Lynda Williams likes to claim heredity explains her imagination and flair for drama. Williams' father read her epic poetry before she could read and her mother's grandfather was a Welsh bard who wrote a book of sermons. Her maternal great-great-grandfather was supposedly made a cuckold of a King of England (while he was attending a royal birth in his capacity as a physician).

By day, as a Prince George librarian, Williams is an "educational technologist.";
By night she explores gender roles and rules in a futuristic fantasy fiction world that is dependent on bio-engineering. In her novel The Courtesan Prince (2005), the first instalment of her planned ten-novel Okal Rel Universe series, Williams invented two ideologically opposed planetary societies, both colonizing space by cloning. Connections to planet earth have long been severed and 200 years have passed since the Killing Reach War. High-tech and egalitarian Reetions remain averse to the neo-feudal and barbaric Gelacks.

In her follow-up, Righteous Anger (Calgary: Edge $22.95), Williams continues to explore the two warring cultures. The Reetions are socially transparent and regulated by the computer, the Gelacks are genetically enhanced, highly religious and regulated by the Okal Rel Sword law. In particular, Righteous Anger focuses on the fortunes, awkward fate and fighting skills of Horth Nersal, a half-breed who was conceived as the result of a treaty marriage to bring peace between two disparate factions. 1-894063-38-4

[BCBW 2007]