We already live in a science fictional future: your pocket, after all, probably contains a powerful communicator/computer with which you can log onto a world-spanning information network. 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 …
John Howe is an artist particularly well known for his illustrations based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He and Alan Lee served as the chief conceptual designers for The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, so you have well have seen his work without even knowing his name. But when I interviewed him for …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/02/Mind-reading-Through-Technology.mp3[/podcast] Most of the time, we don’t really want other people to know what we’re thinking. When a friend starts spouting conspiracy theories or a relative asks what we think of her new tattoo, it’s just as well that only our soothing platitudes are heard, while the words running through our heads remain unspoken Outside …
OK, this is an interesting one. As I have often recounted, Marseguro, which won the 2009 Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction novel in English, began with a single opening line penned as a morning exercise in the Writing With Style program at the Banff Centre, in a science fiction-writing class taught by Robert …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/01/Communicating-Cars.mp3[/podcast] Do you talk to your car? I know I do (perhaps not as much as I, um, “talk” to other drivers, but some). I think I inherited the trait from my mother: all of the cars of my childhood, I knew from her, were named “Suzy.” These days, your car may even listen to …
Here’s a blast from the past: my 1993 script for a half-hour science-fiction-flavored promotional TV show for the Saskatchewan Science Centre, which aired on Cable Regina (now Access Communications). I was communications officer of the Science Centre at the time. Since I voiced the alien, large portions of this consisted essentially of me talking to …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/01/The-Naming-of-Drugs.mp3[/podcast] If you take a prescription drug, you’ve probably said to your pharmacist something like this. “Hi, I need a refill of the hydro… chloro… thoro… acti… zine? Zanc? Something like that.” At which point the pharmacist manfully chokes back his laughter at your pharmaceutical phonetics phailure, tactfully supplies the actual name of the drug, …
Nominations are now open for the Prix Aurora Awards, presented annually by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) for the best in, you guessed it, Canadian science fiction and fantasy. I was fortunate enough to win an Aurora in Montreal in 2009 for Marseguro (that’s me holding the award, flanked by Betsy Wollheim, …
Wonderful to see that Magebane has been picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club; my last book the SFBC brought out in hardcover was Marseguro. Their description is nice, too: Magebane by Lee Arthur Chane is that rare breed of novel—a brisk-paced, twist-filled stand-alone adventure of science vs magic! Four centuries ago, a devastating …
This is an unpublished and, as far as I know, never-submitted short-short I rediscovered in my files. I think I may have written it at Banff during the Writing With Style workshop on writing science fiction with Robert J. Sawyer, the same workshop out of which came Marseguro. The landing pod settled in the middle …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/01/Willpower.mp3[/podcast] The New Year may already be a little long in the tooth for a column on New Year’s Resolutions, since many of them have already been broken, but, hey, maybe you’re one of those still clinging to the hope that this year will be different than all the rest: in which case, this column’s …
A few years ago, at the time of Saskatchewan’s centennial celebrations in 2005, I had the opportunity to thrice portray T. Walter Scott, first premier of the province of Saskatchewan, and give a speech in his guise. Naturally, I made him a time traveler, so I could treat the whole thing a bit like a …
