How do you learn from the past if there isn’t one?
Sixty years ago, something awful happened. Something that killed everyone except the people at Blue Ring. Something that caused the Headmasters to appear. But Maple doesn’t know what it was. Because talking about the past is forbidden.
Everyone at Blue Ring has a Headmaster. They sink their sinewy coils into your skull and control you, using your body for backbreaking toil and your mind communicate with each other.
When someone dies, their Headmaster transfers to someone new. But so do the dead person’s memories, and if one of those memories surfaces in the new host’s mind, their brain breaks. That’s why talking about the past is forbidden.
Maple hates this world where the past can’t exist and the future promises only more suffering. And she hates the Headmasters for making it that way. But she doesn’t know how to fight them – until memories start to surface in her mind from someone who long ago came close to defeating the Headmasters.
But whose memories are they? Why aren’t they harming her? And how can she use them to defeat the Headmasters? Maple has to find the answers herself, unable to tell anyone what she’s experiencing or planning—not even Thorn, the young man she’s falling in love with.
Thorn, who has some forbidden secrets of his own . . .
Praise for The Headmasters
“Mark Morton’s The Headmasters is a brilliant science-fiction debut from one of Canada’s best-loved nonfiction writers. This compelling YA novel is a spot-on updating of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic The Puppet Masters for the new millennium, with intricate world-building, a great science-fiction puzzle, and — ironic for a novel about suppressed memories — a main character you’ll never forget. I loved it.” — Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of The Downloaded
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In Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (1996), I explore the origins and histories of more than a thousand food words and cooking terms. The book received very high critical praise from scholars such as Margaret Visser and from food writers such as Corby Kummer, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic. The reviewer for Quill and Quire endorsed the book as being "both education and entertainment" (which is exactly what I was aiming for), and the reviewer for Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries had this to say: "Thoroughly researched, well presented, fascinating, and a wonderful addition to reference collections."
In 1997, I suggested to a friend that we write a book about how people living at the ends of previous centuries celebrated the ends of their centuries. The result was The End: Closing Words for a Millennium, which I published with Gail Noble in 1999. Researching the book was very enjoyable: it was a wonderful opportunity to pore over hundreds of newspapers, journals, and letters that were written in the closing days of other centuries. Being interviewed about the book by CNN was a highlight, and so was the opportunity to turn part of the book into a one-hour documentary for CBC radio.
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In The Lover's Tongue (2003), I put the language of love and sex under scholarly scrutiny, exploring the origins, history, and sociological implications of hundreds of bawdy and clinical terms and phrases. The book received dozens of enthusiastic reviews. The Globe and Mail, for example, said that "Morton is the perfect guide for what, in other hands, could have been a cheesy, pun-filled look at dirty words. Instead, this book is an engaging and informative look at the etymology of words and phrases." In 2005, The Lover's Tongue was republished in the UK as Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk. There too the book received high praise. The Manchester Guardian opined that "no other book that offers such a compendious and up-to-date trove of erotic etymology," while The London Times deemed it "absolutely correct and without fault, beautifully prepared and presented....The reader can hardly fail to be delighted."
My most recent book, Cooking with Shakespeare (2007), was published by Greenwood Publishing and combines two of my longstanding interests: namely, food culture and early modern literature (see, for example, an article about food proverbs that I wrote for The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, published by Scribner's in 2003). Cooking with Shakespeare explores what people in Shakespeare's England ate, how they prepared and served it, and what their ideas were about dietary theory, food laws, pharmacology, and economics. Cooking with Shakespeare was "highly recommended" by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, and was favorably reviewed by Gastronomica, The Midwest Book Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. .
In 1998, I edited the novel In the Hands of the Living God, written by Lillian Bouzane, for Turnstone Press. The book is a fictionalized account of the wife of the fifteenth-century explorer John Cabot. My editing work focused primarily on ensuring that the historical aspects of the book were accurate. I also served as substantive and stylistic editor of the award-winning novel Sins of the Suffragette, written by Allan Levine and published by Great Plains Publications, and also for The Alchemist's Song written by David Wynn Roberts and also published by Great Plains Publications. In 1999, Gail Noble and I co-edited the Fall issue of Prairie Fire. The issue was devoted to "writing at the end of the century," and featured short stories, poetry, and nonfiction by dozens of new and established authors.
In 1999 I began writing a quarterly column for Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture, published by the University of California Press. Since then, I've published about forty articles in that journal, on topics ranging from how white supremacists construe ethnic foods, to the racist connotations of synonyms for "obese," to linguistic sequencing in food pairs (for example, almost everyone says "peanut butter and jam" and "salt and pepper," not "jam and peanut butter" and "pepper and salt"). My Gastronomica columns have been recommended several times in Utne's "Great Reading" Blog. If you'd like to read some of them, here's one about linguistic sequencing and here's one about cannibalism.
The following are some of the columns that I wrote and broadcast for the CBC Radio program Definitely Note the Opera:
