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!

It’s still a ways until April, but lo and behold, I discovered the book is already listed at Amazon. Go forth and pre-order!

You know you want to.

CM Magazine

The review is mainly a pretty complete synopsis, with a longish excerpt from the first chapter. It ends with:

Written clearly, and with an interesting version of the Arthurian legend, the tale portrays some common teenage problems through the eyes of the two main characters, while placing them in harrowing fantasy situations…The story will appear to those who enjoy fantasy and will not require a knowledge of the Arthurian tales to follow.

Recommended.

Nice!

The review, by author Robert J. Wiersema, almost gave me a heart attack with the first sentence, though. It begins:

Authors who incorporate, interpret, or subvert Arthurian legends in works of contemporary fantasy take a huge risk: the failure rate of such books is staggeringly high.

Gulp. Fortunately, he continues with:

Every so often, though, a writer is skilled enough to utilize the stories of King Arthur and Camelot to significant effect. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is definitely on the list. So, too, is Song of the Sword, the impressive new YA novel from Regina writer Edward Willett.

Whew! That’s all right, then. (Me, compared with Guy Kay? It is to blush. Although we both have a connection to Weyburn…he was born there, I lived there many years…so, who knows? Maybe it’s something in the water.)

Wiersema goes on to summarize the story (very well), and then adds:

It’s an audacious conceit and a daring subversion of the Arthurian mythos, and Willett backs it up with a taut, compelling narrative, well-drawn characters, and a keen sense of genuine peril and true wonder. It’s a powerful, fun, engaging read, and it’s the first of a series, so readers have much to look forward to.

His only caveat: he wonders if young readers may not be familiar enough with the Arthurian legend for my reworking to resonate as fully with them as I’d like, and worries that if this is the first time they run into the Arthurian cast of characters, my book could “skew” their initial reading of their legends.

I hate to sound heartless, but…I think I can live with that!