Showing results by narrator "Richard Walker" in All Categories

Deathlands is a living hell, but there is someplace worse: a parallel Earth where the atomic mega-cull never happened. Now this Otherworld Earth is in its final death throes. Yet for an elite few, the reality portal offers a new frontier of raw energy, expendable slaves — a bastion of power for Dredda Otis Trask. Her invasion force of genetically engineered warrior women has turned the ruins of Salt Lake City into the deadly mining grounds of a grotesque new order — one that lies in wait for Ryan and his companions.

Generations after global annihilation, Kansas is a mutated landscape of dense, deciduous forest. Gone are the amber waves of grain, another hideous result of nuclear devastation that changed the face of the Earth forever. Now it's survival of the freakish. Following rumors that might lead them to the long-lost Trader, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists find themselves the unwilling house guests of the wealthiest barons in all of Deathlands.

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.”

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.

Michael is branded a traitor as a child because of the murder of the king’s nine-year-old son, by his father David Kingman. Ten years later on, Michael lives a hardscrabble life with his sister Gwen, performing crimes with his friends against minor royals in a weak attempt at striking back at the world that rejects him and his family. In a world where memory is the coin that pays for magic, Michael knows something is there in the hot white emptiness of his mind.

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.

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.

Michael Kingman thought he was going to die by the executioner’s axe, forever labeled as a traitor. Still alive, and under the protection of the Orbis Mercenary company, Michael and his family and friends are deeply involved in the seemingly rival conspiracies that are tearing The Hollows apart. With the death of the King, both the Corrupt Prince and his sister Serena are vying for the throne, while the Rebel Emperor is spreading lies amongst the people, and all of them want Michael dead.

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.

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.

Nearly a hundred years after Russia's thermonuclear first strike turned America into a radioactive wasteland, the brave survivors and fierce FreeFighters of that shattered nation have forced the brutal Sov invader to the peace table. But a new and unexpected danger suddenly appears in the skies over America - from orbit. Someone is reactivating the ancient space systems of the 1980s...one by one the nuke-armed space missiles of the past change orbit to threaten every major population center of the world.

In what was once the nuclear testing ground of the pre-dark world, the Marshall Islands are now the kingdom of the grotesque lord Baron Kinnison. Here in this world of slavery and brutality, the companions have fought a fierce war for survival, on land and sea — yet the crafty baron still conspires to destroy these interlopers. Activating a 20th century hot air balloon left untouched by the blast, they escape to the neighboring pirate ruled forbidden island, with the Baron and his sec men in hot pursuit — and become trapped in a war for total supremacy on this water world.

There have been countless books and films about Jack the Ripper, and it is by far the most popular walking tour in London. The fascination remains as strong now as it did in 1888 during that year's Autumn of Terror. A macabre tale set in a gaslit London of sumptuous mansions and grimy hovels through which a monster moves. It is the story of five women lost in a world that didn't care. It is the story of five victims who shared The World of Jack the Ripper.

By weaving together thoroughly researched historical facts, Storyline of Our Predecessors: The Collapse of Ancient Society provides a glimpse into the culture of ancient civilizations and the factors that ultimately led to their collapse.

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.

Apropos is the unlikely noble whose life began in the lowest of ways: as the result of a gang assault by a group of drunken knights on a helpless tavern wench. Last time out, Apropos attempted to seize control of his own fate, and ended up with, appropriately, nothing. Time has passed since he fled the kingdom of Runcible, and Apropos leads a quiet existence as a tavern owner. All that changes abruptly, however, when the sorceress Sharee re-enters his life with the forces of the warlike Lord Bellicose hard on her heels. They want something they're convinced she has stolen.

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.