E730 - Dale L. Sproule - Gods of the New Wilderness Series that blends philosophy, AI, and myth

EPISODE 730 - Dale L. Sproule - Gods of the New Wilderness Series that blends philosophy, AI, and myth

Author and long-time speculative fiction writer Dale L Sproule joins Dave to explore how the writing and publishing landscape has transformed over the past several decades and what that means for today’s authors. Speaking from Toronto, after years on Canada’s west coast, Dale reflects on how the shift from traditional print to online and self-publishing has forced writers to take ownership of every stage of the process. Writing, he says, is the fun part; what comes after is learning to assess if a manuscript is truly ready and finding the right people to help you make it better.

Dale shares practical, experience-based insights on the value of writers groups, both in person and online. He talks about how hearing your work read aloud exposes awkward phrasing, weak passages and moments that do not ring true, and how feedback must always be weighed against your own vision rather than automatically accepted. In his view, developing as a writer means learning to distinguish between advice that improves your story and suggestions that simply change it.

The conversation moves into Dale’s varied creative background as a painter, publisher and editor, and how those skills now allow him to manage cover art and book design himself. From there he tackles the tensions around AI in the arts, acknowledging the genuine anxiety in the creative community, especially among visual artists, while also recognizing that some AI-assisted work is producing astonishing, genuinely new forms of expression. 

Dale’s science fiction series, Gods of the New Wilderness, which imagines a world devastated by an immense solar event that wipes out electronic technology. In its aftermath, a biological computer grown in the root network of a forest evolves into a society of sentient trees that rebuild their world using the remnants of human knowledge, mimicking human culture, philosophy and even individual historical figures inside a vast virtual space.

At the heart of his story is a deeply human, allegorical conflict: a girl overwhelmed by the flood of information from this forest intelligence learns to communicate through reworked lyrics of long-lost songs, while her powerful, psychopathic sister exploits that knowledge, torturing both sibling and forest to rebuild technology and consolidate control. Dale describes how the AI-like forest becomes the moral center of the tale, gradually developing empathy and emotional awareness, while some of the humans lose theirs, flipping the usual “AI as villain” trope on its head.

Dale closes by sharing where listeners can find his work, including his Gods of the New Wilderness series and earlier horror collections, and by reflecting on the urgency he feels, in his seventies, to get long-gestating projects onto the page. 

Key takeaway: Writing today asks you to be both artist and architect of your own career. Community, careful feedback and ethical clarity around new tools like AI can help you protect your voice, tell more original stories and build worlds that still feel deeply, recognizably human.

https://godsofthenewwilderness.com/

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