Alex Zlatin

I live in Winnipeg. Starving the Gods is my first novel.

For more than a decade I have worked in the dental industry. I run Mint Ops, which handles the operational side of dental practices across Canada: software, administration, marketing, hiring, and the transitions that happen when a practice changes hands. I founded DOMAC, an association for dental office managers, because the people who actually hold a practice together had no professional body of their own. In 2018 I published Responsible Dental Ownership, a non-fiction book about running a practice without letting the business hollow out the reason you opened one.

That is a strange background for science fiction. Having said that, it is closer to this book than it looks.

I spend my working life inside institutions under more strain than they admit. Organizations rarely lie because the people in them are liars. They lie because the truth would require an answer nobody has yet, so the story gets told for one more quarter, and then one more, and the gap between what is said and what is true becomes load-bearing. Starving the Gods is about three civilizations doing exactly that, at a scale where it kills people.

Having said that, I did not write it to make a point. I wrote it because it is a good story. I have always loved science fiction that earns its turns: characters who talk like people, events you do not see coming and cannot argue with afterward, and somewhere underneath, something the book actually wants you to believe. I wanted the scars to be real. Everyone in this book pays for what they can do, and so does everybody standing near them.

The dental work is the day job and I am not finished with it. The creative side is where my head goes to rest. This book, the music I write and produce under UX5, a game when there is time. I am still writing my own story. This one just got finished first.

On AI

This book was written with AI assistance. I consider the tooling normal and the hostility temporary, and the work stands or falls on the reading. There is, because I would rather say it plainly on my own site than have it discovered and framed by someone else.

Getting in touch

alex at starvingthegods dot com. Rights enquiries, review copies, events, or anyone who just finished the book and wants to argue about the ending.

If you would rather be told when the book is out than remember to check, the list is on the front page. Four interludes from the book come with it.