Barry Pomeroy

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About Barry Pomeroy

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. You can find him at http://barrypomeroy.com/

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Books By Barry Pomeroy

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Days of the Virus: COVID-19 and its Consequences Feb 20, 2021

by Barry Pomeroy

$4.69

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.
Some compared it to the 1918 Spanish Flu, but without the internet those who had been affected a hundred years earlier didn’t know they were part of a vast suffering community. With COVID-19, people from around the world watched other communities cope and fall apart, their favourite celebrities break down on screen, and conspiracy fantasies proliferate. Such was the temper of the times that the words of mad people online began seem as valid as the statistics of the disease, and statements from health authorities seemed to be laced with fear and suspicion.
Into this maelstrom of dread and mayhem, a small group of people found their lives shredded or enhanced, as they struggled to survive the new circumstances of widespread fear, contagion, and government crackdowns. With the internet to fuel their doubts and delights, they sought for answers from a system which had been built more for entertainment than scholarly pursuit. Seeking to learn when the pandemic would end, they didn’t know if they were constructing a new community from strangers or would be greeted by snarling dogs at their door.

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Malu Nov 15, 2014

by Barry Pomeroy

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A cave girl trapped in modern times, Malu has lived a peaceful existence in the forest of Flores, Indonesia. When Hantus capture her, they little realize that the existence of a living Homo Erectus in the modern world will disrupt forever the lives of dozens of people. Even those who gape into her cage turn away from the intensity of her green eyes and constantly moving hands.
While Malu is transported to a lab in Massachusetts by avaricious researchers who hope to sell her DNA, a photographer flees for his life from a man he doesn't know, and a murderer sells cocaine and dreams of revenge. Like the flap of a butterfly's wing, Malu causes two eminent scientists to become her temporary guardians, a reluctant activist to plan his first animal rights action, and a criminal offence to be righted.
Such is the tableau that makes up Malu, the story of an impossible girl whose relentless drive to be free forces a reluctant world to afford her a home.

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H.G. Wells’ World Brain: Annotated with an Introduction by Barry Pomeroy, PhD (Scholarly Editions Book 1) Dec 9, 2017

by Barry Pomeroy

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This annotated edition of World Brain 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.
Wells was inspired by the needs of a world teetering on the brink of global war, and eagerly met with Stalin and Roosevelt to learn what they knew of the peace process. When he found them without advisors, he turned to the education system only to be dismayed by its derivative and dismal state.
Finally, Wells decided that the ordinary citizen would have to teach themselves, and he turned his considerable mind to the task of how that might be effected. He imagined a globally financed encyclopedia, which would be continually updated by teams of volunteers and would serve the intellectual needs of the modern citizen.
In these days of internet technology, H. G. Wells’ warnings and imaginings are more relevant than ever, as in these fever days of incipient nanotechnology, ghostly quantum effects, and international media system threats of global conflict, we are increasingly drowning in a sea of information we scarcely understand. Wells’ synthesis of information delivery systems, and the competent receiver and producer he imagines at its centre, has much to offer the modern scholar who is trying to make the cornucopia of the internet relevant to our changing world.

How to Read, Write, and Interpret Fiction: Authorial Strategies and Literary Technique Nov 3, 2019

by Barry Pomeroy

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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. Each writer, from experts in the craft—like the writers of the stories I use as examples—to the beginner who wants to exercise control over the story they are writing, choses from a series of techniques or strategies that permit or prevent certain stories from being told. This study is an attempt to examine more closely the ways that literary techniques—such as use of narrator, the construction of character, narrative desire, the manipulation of narrative levels and narrative time, the evocation of cultural codes, as well as metafiction and magic realism—assist or frustrate the reader’s attempt to understand the author’s intentions.
By making writerly readings of realist texts as well as symbolic, psychological, and speculative thought experiments from writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schultz, Octavia Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Fritz Leiber, George R. R. Martin, Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas King, and Kim Stanley Robinson, the implications of these choices can be more easily seen. The reader becomes privy to certain types of information depending on what strategy the writer has chosen, and that choice leads the writer to ever more circumscribed possibilities until the story has fulfilled its author’s intention. Although knowledge of these techniques is typically demanded at the undergraduate level, and there are list-like guides which purport to define them, seeing them in their natural habitat gives the reader a much better sense of what the technique or strategy offers to the author.
This analysis of the techniques used to create engaging stories should be useful for both students and writers who are interested in learning about the diversity of ways in which authors have confronted both narrative and structural questions in the stories they wish to tell. The short story—just to name one fictional form—seems endlessly flexible, but with an understanding of what a particular strategy allows, both the reader and the writer are better equipped to understand the text’s messaging as well as how the chosen technique informs or inhibits its performance.

How to Write an English Paper: Argue, Research, Format, and Edit Mar 17, 2017

by Barry Pomeroy

( 3 )

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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. Many guides on the market are full of information the student does not necessarily need, and tend to be expensive books whose rationale for existence is hundreds of pages devoted to primers on sentence structure, conjugation of verbs, and arcane use of punctuation. This project is meant to answer the need for a quick, coherent guide that focuses more on argument than grammar, and more on research and literary terminology than parts of speech.
With the notion of research changing as quickly in the academic world as it is in the mind of the general public, this guide takes on the task of explaining the different resources available as well as their relative strengths, and how to incorporate material into the essay using both MLA and APA format.
Lastly, the guide gives an editing checklist the reader can use to double-check their own work, offers a description of how their paper might be graded, and takes on the task of explaining constructions as prosaic as punctuation and as arcane as fake transitions and the incorporation of quotes. I also have a list of literary terms commonly used in undergraduate English papers, and offer a few fun exercises to tease your brain, test your knowledge, and boost your self-esteem.

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Vested Interest Jul 7, 2015

by Barry Pomeroy

( 2 )

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When NASA finally loses its funding and the media claims that the public has turned its back on space, only James Looven and Amy, his daughter’s best friend seem to be outraged. Railing against the world’s stupidity, they soon realize that support for the space program is more widespread than they have been led to believe. Lacking government funding, they rally the many thousands who don’t want humanity to die at the bottom of a gravity well, and even while Earth reels from famine and resource scarcity they decide to build their own program.
Working with hundreds of likeminded others they realize that the return to space is not only possible but surprisingly easy. Only when they go further afield do they find that the solar system through a telescope is very different than the reality of stepping on an asteroid. In the distant stretches of the asteroid belt they make a discovery about Vesta that changes forever how humanity thinks about the asteroid as well as the potential of such materials. The only question that remains is whether they want to come back to Earth and her many problems.

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The First Colonist on Mars: Courtesy of the Mars Historical Society Apr 16, 2018

by Barry Pomeroy

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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.
Twenty-five years after Jack Errores wrote his dispatches from the surface, the first colonist on Mars disappeared into history. This authoritative version from the Mars Historical Society tells the story of his achievement and ultimate betrayal. Although some would scoff that a planet so newly settled would already be claiming a history, this transcription is meant to set to rest the many conspiracy theories that Mars was never settled so early—that Jack Errores who devoted his life to the cause was a fiction perpetrated by three national space agencies—and his poignant attempt to record his life on the surface for posterity is either invented or enhanced.
Although initially compiling this history of the First Human Colonist on Mars was meant to explore the potential of independent survival on the surface, the story immediately began to drift toward Jack Errores’ tragic tale. Sent alone to his death over a generation ago, his struggles have come to symbolize survival in the deadly environment that is the Martian surface and the desperation implicit in the attempts to settle the planet.
Now that the news media is overcome by claims about Martian colonization, and some hopeful few are striving to be amongst those chosen for the one-way trip, Mars is again in everyone’s thoughts. Although it remains to be seen if the news is merely unsubstantiated hype, it is worth remembering that before their ink was dry Errores was fighting to survive on a desiccated planet that possesses one percent of Earth’s atmosphere and whose regolith is largely silica and poisonous perchlorates.

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A Storied Winnipeg: Fables and Local Legends Feb 27, 2015

by Barry Pomeroy

( 3 )

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The stories of Winnipeg are as varied as the city itself. Caught in the middle of the continent by the amber of its past glory and its current penury, Winnipeg occupies a rare and beautiful place in the Canadian landscape. Winnipeg is defined by its main road, which merely circles the city, and its tottering buildings sitting on pylons driven deep into the mud of the ancient lake-bed. The principal streets crook across the flat prairie following the ancient whims of cattle and the people maintain their lives as heedless as ants in the grain.
Many Winnipeg stories feature the city as a distant black hole slowly orbited by the suburbs which gain speed so they are not pulled into the event horizon that is the downtown where light does not escape. This collection would probe that black hole, would wander the frigid streets and stand over the odoriferous steaming grills, in order to see how the modern city dweller commutes in the core, lives in apartment buildings built on mud, and works in the far flung reaches of strange industrial parks where a grey moonscape competes with the grey sky for the viewer’s reluctant attention.
Interspersed in the collection, like restless commuters on the buses that ply the unploughed streets, are the Mutes and Norms Newsletters, which detail either the deterioration of their narrator’s mind or some vast city-wide conspiracy. There are also tales of live-in maids in Tuxedo mansions, wheelers and dealers in the real-estate trade, ghostly presences who understand something special about the city, love stories with strange Winnipeg twists, and tales of escape only to return.
We don’t leave, but we can be absorbed into a horizon, lose ourselves in an ad, or disappear into the forest and shelterbelts on the outskirts. Some features of the city are recognizable. The sizable immigrant population, the thousands of dead end jobs and half empty buses with their redolent reminders of those who have ridden them, and the sense—which we are even reluctant to admit to ourselves—that something strange is happening in this city. There is a vortex that draws us, some lodestone against which we feel ungovernable attraction and a wary repulsion.
This collection is about that tension, the taut grasp and thrust that is the largest city in Manitoba, its nodes of the two universities, its religious fanatics who write angry Jesus in the snow and on dirty windows, the many crushed faces of its poor, the backroom dealings that give rise to shoddy infrastructure and corrupt city council.
A city of extremes, Winnipeg is only slowly coming into words, and those words are abrupt and sprawling, glittering and soiled, ecstatic and forlorn.

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Wasted and Wounded: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the early years (Tom Waits' Music to Stories Book 1) Mar 12, 2018

by Barry Pomeroy

( 2 )

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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. Searching for the American dream and distracted by a promise, a woman tosses pennies into liquor bottles in a half moon bar, a fast car leaves the parking lot with the radio on full, even while a knife fight wounds the street and an old man pumps quarters into a one-armed bandit.
The songs tell the story of a man who carries the Midwest on him like a ring he can’t get off, who rattles on the wide streets of the American west like a tin can tied to a junkyard dog and crowds in the eastern cities where the brownstones spill out onto the broad steps of long afternoons. Refusing to be caught by the despair of the endless nights, he jockeys for dollars with the sell-outs, fishes for the glisten of silver among the litter in the alleys, and sleeps under the bridge on a rainy night.

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Historiographic Metafiction: Lying with the Truth Nov 19, 2014

by Barry Pomeroy

( 2 )

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In this project I ground my reading of historiographic metafiction in a series of postmodern texts which work out of and subvert traditional notions of historical writing. I use Linda Hutcheon’s construction of this postmodern genre to investigate the particular literary and historical strategies these texts use and abuse in order to write an alternative history. Beginning by reviewing the theory surrounding historical fiction as well as historiography, I investigate the specific textual strategies that historiographic genres—such as the postmodern novel, the Canadian long poem, the short story and to some extent, the film genre—use to present their self-reflexive interaction between history and fiction.

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The Slippery Signifier: Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes Jan 21, 2021

by Barry Pomeroy

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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.
As children we think a single word can change forever how blossoms fall, or at least that’s what the poem told us. Later, we learn to depend on collections of words. We hope that their jostling Brownian randomness will somehow, eventually, encourage them to settle into a coherent meaning. Once we understand syntax, that words can form coherent structures, we know that more important is the order of their appearance if we want the heavy lifting we are demanding of them to be performed. For many, the final stop on this uneven path is a fascination with the forms, rigidly demanding the exact placement of the slotted word.
Once the forms stretch, we realize that the endlessly plastic word can be twisted to suit nearly any shape. Deforming structure around it as if it were somehow unreal, the word is an arbitrary utterance cast adrift from intention and desire. By that point some are ready to abandon words entirely, and focus instead on what is known, the reliable physicality of the unworded phenomenological world, an image in a mirror, or going even further back, the glorious chaos that was the wordless real of their youth.
Only after many years do we realize that we still rely on the single word, that we ask it to carry the burden of inevitable incoherence, collecting resonance as it tumbles across the page and time, squirming for space, a piglet at a teat, shouldering aside others in an urgent, interminable, demand for meaning.

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The Last Leaf on the Tree: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the last years (Tom Waits' Music to Stories Book 4) Apr 30, 2019

by Barry Pomeroy

$4.59

This fourth and last volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs tells more stories of Waits’ later period beginning with the blues, ballad, and experimental bastards of his musical career from Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. Released in 2006, Orphans was compiled of songs that extended as far back as Rain Dogs and contained many which had not been previously released. I end the book series with Waits’ latest album, Bad as Me, also from Anti-Records in 2011. Bad as Me continues digging in the rich vein Waits had been following since the eighties. Like a miner working a seam, he is tirelessly following the mineral to its source, and has dug deep into the earth itself, releasing the primal holler and backwoods stomp alongside the operatic subtlety of jazz and blues rhythms.
Like the first three volumes of Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs, 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 the later albums. The love story which keeps the protagonist alive and breathing and sparkling through the darker elements of a world gone mad with money and weapons.
Until Waits releases another album, however, this is the last volume of my series. That being said, like thousands of other Waits fans, I eagerly await the next entrance into a world we would never have experienced without his unique talent.

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