Mostrando resultados por autor "Dale Olausen" en Todas las categorías

A sexual predator stalks the city. He has chosen his unwary victim - he waits, he watches, he stalks. But, who stalks the stalker? I wrote this some time back, when there were a number of rapes in the Toronto Scarborough area by someone who became known as “the balcony rapist” or "the Scarborough rapist". At the time, he hadn’t been caught yet, though he was arrested later, for these and other horrible crimes. So, the story is fictional, but loosely based on that era’s events, though with purely imagined plot twists. I suppose this was a sort of fictional rumination on evil, ...

“We have reason to believe that the last expedition had made contact with the aliens and had gained some vital intelligence about them. We know that, but that’s all we know. All other contact with the expedition was lost before we received any of the details. “Agent X was the only surviving member of that expedition. A rescue team found him on a small craft, orbiting Mendel. He couldn’t even speak and he soon fell into a coma, the state in which he was when you began your treatments. His mind was very diseased.” “And you need us to dig that information out of his diseased mind,...

What follows is an account of a few weeks one long-ago summer, when I was 19 and was working for the Canadian National Railway (CNR) on a railroad construction gang, in the wilds of north-central British Columbia, Canada. The journal is in the form of a letter, that was never sent. Decades later, I think it has an interesting historical resonance. At times I come off like a callow youth – I plead guilty as charged. I swore a lot more in those days than I do now, but in places the writing is surprisingly good, at least in my humble opinion. And the story has a compelling narrative arc. ...

An attractive woman in a blue suit handed a dossier to an older man in a blue uniform. “Give me a quick recap”, he said. “A geophysical crew went into the Canadian north. There were some regrettable accidents among a few ex-military who had become geophysical contractors after their service in the forces. A young man and young woman went temporarily mad from the stress of seeing that. They imagined things, terrible things. But both are known to have vivid imaginations; we have childhood records to verify that. It was all very sad. That’s the official story.” He raised an eyebrow. ...

What follows is an account of a ten day journey through western North America during a working trip, delivering lumber from Edmonton Alberta to Dallas Texas, and returning with oilfield equipment. The writer had the opportunity to accompany a friend who is a professional truck driver, which he eagerly accepted. He works as a statistician for the University of Alberta, and is therefore is generally confined to desk, chair, and computer. The chance to see the world from the cab of a truck, and be immersed in the truck driving culture was intriguing. In early May 1997 they hit the road. Some ...

This story is titled “Beyond the Blue Door, Part 2”, as it is a companion piece to Helena Puumala’s original story “Beyond the Blue Door”. In that story, the teenage girl Jennie takes refuge from domestic abuse in a perhaps illusory, perhaps supernatural, world that she has discovered that exists beyond a hidden blue door in an old farmhouse. The story can be interpreted in many ways – the Blue Door may represent a psychological escape mechanism for a traumatized youth, or it may represent a transition to a hopeful alternative reality. The conclusion to the story may be read ...

This story is composed of two interconnected narratives, with Part 1 describing a tragic family situation that is resolved by the events in Part 2. The families involved are separated in both time and space, but their fates intertwine in this location which has become known by the locals as "the haunted park". Philosophically, the story explores the notion of a ghosts and the afterlife from a several different perspectives. And of course, it is just a satisfying ghost story. The characters in Part 2 are also found in Helena Puumala’s selection of ‘Lake’ stories, entitled Five Holiday ...

In the field known as Astrobiology, there is a research program called SETI, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. At the heart of SETI, there is a mystery known as The Great Silence, or The Fermi Paradox, named after the famous physicist Enrico Fermi. Essentially, he asked “If they exist, where are they?”. Some quite cogent arguments maintain that if there was extraterrestrial intelligence, they should have visited the Earth by now. This story, a bit tongue in cheek, gives a fictional account of one explanation for The Great Silence, known as The Zoo Hypothesis. Are we a ...

Just what might a gambler give up, to go on the winning streak of his life? Even he can't know for sure. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus legend is given a Damon Runyon spin, in this short story.