I came away from the project with a great admiration for William Bligh, who is surely one of the more grievously wronged-by-history men in the history of the British Empire.

Here’s the introduction and about half of the (very long) first chapter of The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie.

And, of course, a link to where you can buy it on Amazon!

***

Introduction

Boom!

The single cannon shot from HMS Duke rang out over the choppy gray water of England’s Portsmouth Harbor. It was 8 A.M. on Wednesday, September 12, 1792, and the Duke had just hoisted a flag indicating that a court martial was in process.

Thirty minutes later, ten prisoners were led from the gun room of HMS Hector and loaded aboard one of the Hector’s boats. British Marines in bright red uniform jackets stood at attention as the boat’s crew dipped their oars and began the journey to the Duke, moored in the outer harbor.

More than an hour later, with the Marines still standing at attention, the boat reached the Duke. The prisoners were formally taken aboard, and then led into the captain’s great cabin at the very stern of the ship to face the twelve captains who would serve as their judges and the Judge Advocate who would run the court. Also present were the prisoners’ counselors, and various witnesses.

The Judge Advocate, Moses Greetham, began reading from the “Circumstantial letter” which laid out the details of the case: the ten men were accused of mutiny, a crime punishable by death.

Specifically, they were accused of the most famous mutiny of all time: the mutiny on His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, the ship once commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh.

For more than two centuries now, that mutiny has captured the imagination of the world, inspiring histories, plays, novels, at least one stage musical, and five motion pictures.

Oddly enough, it all started with breadfruit.

Chapter 1: The Voyage of the Bounty

In 1688, while sailing around the world, a naturalist (and occasional pirate) named William Dampier noted an interesting new fruit from the island of Guam:

“The bread-fruit (as we call it) grows on a large tree…The fruit…is of a round shape and has a thick tough rind. When the fruit is ripe it is yellow and soft; and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of this island use it for bread: they gather it when full grown while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven…the inside is soft, tender, and white.”[i]

Later explorers, including Captain Cook (the first European to visit Hawaii and Australia) also extolled the virtues of the breadfruit. The fruit was so much like bread that sailors actually preferred it to their own bread. (That’s not surprising, since the bread served in the middle of a long voyage was a kind of cracker made of flour, water, and salt known as “hardtack” or “ship’s biscuit.” Ship’s biscuit was so hard it often had to be soaked before it could be eaten. It was also occasionally infested by the worm-like larvae of beetles.)

As early as 1775, the Society for West India Merchants saw the potential in breadfruit as a source of food for slave on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The Society offered a hundred pounds to the first person who could bring living breadfruit trees to England.

A Passion for Botany

Among those with businesses interests in the West Indies was Joseph Banks. Born in 1743, Banks was independently wealthy and passionately interested in natural history—particularly botany, the study of plants. When he was twenty-one he collected numerous never-before-seen specimens of plants along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, England’s top scientific society, when he was just twenty-three.

He next joined Captain James Cook aboard the Endeavour when he set sail in August 1768 to carry British astronomers to Tahiti to observe the planet Venus crossing the disk of the sun.

The ship’s visit to Tahiti seized the public’s imagination upon the Endeavour’s return to England in 1771, even though the island had first been reached by an English ship four years earlier. Banks had a lot to do with the public’s sudden interest. He returned with thousands of specimens, drawings and paintings.

In 1778, after a final voyage to Iceland, Banks was elected president of the Royal Society. For decades, very few expeditions of science or exploration were undertaken without his consultation.

Banks wrote and received tens of thousands of letters from all over the world, full of questions and scientific observations. More than a few urged that the breadfruit tree be imported as a new food source for the West Indies.

Banks could see the fruit’s potential. He convinced the British government to mount an official expedition, announced in February 1787, to bring back specimens of the plant.

A former merchant ship called the Bethia, approved by Banks, was purchased and renamed His Majesty’s Armed Vessel (HMAV) Bounty. (The Bounty was too small to qualify for the designation His Majesty’s Ship [HMS]).

Command of The Bounty was awarded to Lieutenant William Bligh.

Enter William Bligh

William Bligh, born September 9, 1754, was the son of Francis Bligh, customs officer at Plymouth, and Jane Pearce, a widow Francis had married just ten months earlier.

Reality vs. the Movie: A Cabin Boy at Age Seven?

Throughout this book, we’ll be comparing real-life events to the way they were described or depicted in the 1984 movie The Bounty, produced by Dino de Laurentiis. In that movie, Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) tells Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) that he has been at sea since he was twelve.

In fact, William Bligh first appears in naval records as a ship’s servant on the Monmouth at the age of seven—but it’s unlikely he actually went to sea at that age.

In the 1700s, Royal Navy captains would often enter youngsters from well-connected families onto the books, providing them with valuable “sea time.” Sea time was important because, to become a lieutenant, a young man had to appear on a ship’s roster for six years, and serve as a midshipman or master’s mate for at least two years of the six.[ii] Appearing on a ship’s roster at a young age allowed the boy to step straight into a midshipman’s position and take his lieutenant’s exam sooner.

Bligh probably first went to sea for real at age sixteen, shortly after his mother died.

In 1770 Bligh signed on to the Hunter as an able seaman. This was a typical classification for potential officers on ships where all the positions for midshipmen—officers in training—were filled. Six months later a midshipman’s position opened up, and Bligh was promoted.

From ages seventeen to twenty Bligh served as a midshipman on the Crescent, sailing to Tenerife and the West Indies. In 1774 he joined the Ranger, temporarily reduced to able seaman again, as she hunted smugglers in the Irish Sea.

At age twenty-one, Bligh learned that Captain Cook had selected him as sailing master of the Resolution for Cook’s third expedition. Cook must have heard a good report of Bligh’s navigational capabilities. He may also have known of Bligh’s talent for drawing. Cook wanted all his officers to be able to construct charts and accurately sketch the various places in which the ship might anchor.[iii]

Sailing with Captain Cook

With Cook, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), New Zealand, Tahiti, and various Pacific islands. Cook also sailed up the west coast of North America in a failed search for the Northwest Passage (a more direct route from Europe to the Pacific that would avoid the stormy seas around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America).

Bligh must have paid close attention to Cook’s methods for keeping his crew healthy on long voyages, because he later implemented some of those methods on the Bounty. Second to Cook himself, he was responsible for creating charts and surveys, and also drew accurate sketches of birds, animals, and landscapes.

On February 14, 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, Bligh witnessed the murder of Captain Cook by natives. In Bligh’s view, the murder happened because the Marines guarding Cook did not do their duty.[iv] The tragedy affected Bligh not only personally but professionally. Bligh’s family connections were just good enough to get him into the Navy as a midshipman, but he had been counting on Cook’s influence to help further his career. (In the Royal Navy in that era, who you knew was often more important than what you knew.)

In February 1781, Bligh married Elizabeth Betham on the Isle of Man. After serving on a variety of ships for a few months near the end of the American Revolution, Bligh ended up on the Isle of Man with his wife and new daughter. In the scaled-back peacetime Navy, no officer’s berths were available.

The peacetime Navy paid only two shillings a day, so Bligh had to find work. The Navy granted his request for permission to sail on merchant ships. From mid-1783 until he was appointed commander of the Bounty, he commanded ships belonging to his wife’s wealthy uncle, Duncan Campbell, carrying goods from England to the West Indies and returning with rum and sugar.

His careful drawings and proven navigational skills probably recommended him to the Admiralty as commander of Sir Joseph Banks’s breadfruit expedition. Navigational skills were important because, once he’d retrieved breadfruit from Tahiti, the Admiralty wanted him to chart the Endeavour Straits, a narrow, dangerous passage separating Australia (then called New Holland) and New Guinea).[v] Cook had run aground there. The Admiralty hoped Cook’s sailing master might do better.

There’s no evidence Banks ever met Bligh. But Bligh, knowing the career value of a powerful patron, thanked Banks profusely for command of the Bounty, and wrote: “I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust…”[vi]

HMAV Bounty

The Bounty was a three-masted merchant vessel, built just 2 1/2 years earlier. She was 85 feet, 1 1/2 inches long on the upper deck and 24 feet 4 inches wide. At just 220 tons, she was much smaller than any of Cook’s ships had been.

Because she was so small, she was rated as a cutter. That mattered because a cutter did not rate a captain or a commander as a commanding officer, but only a lieutenant. That, in turn, meant Bligh would not be getting a promotion, as he had hoped.

On a voyage expected to last at least two years, the difference between a lieutenant’s and commander’s pay was considerable. Bligh would earn just £70 a year. (As a merchant captain under Duncan Campbell, he’d been earning £500.) All the Navy offered was the assurance that that he would be promoted upon his return.[vii]

The Bounty was unusual in other ways, thanks to modifications Joseph Banks had insisted upon. All that mattered to Banks was the return of breadfruit, and, he wrote, “…the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.”[viii]

The most notable modification from Bligh’s point of view must have been the loss of the great cabin, the commanding officer’s private quarters. Normally the great cabin was as wide as the ship and extended from the stern almost to the main mast, with windows on three sides providing plenty of light. But on the Bounty, the great cabin had been turned into a breadfruit nursery. It was filled with shelves, cut with holes to receive 629 pots. It had special ventilation, a stove for warmth, a drainage system that caught and recycled excess water, and more. Bligh had to make do with a windowless cabin, eight by seven feet. He would eat in a small, cramped pantry.

The Bounty’s small size meant a smallish crew. Bligh would be the only commissioned officer. Warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. Bligh decided not to hire a purser, who normally bought provisions from the Navy Board, tracked them and doled them out on the voyage, and sold back unused ones at the end. Instead, Bligh would look after the disbursement of stores himself.

Most fatefully, the ship would not carry any Marines, who on most Navy ships served as the captain’s security and police force.

This week’s Saturday-special-I’m-actually-posting-on-Monday is the first chapter of the YA science fiction novel (dystopian before dystopian YA SF was cool!) I just epublished last week:

If you like this sample, you can order the complete book through Smashwords or buy it in the Kindle store. (It should soon show up in other premium ebook stores.)

Enjoy!

***

The Chosen

By Edward Willett

Chapter One

Beth Foster held tight to her father’s waist, her right ear pressed against his back, as the white stallion galloped across the prairie. Out of the corner of her eye she caught occasional glimpses of the dozen mounted men following close behind. The pounding of all those horses’ hooves and the pounding of her own heart mingled in her head until she couldn’t tell one from the other.

Suddenly the stallion slowed, and at the same instant, Beth smelled the sharp scent of burning pine. She raised her head, sniffing the autumn wind like a hunting dog, as her father lifted his right hand and the other riders reined to a halt around them, horses blowing and stamping, breath and sweat steaming in the frosty air. The wind tossed a strand of red-gold hair across her eyes, and impatiently she tucked it back under her warm red cap of knitted wool.

Her father surveyed the troop of horsemen, and Beth followed his gaze. Each man wore a white surcoat, emblazoned front and back with the red cross of the Crusade, dimmed by the dust of their ride; a saber hung from each belt and a holstered rifle was slung from each saddle.

Beth’s father nodded, then said, “Torches.”

From their saddlebags, each rider pulled out a short wooden torch, greasy rags wrapped around one end. After a few moments’ work with flint and steel, the rags began to burn. One by one the riders lifted the flames in salute to Beth’s father. He raised his clenched right fist in response. “Hold on,” he said in a low voice to Beth, then, “To the glory of God!” he shouted, and slammed his heels into the stallion’s flanks.

Beth’s heart leaped as they surged up the slope, but instead of plunging down the far side of the hill, her father reined to halt at its crest. In the valley below Beth could see a farmyard, with a pre-Trouble white frame house and a few outbuildings surrounded by a much more crudely made wooden stockade about eight feet high. “Aren’t we going down?” Beth shouted as the other riders pounded past them, but her father shook his head.

“It’s too dangerous for you,” he shouted back. “Just watch. Watch how the Chosen purge the land of evil!”

Beth watched.

An old man picking corn looked up as the riders thundered down toward him, froze for a moment, then dropped his half-full basket and ran for the open gate, shapeless brown hat flying from his balding head. “Joey! Marta! Close the gate! Close the—”

The broad chest of the lead black gelding struck him in the back and he fell, rolling over and over among the dry yellow stalks.

A woman appeared in the doorway of the house, and screamed as the Chosen pounded through the gate. Three crying children, the oldest no more than eight, ran to her. One by one the horsemen flung their torches through the door of a shed from which stretched two strands of black wire, strung on tall wooden posts.

A dull thump shook the ground, and orange flames engulfed the shed and licked at the wall of the house as the Chosen swept out of the compound and rode back up the hill, past the motionless body of the old man.

“Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!” Beth’s father shouted to his men as they rejoined him at the top of the hill, but Beth’s eyes were locked on the woman. She herded her coughing, weeping children away from their burning home, then saw the old man lying in the field and ran toward him.

“Dad!” Beth heard her scream. “Dad!” Beth’s last view, as her own father wheeled the stallion to lead his band home in victory, was of the woman kneeling in the broken corn beside the old man, sobbing.

Beth thought she might be sick. “It was God’s will,” she whispered to herself. “God’s will—God’s will!” Hadn’t her father said so that very morning? He had stood in his stirrups, silver hair and beard astir in the breeze, his voice booming through the Square. “The army of the Lord rides forth to rid the land of evil and prepare the Earth for the coming of its King!”

They had a generator, Beth told herself fiercely. It had to be destroyed!

“Electricity is the lifeblood of Satan!” her father had shouted out across the Square. “From it sprang all the evils of the Old World before the Tribulation!”

But she kept seeing the old man rolling in the dust, the fire licking at the house, the terrified faces of the children, and in her ears still rang the cries of the woman who had seen the little bit of security she had carved from a hard, uncaring world destroyed in an instant.

We saved them from the Evil One. We saved them!

Would Mama have thought so?, another inner voice whispered in reply.

All the way home, Beth listened to the excited voices of the horsemen, rehashing their glorious attack. She didn’t say a word, and when the tree-filled valley that sheltered their village opened below them, Beth suddenly felt she could not face the cheering crowd that would welcome them. “Father, may I get down?”

“What?” He looked back at her. “Why?”

“I’d like to walk from here, that’s all.” She didn’t meet his eyes.

He hesitated, then pulled on the reins. The other riders halted a little further on and waited as he helped Beth to the ground. “Don’t be long,” he said. “There’ll be a celebration feast tonight, and I want you looking your best.”

“Yes, Father.”

He pulled off her cap, leaned down and kissed the top of her head, then handed her back the cap and urged the stallion to a trot. A moment later the entire troop disappeared into the valley.

Beth looked back the way they had come. Was that distant smudge the smoke from the destroyed farm? She stared at it a moment, then shivered and plunged down into the valley herself, to escape the wind that suddenly felt much colder. Winter’s coming, she thought. That recalcitrant strand of hair had escaped again; she tucked it up under her cap once more, then pulled her patched brown homespun riding cloak closer around her shoulders. Maybe this will be the last raid for a while.

But an icy gust rattled the yellow leaves of the birches and aspen like scornful laughter, and she shivered. She knew better. As surely as the snow would come, the raids would continue. “God’s will does not wait for good weather,” her father said, and she knew his scouts were scouring ever further afield for any sign of the Old Ways.

She reached the trail at the base of the slope and walked slowly toward the village, wishing that when she got there she would have someone to talk to, someone who could help her sort out her feelings.

But there was no one. No one questioned her father. He had risen to oversight of the Chosen through the combined force of his intellect and personality; no one had ever withstood him in debate, no one, it seemed, failed to be mesmerized by his fiery oratory. When Elder Silas had dropped dead of a heart attack ten years ago, Elder Joshua Foster had been the unanimous choice as his successor—and had not been challenged since.

If only Mama were still alive. But that was foolishness, like wishing the Tribulation had never happened. If her mother had not died a year ago in the outbreak of Blue Plague that took more than twenty of the Chosen in all, her father might never have begun his Crusade; but die she had, drowned in the fluid that filled her lungs as surely as if she had sunk to the bottom of Lake Katepwa. Beth’s father had taken his wife’s death as a sign. She could still hear him thundering to the Chosen on the Sunday morning that had launched the Crusade. “Evil remains in the land!” he had shouted, voice hoarse with emotion, face tight with pain. “God sent the Tribulation to purge us of evil, but He has let some remain to test our faith. It is our duty, as the sons and daughters of God, to finish God’s great work—before God repents of our survival and destroys us all!”

Beth could also hear her mother’s voice, saying “God is love.” But love seemed to have little place in her father’s new creed…

And then Beth’s heart skipped a beat and she suddenly forgot her doubts as she heard men’s voices—voices she didn’t recognize.

She darted off the path into the woods. Anyone not of the Chosen was to be feared; that was one warning of her father’s she believed fervently. She knew what had happened to others of the Chosen who had come upon some of those who wandered the Wild…

Yet despite her fear, she had a duty to her neighbors. As silently as she could, she crept toward the strangers. There were two, she decided as their voices became clearer; two men, just off the trail, hidden by a stand of bushes. They spoke English, but with such a strong, drawling accent she had to get closer than she liked to understand them.

“Ain’t seen nothing bigger’n a sparrow since day before yesterday,” one whined. “Where’s them deer that old man promised?”

“We’ll find them down here,” said the other in a deeper tone. “He must have known what he was talking about. You saw all those hides.”

“So why should he tell us where he got them?”

“I paid him, didn’t I? I gave him that flashlight thing. That should be worth a deer.”

“Yeah, and who said you could do that? That was mine, that was. Why’nt you give him them silver gloves you lifted?”

“Because I need gloves worse’n you need a flashlight. Anyway, you’ve got those binoculars and the best rifle. And we’ve each got a couple of those—what’d the Technos call ’em?—solar batteries, that’s it. They ought to be worth a winter’s lodging just about anywhere, if they put out as much ’lectricity as they said.”

Beth swallowed and nervously shifted position, and a twig under her foot snapped like a rifle shot. “Someone’s watching us!” the whiney man cried.

Beth burst from cover like a startled rabbit. A branch snagged her cloak, but she twisted free and raced for the village, ignoring the shouts behind her and praying she could outrun the men if they pursued her.

The chill air stung her face and her arms grew cold without her cloak, but she hardly noticed. Electricity! Flashlights! Satan’s work, brought into the Chosen’s valley!

Half a mile later she staggered through the open gate of the village’s palisade and fell to her knees on the flagstones of the Square, gasping, heart pounding, unable to speak.

The Square was crowded with people and horses, as the men who had been on the raid mingled with those who had come out to greet them on their return. John Ramsey, the village butcher, and one of that morning’s raiders, was the first to notice Beth. “Here, now, Beth, what’re you in such a state over?” he said, helping her to her feet as a crowd gathered. She tried to speak, but a stitch in her side doubled her over again and for a moment she thought she would throw up. It seemed to take her forever to summon the breath to blurt out what she had heard.

Shouts of anger greeted her news. Leaving her in the care of Sarah Goodman, a grandmotherly woman Beth knew mainly as the village’s biggest gossip, Ramsey called for men and horses and sent his eight-year-old son, Amos, running toward the big house overlooking the courtyard to summon Beth’s father.

Mrs. Goodman settled Beth on the wooden bench ringing the well, then drew up the bucket and offered her a ladle of water. Beth gulped the icy liquid gratefully, but then almost dropped the ladle in a fit of shivering. Mrs. Goodman’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, dear, I never thought…here.” She pulled off her green wool cloak and wrapped it around Beth’s trembling shoulders. “What you need is something warm. Come inside and I’ll fix you some mint tea.”

Teeth chattering, Beth followed Mrs. Goodman across the Square, but paused as her father strode from their house, still wearing the dust-grimed uniform he had worn on the raid and buckling his sword-belt around his giant, gaunt frame as he walked. His ice-blue eyes glittered in the waning sun, and the cold wind ruffled his white hair and beard. He looked magnificent and frightening, and as Beth watched him mount his stallion once again, she almost pitied the two strangers.

They brought Satan’s handiwork into our valley, she reminded herself. And Father won’t harm them if they don’t resist…

But what if they do?

“Come along, dear,” Mrs. Goodman said, and Beth gratefully turned away from the forming posse and hurried after her.

Mrs. Goodman’s hot mint tea, poured out in a cozy kitchen warmed by a potbellied stove, soon warmed Beth’s body, but did nothing to ease the chill in her heart, and she excused herself as soon as she could, leaving Mrs. Goodman’s myriad questions about what had happened in the woods and on the raid that morning unanswered.

Half an hour later, she watched from the door of her own house as her father and the half-dozen men who had ridden with him returned to the crowd awaiting them in the Square, bringing with them two strangers, bound together astride a barebacked pack horse.

The posse halted, and her father dismounted. He pulled his saddlebags free, lifted one flap, and upended them. Bits of metal and glass scattered across the stones of the Square, glittering in the sun like diamonds.

Joshua Foster drove his boot down onto one of the largest pieces of glass, grinding it to dust against the rock. “Thus do we treat all the works of Satan!” he shouted. The Chosen cheered.

Then he saw Beth and motioned her to him. She reluctantly obeyed, holding her arms tight to her body against the deepening chill. From the other side of his saddlebags he pulled out her old brown cloak; as she took it, he bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m proud of you, Beth,” he whispered, then stood and shouted, “Let my daughter’s devotion be an example to us all! It was she who discovered these pawns of Satan and exerted all her strength to warn us!” He motioned to John Ramsey, whose horse was leading the packhorse bearing the prisoners; Ramsey slipped out of his saddle, then jerked the two strangers to the ground so roughly they almost fell.

One was a tall, stout man, his black hair and scraggly beard salted with gray, his face brown and deeply lined. The other, thinner and younger, had dirty blonde hair and a straggly mustache. Both looked around sullenly, and for a moment the older man’s eyes met Beth’s.

She read anger and disgust there, and suddenly all she wanted to do was escape. “May I go now, Father?” she said, looking down at her hands, twisting the rough wool of her cloak.

“Of course,” he murmured. “You should rest before the feast.” He lifted her chin and smiled at her. “You’re a hero, you know.” Then he released her and turned toward the crowd as she walked quickly toward their house. “These strangers will be questioned,” his voice boomed out again. “They may yet redeem themselves by telling us where they found these tools of the Devil. And tonight at the feast, perhaps, we will be able to celebrate not only a great day in our Crusade, but the hope of more great days to come…”

The front door banged shut and cut off his voice. In the dim hallway just beyond Beth pressed her cheek against the smooth, dark wood paneling and closed her eyes.

“You’re a hero,” her father had told her. A hero—to the Chosen.

But not to herself.

Buy it on Smashwords!

The Regina Book Award is described this way: “In recognition of the vitality of the literary community in Regina, this award is presented to a Regina author (or pair of authors) for the best book, judged on the quality of writing.”

Other shortlisted in the same category: Mark Cronlund Anderson & Carmen L. Robertson, for Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers (University of Manitoba Press); Wilfred Burton and Anne Patton for Call of the Fiddle (Gabriel Dumont Institute; illustrated by Sherry Farrell Racette and translated by Norman Fleury), Britt Holmström for Leaving Berlin (Thistledown Press), and Alison Lohans for Picturing Alyssa (Dundurn Press Ltd.).

The awards will be announced and presented at a gala dinner at the Conexus Arts Centre on April 28.

This is the fifth time I’ve been shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award. Spirit Singer won the Regina Book Award in 2002 (that’s when the photo is from). Soulworm was shortlisted for best first novel in 1997 and The Dark Unicorn for best children’s book in 1998. J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Imaginary Worlds was shortlisted for (if I remember right) best children’s book in…2005, maybe?

It’s nice to be nominated. It’s even nicer to win, since it comes with a substantial sum!

UPDATE: It clearly pays to attend the news conference. I was featured on the CBC-TV spot about the announcement, talking about how important the recognition is to Saskatchewan writers, and I also managed to get myself featured in the Global TV and Regina Leader Post stories…although there are others nominated in multiple categories, and I’m only shortlisted in the one. So, win or not, I sure got good publicity out of it!

Their description is nice, too:

Case in point: the release last week of a research report on exciting new progress in gene therapy for hemophiliacs.

Back in 2001, I wrote a book on hemophilia for the Enslow Publishers series Diseases and People (<brag>School Library Journal called it: “An excellent resource for basic research for personal or academic use.”</brag>).

Gene therapy—the insertion of genes into living cells in the human body to treat disorders—has always seemed to hold particular promise for the treatment of hemophilia because it is a genetic disease: you can’t catch it, you can only inherit it.

What is hemophilia? Allow me to quote my own book:

“Hemophilia is a disease in which a person’s blood does not clot properly. People with hemophilia do not produce enough of one of several proteins in the blood called clotting factors.  The body needs these factors to stop bleeding after an injury. Without these factors, bleeding lasts longer than it would otherwise…

“Hemophilia affects males almost exclusively. About one in 5,000 boy babies has hemophilia. It is passed on from generation to generation by women who may or may not show bleeding-related symptoms themselves. In about one third of the cases, there is no family history of hemophilia…

“The primary symptoms of hemophilia are abnormal bruising and bleeding. In toddlers, falls and bumps may cause skin bruises and bleeding from the lips and tongue. In older children and adults, bleeding may involve muscles and joints, producing painful swelling and hindering movement. If early treatment is not given, this bleeding can result in permanent joint damage.  Head injuries are particularly dangerous for hemophiliacs…bleeding into the brain can be fatal. Bleeding may also occur in the face, neck, or throat, obstructing breathing. Bleeding from the mouth, gums, and the nose may be troublesome, as well…

“The standard treatment in the event of bleeding is to inject the hemophiliac with the missing blood clotting factor, made from either donated plasma or by using recombinant gene technology. This can be done on a regular preventative basis, usually three times a week, just before undertaking an activity that could cause bleeding, or as needed to treat episodes of bleeding…

Hemophilia is, in short, a nasty condition indeed. Prior to the First World War, the average lifespan for a boy with hemophilia was 11. Prior to 1968, it was only 20. By 1983 it was 64…but during the 1980s it dropped again due to the impact of AIDS, which hemophiliacs contracted through the injection of blood clotting factor made from donated, infected plasma (young Ryan White, who graces the cover of my book, was one of the most high-profile victims).

Since 1999, the average lifespan has been normal, but treatment still involves regular injections of clotting factors.

The only way to cure hemophilia would be to replace the missing genes that code for the production of clotting factors…and that’s precisely what researchers from the University College London Cancer Institute and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis have just reported success with.

Their technique used a modified adeno-associated virus, or AAV (which infects human cells but doesn’t cause disease) to insert the gene which produces clotting factor IX (FIX), into liver cells. Their test subjects were six people with severe Hemophilia B. (About one in five people with hemophilia have Hemophilia B; the more common Hemophilia A, which involves a different clotting factor, offers a more complex target for gene therapy, so much of the research has focused on Hemophilia B.)

Before the therapy, the six patients all produced FIX at less than one percent of normal levels. After the therapy, each produced FIX at between two and 11 percent of normal. In the short-term follow-up of six to 16 months, four of the participants no longer needed infusions of FIX at all, while the other two required them less frequently than before.

Molecular Therapy magazine, reporting on preliminary results of the study back in March, enthused that it represented nothing less than the “holy grail” of hemophilia gene therapy.

It also renders my 10-year-old book out-of-date. But you know what? After researching all the tragedy and suffering hemophilia has caused down through the years, I’m okay with that.

I just hope all the other books I wrote, on Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, meningitis and Ebola, are also rendered obsolete—the sooner, the better.

Chane combines some steampunk sensibilities with a magic world, infuses the whole thing with some potent political plotting, and presents the result – a fantastic novel.

And finishes…

Ultimately, a highly satisfying novel. I’d love to see something further in the world that Chane has created…

Read the whole thing.

Review Room has some quibbles, but still says:

I found the book quite appealing because it pitted science against magic, and couldn’t help being drawn in by the detailed descriptions of this alternate magical reality – it’s spells, it’s inventions and it’s different life. Commoners have achieved through science which the MageLords do via Magic. Against this backdrop Chane has created well-fleshed out characters. He gives the reader a look-see into their minds, which was quite interesting. The story has many twists and turns and is quite unpredictable so it keeps one engaged and reading.

Read the whole thing.

Interestingly, both reviewers (and some previous ones) note they’d be interested in seeing more of the world of Magebane. So would I! Which is why I have proposed a sequel. Still waiting for word on it from DAW, though, so…cross your fingers for me!

(This is a slightly modified version of an essay that originally ran on John Scalzi’s blog

I know this is called “The Big Idea,” but my new fantasy novel Magebane didn’t grow out of a single big idea.  Instead, it grew out of four ideas: three big ones, and one not-so-big one. (But “The Big 3 1/2 Ideas” isn’t nearly as catchy a name.)

First: it is, of course, one of the hoariest of fairy-tale tropes that an enchantment can be broken with a kiss: typically, a prince kissing a princess. But one day while I was musing on this (and since I have a young daughter, princesses are something I have mused about quite often), I had the notion of writing a story in which a kiss didn’t just break an enchantment, it broke all enchantments: a story in which a kiss between a (sort-of) prince and a (kind-of) princess would bring magic itself crashing down in ruin.

Now, that’s a somewhat subversive notion in fantasy fiction. Typically in fantasies the destruction of magic is not something devoutly to be wished: instead, they’re all about the restoration of magic, or at least the triumph of good magic over bad magic. But magic is, ultimately, a form of power: and like all power, it can be abused. Particularly if some people have it, and others don’t.

Second: since I was already thinking subversively in terms of making the overthrow of magic a good thing, I continued thinking subversively about another common fantasy trope, the idea that restoring the rightful king to a throne can solve all that has gone wrong in a kingdom.

In the real world, restoring absolute monarchs to power is generally not seen as a good thing. I mean, an absolute monarch is just a dictator with a jeweled hat, when you come right down to it. In the real world, we (well, most of us, at least) celebrate the overthrow of tyrants…even the ones that have been, perhaps, less tyrannical than some of their peers.

Where, I asked myself, are the democratic revolutionaries within fantasy fiction?

I decided to create some.

The third big idea: what happens in a world with magic when technology (any sufficiently advanced version of which, as Arthur C. Clarke famously said, is indistinguishable from magic) begins to give those who cannot wield magic the same abilities as those who can?

With these three ideas in hand, I fired up my story-making cauldron, tossed them in, stewed and steeped and stirred them for a while, and eventually poured off 150,000 words of what I’d like to  think is pretty tasty story.

In Magebane, the tyrannical MageLords, who rule by virtue of their magical power (pretty much their only virtue), were thrown down from power centuries past in their old kingdom by the Commoners, the non-magical people they rule, with the help of something or someone called the Magebane. Fearing for their lives, the MageLords used magic to flee to the far side of the world, where they established a new kingdom, protected from attack by an impenetrable magical barrier.

But now there are various MageLords who would like, each for his or her own reasons, to remove that Barrier; there is a new Magebane; and there are, bubbling up from the increasingly technological advanced Commoners trapped in the kingdom with them, rumors of a new rebelliousness.

What no one in the kingdom realizes is that the Commoners outside, for whom the MageLords are nothing but myth, have explored the world right up to the Great Barrier itself…and that their technology has advanced far beyond that of the Commoners within the Barrier. That is, no one realizes it until one young man crash lands in the kingdom aboard the experimental airship that has just flown over the Barrier…

Yes, that’s right: my big fat fantasy novel is also steampunky!

As for the small idea that is also part of the Magebane mix? That’s the setting. The hidden  kingdom of the MageLords is largely prairie in the south and forests in the north, with lots of lakes.

It has, in fact, the same geography as the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, where I live. And there’s more: in the kingdom’s capital, there is a white stone palace on the southern shore of a manmade man-made lake…just as there is in Saskatchewan’s capital city of Regina, where the Saskatchewan Legislative Building rises on the south shore of Wascana Lake, just a couple of blocks from my house.

Alas, the real lake and the real park surrounding it are not magically protected from winter’s ravages like the one in the book. You could call that wish-fulfillment, if you like, and I daresay you’d be correct.

But then, you could also call the whole book a kind of wish-fulfillment: a wish for fantasy that recognizes that even a benevolent dictator is still a dictator, and that whatever Tolkien may have primed us to believe, The Return of the King is not necessarily a happy ending.

Also, a wish for more fantasy with airships.

Because airships, like bow-ties on The Doctor, are cool.

Evil wizards, multi-level conspiracies, magic, hidden kingdoms, cruel tyrants, usurpers, and a hint of steampunk make this book entertaining. Lee Arthur Chane (also known as Edward Willett) has done a marvelous job of making all of this work together. Instead of being overwhelmingly complicated and difficult to follow with the danger of being boring, he manages to tie the different themes together into an entertaining, cohesive whole. The good guys do win, just not the way anyone expected. Magebane is a very entertaining book and well worth the time.

Yay!

These days, though, the word “book” has developed two meanings. You can still read a bound-stack-of-paper book, but you can also read a book without ever touching anything that was once part of a tree, because the text has become divorced from the physical artifact to which it was once bound, thanks to the development of electronic reading devices.

I will admit up front that I was an early convert to electronic reading. I bought my first ebook reader many years ago, before hardly anyone had such a device. These days, I read on my iPhone and my iPad. My 10-year-old daughter owns a Kobo.

Ebooks are becoming more and more popular, but there are still those who swear up and down that they will never read from an electronic screen, that the only way they will give up paper books is when they are pried from their cold, dead hands.

Despite such passion on the printed-book side, ebook sales continue to soar, and ebook readers are becoming better, cheaper, and more ubiquitious. How can a lover of text-on-dead-trees continue to defend his/her choice?

Science may offer some ammunition in the ongoing debate. For instance, a study conducted last year by Jacob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, a California-based usability consulting firm, tested three different ways to read e-books–on the PC, the Kindle 2, and the iPad–against the reading of paper books. Nielsen found that those reading any of the ebook versions were as much as 10 percent slower than those reading the printed versions. (Reading on the PC was the slowest—and least popular—of all.)

Then there was the University of Washington report this spring on a pilot project in which computer science students used a Kindle DX (the largest version) for their course reading. College textbooks in ebook form would be cheaper for students, and much easier to lug around, so they are generally seen as a kind of “holy grail” of the ebook industry…but alas, seven months into the pilot project, more than 60 percent of students had stopped using their Kindle for academic reading. Those who kept using them tucked paper into the case in order to write notes (even though you can take electronic notes on the Kindle). Others would read near a computer they could use for reference and other tasks the device didn’t make easy.

And then there was this particularly interesting study tidbit, as given in the press release: “The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues, such as the location on the page and the position in the book, to find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.”

So, text-on-paper-holdouts, science is on your side, right?

Well, not so fast. This week another study emerged from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz that, according to the lead researcher, Professor Dr. Stephan Füssel, provides a scientific basis “for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects.”

In this study, participants in two sample groups, young adults and elderly adults, read various texts with various degrees of complexity on an ebook reader (Kindle 3), a tablet PC (iPad) and on paper. Their reading behavior and neural activity were assessed by tracking eye movements and through EEGs, and through questionnaires to measure text comprehension and information recall.

The results? Although readers almost universally stated they liked reading printed books best, there was no difference in terms of reading performance between reading from paper and from the Kindle. And when it came to the iPad, older readers actually exhibited faster reading times when using it. Not only that, the data indicated that information was processed more easily when it was read from the tablet.

So where does that leave us? Right back where we started: with personal preference. If you’re only willing to read text printed on bound paper, then by all means stick with printed books. If you’re comfortable reading on a screen, you have a plethora of possibilities.

As a writer, I think I speak for everyone who makes their living with words: we don’t care how you read, we just care that you read. So read, already!

Oh, wait…if you made it this far, I guess you just did.

(The photo: a box full of print copies of Magebane, my latest novel.)

Here’s the blurb from the back, just to remind you what it’s all about:

The kingdom of Evrenfels is the last bastion of magic in the world, cut off from the outside by the Great Barrier through which magic cannot penetrate.

 For centuries, the Magelords have ruled their kingdom with an iron hand while beyond the Barrier, magic and the Magelords have faded into an almost forgotten myth, replaced by low-level technology. Now all of that is about to change, for one man, Lord Falk, the Minister of Safety—the most powerful of the Magelords—has plans to assassinate the king and his heir, to break down the Barrier, and to conquer the lands beyond.

 All it will take is the lives of two innocents: Prince Karl and Falk’s own ward, a girl named Brenna, a small sacrifice to Lord Falk’s way of thinking.  One is the heir and the other is the legendary Magebane, anathema to all magic.

 But there is one thing Lord Falk hasn’t foreseen, one thing that could unbalance all of his plans—the unexpected arrival of a young man whose airship suddenly comes sailing over the top of the Great Barrier…

So, for what are you waiting? Go forth and purchase! A dozen copies for yourself, and a couple for each of your friends (oh, be generous, give them to your enemies, too) and family sounds just about right to me.

Oh, and if you’re local bookstore, through some horrendous oversight, does not have any copies, be sure to ask for it by name, OK?

I thank you for your support, and so does Lee Arthur Chane.

P.S. An interesting note about the cover. This is a scan from the actual book, and you’ll notice the text at the bottom begins “Eight centuries ago…” Most of the cover art you’ll see online says “Four centuries ago…” As do many of the online descriptions of the book. That’s because I expanded the timeline in the final rewrite, after a lot of that stuff had already gone out. Fortunately, we were able to change the actual book cover!