Category: Science Fiction

Story shortlisted for Quantum Shorts

My story “Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, Mary Wu” has been shortlisted in the Scientific American / Tor / Centre for Quantum Technologies flash science fiction competition. Shortlisted stories are listed here: http://shorts2015.quantumlah.org/shortlisted-stories. Prizes are awarded in late January.

Sick of the Apocalypse

I’ve written a little essay, cleverly titled (by the editor) “Apocalypse No” for Arc Magazine’s blog:

I’m sick of the Apocalypse. It’s a tired, worn-out trope and an excuse for lazy writing and I wish it would go away.

 

I’m currently writing a novel set 200 years from now and you know what? It’s hard. It occurs to me that someone writing a novel when the first steam locomotives were just appearing couldn’t possibly have imagined the chain of events that would lead to something like the Facebook phone — not even close. So how the hell can I create something convincing that far in our future? Wouldn’t it be easier to just drop an asteroid/global warming/zombie invasion/plague on everything and then write a novel about people struggling in a world gone to hell?

Read the rest at the Arc Tumblr.

Twentieth Century House Ebook

As an experiment, I’ve created a short ebook containing five speculative fiction stories published over the last decade or so. Titled Twentieth Century House after one of the stories in the collection, it’s available at the low, low price of $1.49. All the stories have been published before in magazines including the Canadian On Spec and Malahat Review, as well as the Tesseracts 11 anthology (edited by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing) and the Intel Tomorrow Project UK.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312

With 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson returned to his careful (and artful) conception of a future that is both believable and enthralling. I was a big fan of the book, and pleased to see it make the Hugo Award nomination list. The Atlantic has a great interview up with Kim today. He had a nice bit about the fiction in science fiction:

Science fiction can explore not just what might happen, but how it might feel, and what it might mean. This means that science fiction has to work as fiction to work at all, which means it must have characters the reader can move inside; the old notion that science fiction was only “about ideas” was not correct. It’s best when the fiction part of it is best.

I find in KSR’s best work a mixture of character and plot and sheer intellectual effort — the Mars trilogy had it, and 2312 has it too. His thinking on future models for economical and social justice, for instance, is very thought-provoking.

The idea that economic systems contain elements of their precursors and their successors is a version of Raymond Williams’s idea of the residual and emergent, in which aspects of the present have their deepest roots in the past and future. Naturally science fiction takes an interest in this, by projecting a future history, thus portraying both what is emerging now, and also what persists and will be in the future a residual.

The whole interview is well worth a read. Read the rest at The Atlantic.