THE NOVEL DEAD AIR IS ON THE WAY

Good news on the publishing front these days. My radio-industry thriller novel “Dead Air” is at the printers and will be available in early October. It’s already available for pre-order through Amazon and Chapters-Indigo online. It’s the story of a morning radio guy whose life is already in a shambles when he realizes that someone wants him dead. Marked for death by an unknown enemy, he’s forced to examine what still makes life worth living.

I’ve been a broadcaster for more than 30 years, so the novel has a lot of insider knowledge.

The story’s set in my home city of Sudbury and I’ll be doing book signings here, then rolling the novel out across the country.

In the meantime, Tesseracts Sixteen has just been published and I’m thrilled to be a part of it (see some of the notable writers also included in my last posting below). Although I likely can’t make it, a number of the authors will be doing a book signing at the Bakka-Phoenix book store in Toronto on Saturday September 29^th at 3:00 pm. At least I’ll be able to do a book-signing and reading event in Sudbury along with editor Mark Leslie and writer Sean Costello October 4^th at the Vale Living With Lakes Centre.

FEATURE INTERVIEW IN ON SPEC

My newest published story has just appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic. It’s a light fantasy story called “A Taste Of Time” about a little girl who loves to pick blueberries, but something strange is going on—she knows things she has no right knowing. Equally exciting, the story is accompanied by a feature author interview with me—an extensive interview done by Roberta Laurie. Thanks for making me sound interesting Roberta!

Since On Spec is a top-notch fiction magazine that consistently presents a very high quality of writing, it’s always flattering to be a part of it, and the feature interview is great exposure.

If you can’t find a copy of the latest On Spec at your favourite book or magazine store, ask for it. Or you can buy online through their website (where they were thoughtful enough to include a link to my own website).

Next up: my story “Once Upon A Midnight” inspired by Edgar Allan Poe will be published in Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound due out in September from Edge Books, along with such notables as Robert J. Sawyer, Kevin J. Anderson, Sean Costello, and Neil Peart (yes, the drummer for Rush!) The Tesseracts series has a venerable history, and I’m ecstatic to be included. And then my novel Dead Air will be published in October by Scrivener Press. Good times.

TRY TO KEEP UP

Science Fiction writers have good reason to try to keep up with all of the new scientific knowledge being discovered. We don’t want to be caught with egg on our faces. Once, it might have been fairly easy to stay current. Now, the amount of new information is mind-boggling.

Sure, it’s easier than ever to check the latest facts online, but many times we don’t feel the need to do that because we’re writing about something we “know”. That’s the trap: often the things we think we know are actually only theories. And theories have a way of being proven wrong.

What brought this to mind this week was an episode of “Quirks and Quarks” on CBC radio. For many years, it’s been thought that the Clovis people—North America’s first human inhabitants—originated in Asia and came here from Siberia over a land bridge at what is now the Bering Strait. But a new book, Across Atlantic Ice - The Origin of America's Clovis Culture by Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley argues that the evidence of that human migration route has too many serious weaknesses. The most notable problems are that no distinctively Clovis artifacts have been found in Alaska or Siberia, and relics found along the west coast are newer than those that have been discovered in New England. Stanford and Bradley claim that Clovis flint blades and other tools bear a very close resemblance to a European people archaeologists call Solutrean (after a site near Solutre, France), so the scientists theorize that the Clovis people actually came from Europe across the Atlantic in boats (because of the ice age, the ocean level was much lower and continental shelves were exposed to west of Ireland and east of the Grand Banks, making the trip much shorter than it would be today.)

Is this important for an SF writer to know? Well, it happens that I make a brief mention of the Clovis people in the next novel I’m now outlining. It’s only a small detail, barely relevant to the plot, but the book could have been out of date before it’s even written!

On an unrelated note, my last post was confirmed this past Tuesday as the startup company Planetary Resources (with Peter Diamandis, Eric Anderson, James Cameron et al) will indeed be focused on mining asteroids. In fact they already have contracts involving interim steps in the process, which have given them a “positive cash flow” right out of the gate. I guess that’s how they became billionaires.

On another unrelated note, here’s a link just for fun to a new short video of Saturn, its moons, its storms, and its rings, pieced together from stills taken by the Cassini and Voyager missions. Enjoy the journey.

SPACE EXPLORATION: RUNNING ON EMPTY?

I recently read an article that suggested humanity’s efforts to explore space are quietly being abandoned. The idea was triggered by the recent transport of the space shuttle Discovery to Washington DC to become a museum display. The argument goes that, while surveys show citizens still want and expect to see a future that includes Star Trek-like space travel, governments are quietly cutting funds and letting the dream die.

While there’s some truth to that, it ignores the way the private sector has been stepping up to the plate, and it’s been doing so in a big way lately. We’ve all heard about Richard Branson’s plans with Virgin Galactic to take millionaire thrill-seekers like Ashton Kutcher to the edge of space, and you may have dismissed it as little more than a carnival stunt. But space tourism is a perfectly valid way to fund other projects, and I’m sure Branson won’t be content with joyrides alone.

Even more immediately promising is PayPal co-founder Elon Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). NASA has just given the go-ahead for SpaceX to launch a test cargo mission to the International Space Station on April 30^th. The mission calls for SpaceX’s unmanned Dragon space capsule, launched by their Falcon 9 rocket, to haul a cargo of food and supplies to the station and bring other cargo back to Earth. It will be the first time a private spacecraft has visited the station, but it’s part of a longer contract to supply the ISS for the next few years. The Falcon rockets have performed well so far, and the Dragon capsule is designed to be able to land on the Moon or other planets in years to come.

Then there’s the Google Lunar X PRIZE offering $20 million to the first nongovernment team that can land a robot on the moon capable of traveling a half a mile or so and sending high-definition video back to Earth before the end of 2015. Second prize is $5 million, and other bonuses are available. A reported twenty-six groups are in the running.

And this coming Tuesday April 24^th a new space exploration company called Planetary Resources will be unveiled at a press conference. The high profile names associated with the venture include film director James Cameron, Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, X PRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, former NASA mission manager Chris Lewicki, and politician Ross Perot's son, among others. The project to be announced Tuesday is promised to involve a new industry that will overlay space exploration and natural resources. Industry watchers believe it will be a plan to mine asteroids.

So maybe governments are losing some of their enthusiasm, but private entrepreneurs are stepping forward to pick up the slack and, to me, that signals that the future of space exploration is still bright!

TAKE A RIDE ON A ROCKET

Here some pretty amazing footage taken from cameras aboard the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters. Experience the ride from start to finish. We won't see this kind of thing anymore.

Whether or not you were a fan of the space shuttle program, the first privately-owned space cargo delivery business is almost ready to begin. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX plans to launch the first commercial cargo load of supplies to the International Space Station on April 30. After about 12 contracted cargo runs, SpaceX will start ferrying astronauts to the space station.

We'll be watching closely on April 30 and keeping fingers crossed that this will be a productive new step outward into space.

In the meantime Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic continues to sign up passengers for its planned tours to the edge of space. The newest to make a booking? Actor Ashton Kutcher will be Virgin Galactic's 500th passenger, if everything goes according to plan, though there's still no official start date for flights to begin. The ride is expected to cost about $200,000 per person for a flight about three-and-a-half hours in total (only six minutes of weightlessness).

The times they are a changin'...hopefully for the better.

STUFF HAPPENS AND EINSTEIN STILL RULES

If you follow scientific news at all you probably saw the headlines in September of last year when an experiment done by a particle accelerator at the CERN facilities in Switzerland appeared to show neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light (see my earlier post). A beam of neutrinos sent from the Super Proton Synchotron in Geneva seemed to arrive at a detector 730 kilometers away in Italy 60 nanoseconds faster than a beam of light sent at the same time. Of course, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says that nothing can go faster than light, so this was potentially momentous news.

Fast forward to this week (but not faster than light!) and the scientists involved have announced that the results of the experiment are in doubt. They may have been caused by a data transmission problem. A fiber-optic cable that fed data from a GPS used in the timing procedure wasn’t as tight as it should have been, and that bad connection could potentially have produced a time discrepancy that suspiciously matches the 60 nanoseconds at the heart of the furor.

Now, this isn’t a clear-cut conclusion that the experiment was a bust, just an admission that an equipment problem could have accounted for the controversial results. The smell test says it probably did, and Einstein is still on his throne.

Which also means warp speed is still fiction. For now!

BACK TO THE BASICS IN GENETIC ENGINEERING?

At some point in Earth’s history, the first living cell was produced from what’s popularly called a “witches brew” of chemicals in the water of our newborn planet. Then the next big leap was when those first single-cell organisms became multicellular, allowing for specialization of function and the beginnings of the diversity we know today. We’re not sure how that happened, or exactly what triggered it, so for decades chemists have searched for the answer with a wide range of experiments.

Mostly, when we think about evolution, we think in terms of major changes occurring over millions of years, if not billions. Especially a transition as pivotal as from single cells to multicellularity. But now a team of scientists at the University of Minnesota has encouraged cells of simple brewer’s yeast to evolve into multicellular clusters within just two months!

How? By creating conditions that forced it to evolve. Their process is described in a good Wired article here, but essentially the researchers created an environment in which yeast cells that clustered together were given an advantage in reproducing—so that’s exactly what the cells did. Within two months they’d formed permanent multicellular clusters of cells, featuring specialized components and ready to diversify.

The lead researchers suggest that, when we want to produce specialized organisms for industry or medicine, complex genetic engineering might be far more complicated than necessary. We might be better off shaping evolution by doing the job that natural selection has done, but doing it faster. Farmers have done something similar for centuries breeding animals and crops.

To my way of thinking, that method seems a lot less likely to produce unintentional genetic creations that might prove unwelcome or even dangerous.

Sometimes simple is better.

THE ETHICS OF SCIENCE AND SF

I’ve been a science fiction fan all my life, and it seems to me that the very best science fiction makes us ask questions. SF stories very often start with a “what if?” kind of premise, making predictions about future technology, or turning a concept on its head and then seeing where the premise will lead. That’s the writer’s job: letting our inner prognosticator loose with a healthy dose of imagination. We say to the reader, “Here’s a direction this could go, and what I think things will be like if it does.” Then it becomes the reader’s job to decide whether or not the end result is really something we want.

The same thing could be true about developments in real science if we know they’re taking place. Did you know that scientists have produced monkeys that glow in the dark (and pigs, and kittens)? Genetically-engineered horse/zebra and lion/tiger cross breeds? Insects and rats that can be controlled like robots by remote control? A light-activated machine controlled by a disembodied eel’s brain? You’ve heard about Dolly the sheep, but did you know that many other animals have been successfully cloned, including wolves? You can see examples of all of these things and many more in a TED talk by bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe. Wolpe doesn’t give his own opinion about anything—that’s the point. These developments have the potential to affect all of us, and we all have a stake in the decisions made about them: the ethical and practical questions raised by the ability to create such things.

Wolpe says we’ve begun a third stage of evolution: directed evolution, or evolution by design. It’s not just the realm of science fiction anymore.

In our SF it’s OK to let our imagination run anywhere it has the ability to go.

Can we say the same thing about our science?

THE OLD AND THE NEW

I spent this past weekend in Niagara Falls, Ontario, participating in something called “New York Comes to Niagara” in the Algonkian series of conferences. If you’re an aspiring writer who takes your writing seriously as a profession, you’re probably hoping to get an agent and a publishing deal with one of the big New York-based publishers some day. The Algonkian conferences, led by author, editor and agent Michael Neff, are completely focused on making the perfect pitch to those powerful people, and how that pitch can also act as a diagnostic tool to make sure your novel has stayed on the track you meant for it. The approach worked for me: pitching the concept of a thriller novel of mine, I got interest from a major Canadian agent and two very high level New York editors. I still have to whip the manuscript into perfect shape and see how those leads pan out, but I could have spent years sending mail-out queries without getting that kind of response. You can find out more about Algonkian conferences here.

That’s the “old” part of my title: the publishing industry in its traditional form, focused on what a friend of mine calls “tree books” (as opposed to e-books). And I think that traditional industry still has a lot of life left in it, or I wouldn’t be pursuing it so hard.

But my most recently-published short story—my sixth—is my first that may never appear in print form. It’s called “Sand From A Broken Hourglass” and it’s included in the 2^nd issue of a brand new horror/SF magazine called Penumbra, available for download in .pdf format as of yesterday. An issue of Penumbra costs just $3.99 US and it’s a great looking magazine, with quality writing and top-notch art, too, as you can see from the cover. But it’s electronic only—no print. Penumbra was launched at the beginning of October along with the launch of its parent company Musa Publishing. Because Musa publishes in e-form it’s able to bring out new books at a mind-boggling rate, all with good cover art and at very affordable prices. They say it’s all about the story and the author.

Is this the “new” model of publishing? Well so far it’s one of many new models, but it does look promising.

And I guess my point is, each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but there’s room for all. Just as long as people still love to read.

ANOTHER SHORT STORY PUBLISHED

I just found out that another short story of mine is now available in print. “Once Upon A Midnight” has just been published in the anthology In Poe’s Shadow from Dark Opus Press, and is available through Amazon.com. The anthology consists of new short speculative fiction inspired by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe—my own story is about a woman obsessed with a failed relationship who would be better off concentrating on her job, since she works in a test facility for the deadliest of biological agents! The book has interesting cover art (see an earlier post) and gothic fonts for titles. I’m eager to read it, but I haven’t received my copy yet!

On another front, Musa Publishing has now had its official launch, including the first issue of their speculative fiction e-magazine Penumbra. My short story “Sand From A Broken Hourglass” will be in their second issue due out November 1^st.

I hope you enjoy them.