At first, the column quite often focused on something related to events at the Science Centre; so, when we had an exhibit on memory, I wrote a column about memory (and also wrote Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star, but I digress).

When I left the Science Centre to become a full-time freelancer in 1993, I took the column with me. It kept running in the Sun and on CBC, but the various weeklies around the province who had been willing to take it for free refused to pay for it (including my own former employer, the Weyburn Review! Not that I’m still bitter), so I quit sending it to them.

At some point the Red Deer Advocate picked it up, and for a while the St. John’s Evening Telegram ran it, but though I periodically tried to get more newspapers interested in it, nobody ever wanted it. I did build a pretty good list of email subscribers, though, as people signed on through my website.

The Evening Telegram only ran it for two or three years. The Leader-Post kept it, though it got much shorter (in the Sunday Sun it used to run over 1,000 words, and by the end it was under 700). Then, three years ago or so, CBC decided 17 years of me as a science columnist was enough, and they stopped using me for that (though I did other things). And then, just last year, the Leader-Post, ordered by the financially struggling CanWest to cut costs and use fewer freelancers, decided to cut my column (because the $25 a week they were paying me–if you call that pay–was apparently going to save the chain from bankruptcy).

I had almost pulled the plug on the column with the CBC stopped carrying it, but at least I still had two newspapers, even though what they were paying barely made the column worthwhile. When the Leader-Post dropped it, that left only the Red Deer paper, and while I was happy to keep appearing there, it really no longer made any kind of business sense to keep writing the column. Still, I plugged on for a while because of all the email subscribers and because the column provided regular updates to this site, and helped drive traffic to it.

But…not very much traffic. And as I took on more and more editing duties with the Fine Lifestyles stable of magazines here in Saskatchewan over the past year, while still writing fiction (with a five-book YA fantasy series beginning this fall, my first adult fantasy for DAW and other projects), writing the column went so far on the back burner that it was anybody’s guess which day of the week I would get to it, if I did at all–and when I realized this week I’d missed two weeks without writing a column at all, I realized it was time to pull the plug.

So the science column is history, after more than 20 years. That’s a pretty good run of columns.

If anybody were willing to pay enough for it to make it worth my while, I’d love to keep writing it. But, given the circumstances…

I’m going to keep scanning the science sites for interesting items, but in future, I’m more likely to just put up a short post with a link rather than writing about it myself.

If you’ve been a reader of the column, I hoped you enjoyed it! And if you haven’t and are wondering what you’ve missed, well, pretty much every one of those 20 years’ worth of columns is right here on edwardwillett.com. Lots there to keep you reading.

Heck, at one a week, it will take you 20 years.

It’s a great place to find all my books listed in one hand-dandy location. Be the first on your block to collect them all! (Hey, that approach works for toy-stuffed breakfast cereals…)

It also echoes these blog posts. Which means you could be reading this post on Amazon, and discover a link to the page you’re already reading…hopefully this will not result in an endless recursive loop, collapsing down to a black hole from which you will never escape.

Someone click the link and find out for sure!

Nice!

• Do newspapers have a future?
• Is Twitter a threat to morality and ethics?
• A cure for honey bee colony depopulation syndrome (a.k.a. colony collapse disorder)?
• I think, therefore I Tweet
• Best way to clean up the environment? Make everyone richer.
• Internet to be an “unreliable toy” by 2012?
• A drug to help recover “lost” memories?

At just about the time I came to that conclusion, Justine Larbelestier‘s new site went live. I liked the look of it, and she seemd pleased with the service she had gotten from PagedMedia, which specializes in writers’ sites. So I contacted Stephanie Leary there and we began the process of designing the new, improved, edwardwillett.com.

And now, just in time for the launch of Terra Insegura, here it is! It’s much cleaner and simpler. Not everything made the journey over from the old site, which was getting quite dated-looking, but among the things that did make the journey were all of my science columns, reconfigured as blog posts, dated (as close as I could figure, anyway) to when they were originally written. (Which is why I now have “blog posts” that predate the World Wide Web by two years!)

I suspect I’ll take a big hit in visitors until the search engines catch up with the new URLs for my columns, which have driven the bulk of the traffic to this site. But it needed to be done!

So take time to poke around the site and let me know what you think. Now that it’s up and running I’ll be tweaking it myself going forward.

And thanks to PagedMedia for all their work!

• Never mind Darwin: hockey players as religious icons
• Chessmen that debate every move
• You are reading Futurismic. You find a post about how you imagine the events described in narratives…
• A new use for social networking technology: examining patents
• Are religious skeptics bound for demographic doom?
• Thought-controlled wheelchair developed in Italy
• Fear-free living through pharmaceuticals

I’m just behind playwright Norm Foster (whom I got to see performing in one of his own plays in Kincardine, Ontario, the summer before last), and just ahead of a Lucy Maud Montgomery site.

I’d love to think it’s because I’m such a popular author, but actually it’s because there are almost 20 years worth of science columns at the site. You can hardly search for anything science-related without finding one of my columns somewhere in the mix!

Oh, and if you’re wondering, I averaged 335 visitors a day at edwardwillett.com over the past month. Not bad, but not exactly Instapundit territory…

*Not a reference to The Prisoner. Sorry.

Take a listen and check out the lyrics at Grasping for the Wind (The Linkup Meme Song).

I’m thrilled to be included!

(And actually, as you’ll see, Hasenpfeffer was hardly the hardest thing he had to work in to his lyrics…)

A few highlights:

This book is a good read. The author’s idea of translators is an interesting one…If translating between human languages is not easy, what can be said about translating between languages from different species?

…

When reading this book, more than once Asimov’s Foundation series came to mind. Asimov created the Mule, a man who had thought-projecting abilities, in order to insert an unpredictable element to stand in the way of the Foundation’s plans, and also described the people from the Second Foundation, who only communicate telepathically among themselves. I do not like the way telepathy has been used, both in Asimov’s Foundation series and in Willett’s book, because it seems to me that, if telepathy exists, then it is more interesting to explore it deeply than to have the story only scratch its surface….I think telepathy and thought projection are under-explored in this book.

The other similarity to Asimov’s work is that an impending war is suppressed because of religious authority here, too. In both cases, the evil plans of a military leader are frustrated because of a last-minute communication by a priest. In any case, I marvel at the their description of peoples/species who are both technologically advanced and religious. That almost convinces me that humans have always been and will always be religious.

Nice to see new readers still discovering my first adult SF book!