About The Buffalo Kid
John Ross was once a successful business and family man, that is, until the day the company he worked for pulled up its anchors and sailed away, leaving him with no means of paying his mortgage and supporting his family. Forced into bankruptcy, he ends up destitute and homeless; his wife leaves him and takes their two newborns with her. Now, 71 years of age, John Ross has been on the streets for over three decades. To the city, Buffalo, New York, and the people who pass him by, many know him as the Buffalo Kid, the oldest homeless man in town. Scraggly, unshaven, with tattered clothes and living in a cardboard box under a bridge next to the Niagara River, The Kid survives day by day because of the meager handouts he gets. One cold blustery day, with his stomach aching from the pangs of hunger and the brutal Buffalo winter biting at his skin, he walks the streets, sees a stranger approaching, and asks him for money. The man hands him a $50 dollar bill and walks away. Stunned by his generosity and curious to know why he gave him that much money, The Kid follows him and discovers that the stranger is not from Earth, and has come to study us and our culture. He convinces The Kid to help him in his test of humanity, and what ensues is a bizarre collaboration, filled with twists and turns and thrills; moreover, an inspiring story about 2nd chances in life.
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Author Bio:
At the age of 14, glued to a television set as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Réal Laplaine decided he would become Canada’s first astronaut. By the age of 16, still in school and working a part-time job, he financed his own way, learning to fly planes. His plan was to become a bush pilot, figuring that if he could survive the rigors of Canada’s frontier, a profession more or less equivalent to test pilots who were the usual crop for new astronauts, that NASA would accept him as an astronaut. Sadly, he got sidetracked, but he never lost sight of his dream to leave the planet and explore the stars. Today, he pens novels, mostly soft science fiction which focus on how his characters deal with the inevitability of First Contact, their interaction with highly advanced artificial intelligence, and navigating the stars into new realms. He has never considered his work to be just science fiction, because, as we all know, what was considered “science fiction” several decades ago, is now reality. He grew up in Canada, then moved to America where he worked and travelled the world, and where the seeds of his writing career began. Today he lives in Sweden, and in the not too distant future, he plans to reach his dream of space-jockeying into orbit around Earth.