Not surprisingly, science fiction (though not overly successful at predicting its rise) has taken to this futuristic resource in a big way. But how to choose which sites to visit?

Here’s one way: visit the ones I visit!

Let’s start with general news sites. I’ve previously mentioned Locus Online, the website of the most important science fiction news magazine. Besides publishing news, links to interviews and reviews and more, there alone you’ll find a links page directing you to more sites than you could possible visit without the assistance of an army of clones. Locus Online is always at the top of my list.

I also like SF Signal, edited by John DeNardo. I like many of its regular features, including SF Tidbits, which provides links to interviews, news, articles, art and more every day of the week. There’s also a weekly roundup of free online fiction and the regular Mind Meld feature where writers are asked their opinion about some related topic (i.e., “The best opening scenes in science fiction,” “How to create drama for posthumans.”)

Then there’s SF Scope, “your source of news about the speculative fiction fields,” which is just what it says on the tin. Its many news and opinion features are edited by Ian Randall Strock (who bought two short stories from me back when he edited Artemis Magazine).

A third one is SF Site. This one is very focused on books, with tons of reviews, along with interviews and more. It has regular columns on both TV SF and graphic novels.

Moving on to writers’ organizations, there are three to mention. First and foremost is the website of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, which includes news about members, publishing news and (most valuable for those wanting to break into the field) some well-worth-your-time articles on the practice of writing SF and fantasy.

On this side of the border, there’s the site SF Canada, our homegrown equivalent of SFWA (I was president for a couple of years).

For those on the dark side, I should also point out the Horror Writers’ Association, at the easy-to-remember horror.org.

Looking for places to sell your science fiction and fantasy? There are numerous market-listing sites. One I like goes by the unlikely name of Ralan’s SpecFic and Horror Webstravaganza—or just Ralan.com for short. Ralan’s website has been around since 1994, and breaks down markets by pay: pro, semi-pro, token and “expo” (i.e., no pay!). He lists both book and short-fiction markets, and also tracks response times.

Of course, just about everyone who is already selling science fiction and fantasy has a website. I have two: edwardwillett.com and leearthurchane.com. One you should definitely check out (besides mine!) is Robert J. Sawyer’s, at sfwriter.com (Rob was a very early Web pioneer, which is how he landed such an awesome URL; SFWRITER is also his license plate!).

You should also pay a visit to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site. Rusch is the author of the invaluable Freelancer’s Survival Guide, and regularly posts long, thoughtful essays on the state of publishing today—and how writers can surf the waves of change and hopefully arrive safe on the other side of that dangerous reef we call electronic publishing.

There are some interesting group blogs run by science fiction writers, as well. Deadline Dames is a fun one: subtitled “Nine authors, one website, no excuses,” it details the writing adventures of Devon Monk, Jackie Kessler, Jenna Black, Karen Mahoney, Keri Arthur, Lilith Saintcrow, Rachel Vincent, Rinda Elliott and Toni Andrews, working mainly in the field of urban fantasy.

I also like Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists, an invitation-only group blog with an impressive list of contributors and always-interesting posts. (I particularly recommend “A Writer’s Letter to Santa,” which any writer, SF- or non, should find amusing.

Finally, no list of sites would be complete without Writer Beware, a publishing industry watchdog group sponsored by SFWA with additional support from the Mystery Writers of America. Writer Beware “shines a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls” and also provides “industry news, writing advice, and a special focus on the wacky things that happen at the fringes of the publishing world.” If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Check it out at Writer Beware first!

This only scratches the surface. There are dozens more that could be listed. But the Web being the linkful place it is, any one of these sites will lead you to some of those dozens more.

And when you think about it, what better use could there be of today’s science-fictional technology than using it to learn more about science fiction?

The panel is described this way: “In Operation Chaos, Poul Anderson’s shapeshifters’ abilities were limited by the law of conservation of mass. Do such considerations enhance the narrative?”

It’s such an interesting question to me I thought that, with your indulgence, I’d use this column to work out my thoughts pre-panel.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” It comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 book Biographia literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions. The full quote runs like this:

“In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

The willing suspension of disbelief (although I kind of wish the term “poetic faith” had caught on instead) is essential for the enjoyment of any work of fiction or drama. We know we’re watching an actor or reading a made-up story, but we pretend that what we are seeing is real or what we are reading really happened.

However, “willing suspension of disbelief” is easier in some cases than in others. A story set here and now in which nothing happens that could not happen in the world as we know it requires little suspension of disbelief. Fantasy stories, using, say, Coleridge’s “persons or characters supernatural,” or featuring powerful wizards, require a Golden Gate Bridge’s level of suspension.

Some people find that they cannot suspend their disbelief that much, and so spurn on all tales of fantasy, horror or science fiction, muttering, “That could never happen.”

Even those of us whose disbelief is usually suspended as easily as a soap bubble on spider silk can be thrown out of a story when something violates our own internal sense of what is and isn’t believable.

A case in point for me: the giant floating island in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I loved the book, but that one sequence caused my suspended soap bubble of disbelief to wobble severely. Up until then the book, for all its unlikely occurrences, seemed thoroughly rooted in the real world: at that point, because I knew such islands do not exist, I was plunged into a realm of fantasy, and since I did not think I was reading fantasy until I encountered that island, I was discombobulated.

The argument, then, in favour of getting “science into fantasy” is that a brief nod of the authorial head to scientific law, even when magic is involved, makes suspension of disbelief a little bit easier.

In my new fantasy novel Magebane (written as Lee Arthur Chane), for example, the energy for magic comes from heat: the MageLords in their palace actually have a giant coal furnace whose energy they draw on as required for major works of magic. (Smaller spells can draw energy from the air itself, which turns ice-cold as a result.)

To me, that little bit of grounding of the story in the laws of physics enhances the tale in two ways: it helps readers suspend disbelief, and it also places interesting restrictions on what the characters can do with magic–and just as grapes stressed by lack of water and high temperatures make the best wine, so do struggling characters make the best stories.

But when I posted some of these same thoughts online, one commentator said that when she reads of someone mixing science and fantasy, she figures the writer “could not grasp that something might exist, even in fiction, that didn’t reduce to hard principles, something that tapped into poetry and imagery instead, something that could be implied instead of explicated,” and feared it was a sign that “I am facing yet another book in which all the magic has been leached out of ‘magic’.”

Similarly, in a recent interview in New York Magazine, bestselling author George R.R. Martin said that, “When treating with magic in fantasy, you have to keep it magical. Many fantasy writers work out these detailed systems, and rules, and I think that’s a mistake.

“For magic to be effective in a literary sense, it has to be unknowable and strange and dangerous, with forces that can’t be predicted or controlled…It functions as a symbol or metaphor of all the forces in the universe we don’t understand and maybe never will.”

So, does mixing a scientific understanding of the world with magic strengthen or fatally weaken a tale of fantasy?

It promises to be a lively discussion in San Diego—and I promise to report back.

UPDATE: Not much to report, actually. I think I covered all the bases we discussed in my original column–and as moderator I was too busy to take notes and of course I didn’t think until afterward that I could have recorded the entire panel on my iPhone. D’oh! But I had lots of compliments on the quality of the panel, so we must have done something right!

(Photo: The Town & Country Convention Centre in San Diego where World Fantasy was held this year.)

***

They’ve become a fixture at science fiction conventions: people wearing goggles, leather coats, high laced boots and aviator caps, carrying strange devices of glass, brass and leather. They look old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time.

They’re aficionados of a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy known as steampunk, one of the odder sub-genres to come along in a while…and one that has proven remarkably long-lived.

Way back in the 1980s, the hot movement in SF was cyberpunk, of which Canada’s own William Gibson was one of the top practitioners. Cyberpunk was all about tech-savvy geeks in mirror shades hacking and surfing computer networks. Steampunk has pretty much nothing in common with it—except for the name, coined by science fiction writer K.W. Jeter.

According to Wikipedia (a source I consider suspect for a lot of things, but not when it comes to geek history; there are an astonishing 71 references listed for the article on steampunk, a good place to start if you really want to steep yourself in the subject), Jeter wanted a general term for four novels that all took place in a 19th-century setting and imitated the conventions of the SF writers of that century, such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne: The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Homunculus by James Blaylock, and Jeter’s own Morlock Night and Infernal Devices.

In a letter to Locus (the science fiction newsmagazine), Jeter wrote, “Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term…something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps…”

His prediction proved perceptive: in 1990 William Gibson turned from cyberpunk to steampunk with The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling, about an alternate Victorian era in which the steam-powered mechanical computer proposed by Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage was actually built, and ushered in the information age a century early.

(Not that any of those novels were the first example of the sub-genre. There were numerous novels with steampunkish elements before those, and who can forget the 1960s CBS TV series The Wild Wild West, featuring U.S. secret agent Jim West as a “James Bond on horseback,” armed with all kinds of technological tricks and gadgets and facing villains similarly equipped?)

These days, “steampunk” covers a lot of ground. There’s historical steampunk, set in a recognizable historical period (or alternate version thereof), typically post-Industrial Revolution but pre-electricity, resulting in lots of steam-powered or clockwork gadgets. There’s also fantasy steampunk, which incorporates, not just old-fashioned technology, but elements of magic. (Jeter’s own Morlock Night is about an attempt by Merlin to bring back King Arthur to save 1892 Britain from an invasion by the Morlocks of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine future.)

A third sub-sub-genre is future steampunk: stories set in the future whose technology developed in a different way, one that involves a lot more brass and rivets. (And airships! Nothing says steampunk like airships.)

Then there’s the sub-sub (possibly sub-sub-sub) genre of “gaslight romance” or “gaslight fantasy,” which tend  more toward the supernatural, drawing inspiration from Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper, and so forth.

What’s striking about steampunk is its staying power. Although we live in a cyberpunkish world, where anonymous hacking groups regularly steal data, as a sub-genre cyberpunk is stuck on the blue screen of death, while steampunk chugs along undaunted.

The reasons for that formed the subject of a recent “Mind Meld” at SF Signal, a website that regularly asks writers and critics to answer questions on SF-related topics. Jeff Vandermeer, an editor and author who rarely writes steampunk himself but writes about it quite a bit, gave what I thought the best explanation: steampunk persists because it has become its own sub-culture, focused not just on fiction but on the aesthetic as a whole (hence those costumers mentioned at the beginning of the column).

When the boilers of steampunk fiction begin to lose pressure, the subculture stokes the fires again, so that, as Vandermeer writes, “The subculture reanimates the impulse to create steampunk fiction, the fiction energizes the subculture.”

The cross-pollination among websites, books, magazines, artists, sculptors and costumers creates an atmosphere in which “steampunk” books sell well…which encourages publishers to publish more steampunk books.

The result, Vandermeer says, is that “steampunk is rapidly creating a safe haven for very, very interesting material that might not otherwise enter the world through commercial publishers, or even through indie publishers…It isn’t the bleeding edge in terms of innovation in fiction by any means, but it is in general practical, more and more progressive, durable, and beautiful.”

And let’s face it, airships and goggles are cool. Which is why I have both in my next book, Magebane, even though it’s fantasy, not science fiction.

What can I say? Steampunk is in the air, and even I am not immune.

***

In his novel Time Enough for Love, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein included a number of aphorisms supposedly taken from the notebooks of his centuries-old central character, Lazarus Long. One of these I have ever since taken a kind of mischievous pleasure in sharing with poets of my acquaintance: “A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.”

You might think, Heinlein occupying such an exalted place in the science fiction pantheon, that his proclamation would be enough to keep poetry far, far away from science fiction, and science fiction writers far, far away from poetry, separated by a vast gulf like that between the stars…but in fact, science fiction poetry is a thriving literary field in its own right.

Just what is and is not science fiction poetry, however, is a matter for some debate (but then, so is just what is and is not science fiction).

Some people spread the umbrella of science fiction poetry so wide that it stretches all the way back to ancient Greece to encompass The Odyssey. Others consider science fiction poetry to be, simply, poetry with “recognizable science fiction themes” (space travel, time travel, etc.).

At the other extreme, there is a theoretical argument that science fiction poetry cannot even exist, because (if I’ve got the  argument right), our sense of the fantastic when we read prose arises from the narrative’s description of a reality different than our own. Poetry, this argument goes, does not describe any kind of reality, but is entirely self-reflexive: it’s about itself and its own images. This means, says theorist Tzvetan Todorov, that “poetry cannot be fantastic.”

But the trouble with that theoretical argument is that it is quite easy in the real world to point to poems and say, “that’s a science fiction poem.” How do you know it’s a science fiction poem? Because it was conceived, written and published as one. (It’s like Damon Knight’s definition of science fiction: “Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.”)

Certainly there is a thriving community of poets who practice what they consider to be science fiction poetry. So…what kind of poems do they point it when they say, “that’s science fiction poetry?”

Poet Michael Collings, in his essay “Dialogues by Starlight,” identifies three main streams of science fiction poetry.

The first is poetry concerned with science and its influence on our world. Collings’s example is “Relative Distances: Nantucket, 12.29.85” by Robert Frazier, which he says uses “the imagery and language of astronomy to explore not only the distances of outer space but also the equally frustrating distances of inner space, of relationships between father and child in a world altering faster than each can understand and in which father and child may, in some critical sense, be farther apart than the stars they watch.”

A second stream consists of poems that attempt to bridge the gap between science fiction stories and science fiction poetry, presenting science fictional narratives in poetic form, so that the poetry enhances the effect of the narrative and vice versa.

A third stream, Collings suggests, is concerned with the relationship between SF poetry and poetry at large, and works “away from traditional forms, language, and/or content, to assert the genre’s ‘alien-ness,’ its other-ness within the community of poets.”

His primary example is “Shipwrecked on Destiny Five,” a 1986 poem by Andrew Joron that, he says, “lacking consistent rhyme, patterns, traditional meter, even conventional typography, and characterized by a constant use of traditionally non-poet (i.e., ‘scientific’) diction…recreates through texture and imagery the alienation, frustration and despair of its speaker…His work creates contexts that incorporate science, fiction, and poetry, all contributing to the final effect.”

So supposing you’re a poet, intrigued by the possibilities inherent in SF poetry. Where do you go for more information?

The Science Fiction Poetry Association, of course. You’ll find a paying market listing, a listing of upcoming SF poetry events and readings, news and more. The SFPA also presents the annual Rhysling Award for best SF poetry of the previous year. Works nominated by SFPA members for the award also appear in the annual Rhysling Anthology, a good place to start if you want to see the best SF poetry on offer.

For a fascinating discussion of SF poetry, also be sure to check out “Speculative Poetry: A Symposium,” an in-depth discussion by three poets and editors active in the field.

Inspired by my own column, let me take a stab at my own science fiction poetry:

An unpublished writer of rhyme

Travelled three hundred years back in time.

He stole from a poet

Who, unborn, didn’t know it.

Plagiarizing the future’s no crime!

Hmm. Maybe Heinlein really did have a point.

(The image is the cover of Star*Line, the SFPA newsletter.)

An unpublished writer of rhyme
Travelled three hundred years back in time.
He stole from a poet
Who, unborn, didn’t know it.
Plagiarizing the future’s no crime!

I apologize to any and all actual poets in the audience.

***

For most of the world, Charlie Brown is only a beloved cartoon character with a round head. But for those immersed in the science fiction and fantasy genres, Charlie Brown was also the nickname (though he hated it) of Charles N. Brown, owner, publisher and editor of Locus Magazine, which he co-founded in 1968 in Boston.

Although Brown died last year of a heart attack while flying home to California from a science fiction convention, the magazine that began life as a mimeographed newsletter more than four decades ago continues to thrive, under new editor Liza Groen Trombi, as the premiere source of information about science fiction and fantasy writing and publishing.

Which means that if you really want to know what’s going on in those genres, you have to read Locus, as I’ve been doing now for (gulp) some 25 years.

One annual highlight is Locus’s Year in Review issue, the 2011 version of which just arrived. It provides both commentary on the state of the genre and hard data about the business of publishing it.

Curious about how many science fiction and fantasy books are published each year? Locus has that information (with the caveat that it can only report on books it sees). The magazine notes, “The number of books broke 3,000 for the first time in 2010…a fourth year in a row of record numbers,” and adds, “despite the slow economy, publishers are still pumping out the books in ever-larger numbers; their big change is to shift away from more expensive hardcovers to trade paperbacks and more mass-market paperback originals.”

Two under-represented forms of books: POD (print-on-demand) and e-book originals, so in fact the number of science fiction and fantasy books available in some format is certainly far, far greater than even the record-breaking number of 3,056.

Looking to shop your novel to the top publishers in the field? Locus has the numbers on the various SF/fantasy imprints. Leading the pack are Tor, which published 269 books in 2010 (in all formats, both new titles and reprints), Ace, which published 105, Baen, with 72, Del Rey, with 61, Orbit US with 60, my own publisher, DAW, with 55, Roc, also with 55, Subterranean Press, with 45, and Eos and Wizards of the Coast, both with 38.

What’s the most popular sub-genre? Locus’s numbers make it clear: fantasy far outstrips science fiction, with 614 original fantasy books seen by Locus compared to just 285 SF novels. In fact, SF is a distant third to paranormal romance, which accounted for 384 original books last year and wasn’t even on Locus’s radar as recently as 2006. Horror falls not far behind SF, with 251 original books.

Science fiction and fantasy magazines continue to be probably the largest market for short fiction left to writers: but those magazines have been declining in circulation for years. It’s a rather grim part of reading the Year in Review to note that Analog, which boasted 46,324 subscribers in 1997, is down to 22,791; Asimov’s Science Fiction has fallen from 37,488 in 1997 to 17,866 last year, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has slipped from over 30,000 to just under 11,000. Realms of Fantasy which boasted more than 20,000 subscribers as recently as 2002, actually died last year, before being revived by a new publisher. It currently has around 9,000 subscribers.

But for once there’s a ray of hope: the Analog and Asimov’s numbers are actually up from 2009, thanks to a surge of digital subscriptions: 2,500 for Analog and 4,100 for Asimov’s. E-book readers are changing everything, and Locus will be tracking those changes in the years to come.

Information like this is just the tip of the Locus iceberg. The February issue, in addition to the Year in Review, contains, within its 82 pages of pretty fine print, interviews with author Alastair Reynolds and editor Sharyn November; the regular “People & Publishing” column with notes on milestones, awards, books sold and more; and a collection of news stories running the gamut from the financial woes of Borders to the wedding of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.

Each issue also includes books and magazines received and a plethora of reviews. Forthcoming books are regularly listed, and international SF/fantasy news appears periodically.

I can’t state it strongly enough: if you really want to know what’s going on in science fiction and fantasy, you should be reading Locus, either in print or the new digital edition (I’m now reading the magazine on my own science-fictional reading device, the iPad.) Failing that, at least visit the Locus website, locusmag.com, on a regular basis.

Without a doubt, Locus is the best single source of information about the fabulous field of fantastical fiction.

Much as it pains me to admit it, it’s even better than this column.

So let me begin this new regular column in Freelance the same way: by defining what I’m going to be talking about.

I’m going to be focusing in this column on what is referred to in polite literary society as “speculative fiction.”

That’s not a term I often use myself, since it is sometimes a euphemism used by writers horrified by the thought of getting icky “genre” germs all over their nice clean “literary” story, but it has its place as a useful umbrella, beneath which shelter three more specific genres, fantasy, science fiction and horror.

Of the three, the easiest to define, it seems to me, is horror. Indeed, it defines itself: it’s fiction designed to invoke the emotional response that gives it its name. Some horror is completely, if disquietingly, realistic–think of a story of a serial killer on the loose–but much of it has a fantastic element–ghosts, vampires, etc.–which is why it is sometimes called “dark fantasy.”

Which brings us to the definition of fantasy. Here’s one I just made up, but I think it’s pretty good:  a story is a fantasy when the events within it violate physical laws as we know them and the story either makes no effort to justify that violation or else attributes it to magic or supernatural forces.

That’s a broad definition; but then, fantasy is a broad genre, with deep roots, from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Science fiction, though narrower in scope (since it attempts to at least pretend to conform to the laws of science) seems to also be much harder to define, unless you’re happy with Margaret Atwood’s infamous decree that science fiction is “talking squids in outer space.”

Solipsistic definitions abound, such as Damon Knight’s, that science fiction is what we point to when we say “science fiction,” or Norman Spinrad’s “science fiction is what science fiction editors buy.”

Here’s one I like, from Canada’s best-known and most successful science fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer: “Science fiction is a laboratory for thought experiments about the human condition; it lets us examine what it means to be human in ways that we simply can’t in real life, because it would be unethical or impractical to conduct the experiments.

“Using literary devices such as displacement in time or space, or metaphorical others who let us exaggerate or isolate parts of the human psyche, science fiction allows us to see ourselves from odd angles, catching glimpses of truths that might otherwise be hidden from view.”

So, when I write a novel (Marseguro) about genetically modified humans being persecuted by religious extremists in the far future, I am in some small way wrestling with issues that are arising now and will continue to arise into the future. I could deal with those same issues in a fantasy, where perhaps the humans would be modified by magic rather than science, but the issues, of otherness and alienation and religious persecution, would be the same.

But it would be much harder to wrestle with those questions in a mainstream novel, because we don’t yet have any humans genetically modified so as to be distinct from the rest of us: and the moment I introduce them, I’m writing science fiction. In 20 years’ time, though, they may well be the subject of mainstream fiction.

See how that works?

Having said all that, that’s the “eat your vegetables” rationale for writing science fiction and fantasy. Here’s another reason, and every bit as important: fiction is entertainment, and a ripping good yarn with intergalactic empires, aliens, spaceships, space princesses and, yes, talking squid, is my idea of great entertainment.

Science fiction and fantasy encompasses everything from grim near-future cautionary tales about cities flooded by rising oceans to madcap adventures about sword-swinging female barbarians battling giant spiders. All of time, space and imagination are your playground, which is why I’ve never understood why I’m so often asked why I write this stuff. To me the greater puzzlement is that so many writers don’t!

But perhaps you do. Or want to.  Or perhaps you’re just curious about this field of literature, home of the never-was and the still-might-be, rather than the good old here-and-now.

Over the next few columns, I’ll introduce you to the writers, books and trends making waves in “speculative fiction” (sigh), point you to some additional resources, provide some writing tips, and even offer up a few markets for your own fantastic fiction. I hope you enjoy the ride!

And finally, if you have any specific questions, I’m all ears (which in a fantasy or science fiction story is not necessarily metaphorical). Email me at ewillett@sasktel.net and watch for an answer in a future column!

***

Robert J. Sawyer: The Philosophical Science Fiction Writer

By Edward Willett

The Canadian Light Source, the giant synchrotron in Saskatoon, does not immediately spring to mind as a likely venue for a writer-in-residence.

Unless, perhaps, that writer is renowned Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. Then it seems like a perfect fit.

“Most of my books involve working scientists,” Sawyer notes. “I have often visited science institutions, but I’ve never been immersed for weeks on end in the ambience, the atmosphere in which science is done. That experience will lend an enormous verisimilitude to my future writing.”

The unusual pairing was born a few years ago when, after a tour of the CLS with fellow Canadian SF writer Robert Charles Wilson, Sawyer, Wilson, Matthew Dalzell, the communications coordinator for the CLS, and Jeff Cutler, director of industrial science, discussed over drinks the possibility of Sawyer returning and spending more time.

Sawyer suggested the writer-in-residence idea. Dalzell and Cutler were intrigued, and best of all, Cutler found money within his budget to pay for the residency, so no Canada Council grant was required.

Although the location was unusual, Sawyer’s duties as writer-in-residence were typical: he spent forty percent of his time mentoring writers and teaching and talking about writing (he gave a creative writing lecture every Monday at noon to CLS staff), and sixty percent on his own writing.

Sawyer’s appointment garnered “astonishing” media attention, locally, nationally, and internationally. “Everybody thinks this is unbelievably cool, myself included,” Sawyer says.

He says the most interesting aspect for him was the “wealth of little details” he picked up about life at a full-time research facility, from the weekly summer staff barbecues to how the shredding of sensitive documents was handled to the qualifications and salaries specified in job postings.

Getting the details of both science and the work of scientists right is important to Sawyer, whose current books are all set in the present or near future.

There’s a good reason for that. “I was writing what I felt were significant works of social commentary that weren’t being read by anybody but die-hard science fiction fans,” he says. Now that he focuses on the here-and-now (or at least the not-too-far-away), “there are all kinds of people who are Robert Sawyer readers who don’t think of themselves as science fiction readers.

“I’m able to write the kind of mind-expanding hard science philosophically rich stuff that I’ve always written. I don’t miss the spaceships and aliens.”

Sawyer thinks his brand of science fiction should ideally have a different name: he likes “philosophical fiction,” “phi-fi” instead of “sci-fi.”

“It really is a literature of ideas,” he points out. “It’s about fundamental questions. Who we are, where we’re going, whether we have free will, what value consciousness has, is there a God? These are the questions SF deals with. The name ‘science fiction’ really doesn’t convey that.”

But, he adds, “I proudly proclaim myself to be a science fiction writer, and never hide behind ‘speculative fiction.’”

Sawyer’s newest novel, Wake, the first book of a trilogy, grew out of a popular science article Sawyer read that mentioned that at some point early this century the Web will have as many interconnections as the human brain.

“That led me to wonder what might happen then,” he says. In Wake, he suggests that the Web could gain consciousness, just as we did in our evolutionary past when our brains reached a certain level of complexity.

“I spent four years researching the dawn of consciousness to see what parts were innately biological and what parts would be shared by anything that was becoming self aware,” Sawyer says. “One of the parallels that I found was the story of Helen Keller, who had been blind and deaf, in almost complete sensory deprivation, from her eighteenth month of life. She had no really sophisticated consciousness, no sense of personhood, no self-reflection. That became the template for me.”

If the Web gained consciousness, Sawyer thought, it would do so in a similar state of sensory deprivation, and, like Keller, would need help to move beyond it.

“I often say this is a high-tech retelling of The Miracle Worker,” Sawyer says. In Wake, the miracle comes from an unlikely source: Caitlin Decter, a blind teenage girl.

When he was twelve years old, Sawyer spent six days blind, eyes bandaged, after being hit in the face with a snowball. “I’ve been looking for the right place to organically, not gratuitously, use that life experience,” he says. “A writer ultimately cannibalizes his entire life.”

He didn’t rely entirely on his own experience: he also had seven blind people read the manuscript and comment on his depiction of what their lives are like.

Although Sawyer has had a taste of blindness, he’s never been a teenage girl. But then, he takes issue with the old adage to “write what you know.”

“Yes, we writers are told to write what we know,” he says. “But writers can also find things out. You can always decide to become knowledgeable about something.

“The most interesting thing as a writer is try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, get inside somebody who is not like you. It’s like being an actor. No ambitious actor wants to play the part that’s closest to who he or she actually is. They want to play the part that’s the biggest stretch for them.

“It’s the same for a fiction writer. I’m writing my twentieth novel. I’ve written a hundred significant characters. If they were all middle-aged bald white guys who watched way too much Star Trek when they were young, they’d be boring.”

Sawyer laughingly says that if the RCMP didn’t have a dossier on him before, it might now, because he spent a lot of time reading teenaged girls’ blogs and Facebook pages and frequenting the live video chat site Justin TV.

“The public nature of the life of young people today makes it easier to eavesdrop without having to hang around the schoolyard,” he says. He also had teenage girls read the manuscript and offer suggestions.

Like all of his books, Wake is set in Canada. Sawyer is proud of that.

“My books are published all over the world, in fifteen languages. Within science fiction, I have been allowed to be blatantly Canadian, to explore Canadian themes. I get to be a more Canadian writer in this genre than the mystery writers, western writers, romance writers or even the mainstream writers get to be. If you want to be flagrantly Canadian in your writing, and still have a world-wide market, science fiction is a very green pasture.”

With Wake launched, Sawyer is looking ahead to the final two books in the trilogy, Watch and Wonder. Watch is written; Wonder is underway, and the whole trilogy will be out in paperback in 2012—the year in which it is set.

Sawyer, who writes a novel a year, divides each year into four phases: research, first draft, revision, and promotion.

The latter takes him away from Mississauga, where he lives with his wife, Carolyn Clink (herself a poet), three or four months a year.

Fortunately, he can write anywhere. In fact, he says, “I get my best writing time on the road because the phone isn’t ringing and the Internet access is usually pretty nonexistent. The Internet is my crack!”

Sawyer believes strongly in his chosen field of literature. “The ideas of science fiction are still current, and there are new ideas,” he says. “The science is more sophisticated now than ever before, and so the storytelling possibilities are more sophisticated today.”

Science fiction, he says, is “the only scientifically literate form of literature—and it is the only one that has as its brief to deal with fundamental questions.”

He notes that many recent bestselling novels from mainstream publishers, such as Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, are science fiction, and thinks that might represent a trend away from science fiction being published by specialized imprints.

In Canada, by Sawyer’s choice, Wake is published by the mainstream imprint Viking. “Ninety-five percent of everybody who goes into a bookstore never goes into the science fiction section. One in twenty does. And yet I think I have things of value to say to the other nineteen.”

But no matter who his publisher is, he’ll continue writing science fiction.

“Within the confines of science fiction I have written high adventure, deeply moving personal drama, comedy, courtroom drama, medical thrillers, satire. I can’t imagine any other genre where I would be given the latitude to experiment that my publishers now only allow me to have, but expect me to exercise.”

The wagons rolled on through the day.

Words today: 2,121

Total thus far: 19,676

You can add to that another 480 words (actually more like 980 to start with, but then I had to cut it by half) previewing the Regina Fringe Festival for Thursday’s LeaderPost, and another 1,400 words (which represented a 1,000-word cut from the first draft) of an interview with Robert J. Sawyer for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild magazine FreeLance. A productive day. I still need to write a science column and try to do some work on Magebane, but it’s getting late, so…no promises.

Mother Northwind’s smile faded.

Words today: 1,072

Total thus far: 21,062

I only had about thirty-five minutes of actual writing time today, although I did a lot more typing than that: at 2 p.m. I went to the Book & Brier Patch, our local independent bookstore, for Robert J. Sawyer‘s reading from his new novel Wake (a copy of which I bought, of course), and then after that I interviewed Rob at the request of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, which plans to run the interview in the next issue of its news magazine Freelance. (I’ll be sure to post that interview online as well, of course.) Rob, of course, is someone I’ve known for years now, and as I’ve recounted often at this point, it was in his class in writing science fiction at the Banff Centre that I began what turned into Marseguro…which is why there’s a prominent geographical feature in the first book called Sawyer’s Point, and a shuttlecraft by the same name in Terra Insegura.

We also hosted Rob and his wife Carolyn Clink, along with my musician/teacher/director/performer/composer friend Robert Ursan (two Robs are better than one!) to dinner last night and, as the rural correspondents for the Weyburn Review (the weekly newspaper I used to edit) are wont to say, A Good Time Was Had By All.

Tomorrow’s Father’s Day, which should mean I can requisition time to write if I so choose, since I should get to do Whatever I Want…

But somehow, I doubt it will work out that way!