Norman Arminger attempts to reclaim the princess and wreck his revenge on the Mackenzies and the Bearkillers?

The Lord Protector of Portland has continued to press his rule into every corner of the Willamette. Both Juniper and Havel know that war is coming, but their allies in the Free-state of Corvallis are less convinced. Sir Nigel continues his escape from mad King Charles with the aid of his new found Tasmanian allies, having to out race the legendary sailing ship the Cutty Sark and battle pirates off the coast of Africa.

It’s been eight years since the Change rendered technology inoperable across the globe. Rising from the ashes of the computer and industrial ages is a brave new world. Survivors have banded together in tribal communities, committed to rebuilding society. In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, former pilot Michael Havel’s Bearkillers are warriors of renown. Their closest ally, the mystical Clan Mackenzie, is led by Wiccan folksinger Juniper Mackenzie. Their leadership has saved countless lives.

The deadly White Wizards of Fairhaven, wielding the forces of chaos, threaten the ancient matriarchy of Sarronnyn, the last bastion of order in Candar. When Sarronnyn falls despite the assistance of the Black Order mages, Justen, a young Black Engineer, must escape the city and master forbidden technology that harness chaos itself. Even so, it may not be enough to halt conquest of the White Wizards.

Hawk and Fisher, famous for their years of keeping the peace in Haven, are really quite happy being legends. They gave up the hero business when they decided they’d grown too old for it. Now they run the Hero Academy, training young hopefuls to be heroes. Legends never die, but it seems they cannot retire, either. Hawk and Fisher’s adult children, Jack and Gillian, have been kidnapped. They were taken by the Demon Prince, an old enemy from the Forest Kingdom who challenges the couple to one final battle for their lives.

The year is 2089.... America and much of the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.... Ted Rockson and his small band of soldiers fight to rid the land of a Soviet occupational force bent on world domination. But Rockson not only has the enemy to contend with, for out of the ashes of the nuclear devastation of World War III, the Earth has become one large death zone. Mutated animals, destructive storms, and barbaric humans now roam the land. Death seems to be everywhere. Hope seems fleeting. But Rockson will not give up.

After the dust settles from the Great Rebellion, Owen Deathstalker and Hazel D’ark find themselves working as bounty hunters for the tentative new democratic government, chasing down war criminals from the old empire, while still struggling with the nature of their mysterious powers derived from the enigmatic Madness Maze. Their mission is to capture the most notorious villain of all, the grinning psychopath Valentine Wolfe.

The nine hybrid barons — mysterious oligarchs who ruled the fortified cities that emerged after Armageddon — are no more. Gone, not by the civil war fought by a courageous band of exiles, but trapped in a web of evil 4000 years in the making. As Tiamat, a living, sentient ship, hovers in orbit over Egypt, the nine Overlords of an ancient civilization are reborn. The planet Nibiru will live again on Earth and humanity will be enslaved, or die. He is a being of inhuman evil: a melding of dragon, myth, and machine.

Devastation from the nukewar shattered civilization and left a planet both primitive and ripe for rebirth - or retaking. While the balance of power has fallen to avaricious, amoral barons, a handful of humanity still holds hope of a future worth fighting for or dying to defend. If a better life inside the hellground exists, Ryan Cawdor and his friends will find it.

In this raw, brutal world ruled by the strongest and the most vicious, an unseen player is manipulating Ryan and his band, luring him across an unseen battle line drawn in the dust outside Tucson, Arizona. Here, a local barony becomes the staging ground for a battle unlike any other, against a foe whose ties to pre-Dark society present a new and incalculable threat to a fragile world. Ryan Cawdor is the only man living who stands between this adversary's glory...and the prize he seeks.

In the forested coastal region of the eastern seaboard, near the Pine Barrens of what was New Jersey, Ryan and his companions encounter a group of rebels. Having broken away from the strange, isolated community known as Atlantis and led by the obscene and paranoid Odyssey, this small group desires to live in peace. But in a chill-or-be-chilled world, freedom can only be won by spilled blood. Ryan and company are willing to come to the aid of these freedom fighters, ready to wage a war against the twisted tyranny that permeates Deathlands.

A cold sense of dèjá vu becomes reality as the group emerges from a gateway they'd survived before — a grim graveyard of lost friends and nightmares. The consuming need to escape the dangerous melancholy of the place forces Ryan and company onto the frozen tundra, where an even greater menace awaits. The forbidding land harbors a dying tribe — cursed members of the ancient Inuit, who seize the arrival of Ryan and his band as their last hope to appease angry gods...by offering them up as human sacrifice.

Ryan Cawdor is gunned down and left for dead by the new Provisional US Army, commanded by a brilliant general with a propensity for casual mass murder and a vision to rebuild America. Waging war from his pre-Dark, fusion-powered armored locomotive, he's poised to unlock the secrets of the Gateways — as the rest of Ryan's group stand powerless. All except one. Hope may be lost for Krysty Wroth. But revenge is enough.