Today is the day, folks! You can now get hold of copies of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future XXIII (which includes my Grand Prize-winning story, “Saturn in G Minor”) at your friendly, neighborhood bookstore.

The anthology is full of some fantastic fiction by new writers whose names will, no doubt, very shortly be gracing your bookshelves, and Hugo and Nebula Award ballots.

Fittingly, my box of free copies arrived this morning and, according to the tracking numbers, my artwork and trophies should be close behind (they are at least in Toronto…)

Enjoy! As always, I’d love to know what you think.

– S.

(October 17, 1948 – September 16, 2007)

“Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain.”
– from The Great Hunt

I find myself profoundly sad on what would otherwise be quite a happy day.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., better know to fans of the fantastic as Robert Jordan, died yesterday after a long battle with primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy (cardiac amyloidosis).

Much in the same way that Madeleine L’Engle‘s death two weeks ago came as quite a blow to many SF fans and writers of a slightly older generation, the death of Robert Jordan is the passing of a writer who had a profound impact on me in my formative reading years.

The old joke in answer to the question “When was the Golden Age of science fiction?” is “Twelve”, as it tends to be those works you read right around the beginning of your teenage years (when you’re trying to form yourself as a person anyway) that form your interests in reading and writing SF for much of the rest of your life, and to which you look back fondly as when SF was ‘really good.’

Ironically, given my recent success, it was winning a $25 gift certificate to a bookstore for a short story I wrote in seventh grade that led me to The Eye of the World. I was wandering around a bookstore in Kingston (one long since closed) and in the fantasy section noticed a book’s cover. One of the characters was wearing a samurai helmet. Having a long-standing love of samurai I picked it up without even looking inside, along with a book on chess strategy called Principles of the New Chess that I was really excited about (I’m not kidding–I was a seriously weird 11-year-old, okay?)

I figured since I wasn’t really paying for the novel it wasn’t a loss if I didn’t like it. I was pretty certain, however, that chess book was going to come in handy…

Well, I never did read the chess book (ah, my career as the first Canadian Grandmaster that might have been) but did get into The Eye of the World one night when I was having trouble getting to sleep.

Big mistake.

I read the first five chapters before I looked up and noticed it was 3am (on a school night!) But I was there with Rand and Tam, cold and out of breath, running terrified through the Westwood when the Trollocs and Myrddraal attacked on Winternight. I’d rarely ever been so transported by fiction (maybe by The Hobbit and LOTR, and maybe by Kevin J. Anderson’s Gamearth Trilogy).

Though I fell out of reading the series later when there started to be years between novels, it’s hard to overestimate how the first four or five books in the Wheel of Time consumed me between the ages of 12 to about 17. I recall that a copy of The Great Hunt was all I wanted or asked for when I turned 12–it came out 2 days after my birthday and those two days were excruciatingly long.

So thank-you, Mr. Jordan, for my Golden Age. My only hope is that somewhere, someday, in my own writing, I might channel even just a hint of that magic–that True Source–you wielded so deftly. I, along with many others I’m sure, will miss you.

– S.

Hot on the heels of the profile on SCI FI Wire, the Adventures in Scifi Publishing podcast has posted (here) the second of two podcasts recorded at this year’s Writers of the Future week. This one features interviews with some of the writer and illustrator winners, as well as writer judge KD Wentworth and illustrator judge Laura Brodian Freas.

I come in at around the 26m 30s mark (seriously–do I sound like that? And boy do I need to stop saying “uhh” so much! You don’t notice it much in conversation but boy does it stand out when recorded…)

If you’re a writer you should also check out the first podcast, which is the fantastic presentation we received on Thursday afternoon from Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta on how to succeed as a professional author. Find that one here.

Thanks to Shaun Farrell of ASFP for the great interview.

– S.

A report in Nature says that scientists have discovered a planet that survived the red giant expansion stage of its sun on the star’s way to becoming a white dwarf.

The planet, about three times the mass of Jupiter, orbits V 391 Pegasi. During the red dwarf phase of its star’s life it was roughly 1 AU from the star (i.e.: the distance Earth currently is from our sun). The planet currently orbits V 391 Pegasi at a distance of about 1.7 astronomical units (AU), or about 158 million miles (a bit further out than Mars currently orbits the sun).

This is of interest to scientists because (as the NY Times explains): “When our own Sun [roughly similar V 391 Pegasi] begins to graduate from a hydrogen-burning main sequence star to a red giant, two effects will compete…As the Sun blows off mass to conserve angular momentum, Earth will retreat to a more distant, safer orbit. At the same time, tidal forces between Earth and the expanding star will try to drag the planet inward, where it could be engulfed.”

So the ultimate fate of Earth has always been in question. It now appears, given the experience of the gas giant in V 391 Pegasi, that maybe Earth can avoid such a calamity, too…5 BILLION YEARS FROM NOW.

Don’t get me wrong: I geek out on this stuff as much as the next, well, geek (damn). But to read the headlines today, you’d think Bruce Willis had just blown up a comet on a collision course with us.

As much fun as thinking about 5 billion years from now is, and as much as it adds to our understanding of the universe, can we get back to stopping global warming now, please? Because if we don’t we’re not going to last 500 years let alone 5 billion.

– S.

For some reason Blogger has been hiding a number of my posts from this week and I’m missing all the WOTF posts from Tuesday though today…Hmmm…

My back-ups are off-site so I’ll have to repost from those (maybe over the weekend). In the meantime there’s a flood of posts from this week for you to read through!

And don’t forget: the release date for Writers of the Future XXIII is this Monday, September 17, 2007!

– S.

Robert J. Sawyer–good friend and writing guru–has posted a nice little blurb about my WOTF win on his blog. Thanks, Rob!

My man was off winning his own fabulous piece of Lucite at the time, having been named China’s favorite foreign SF author of the year. Well done, Rob! (He also got to hug a panda–how cool is that?)

– S.

Hi all –

John Joseph Adams (assistant editor and slush god at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) has just written a profile of me and my WOTF Grand Prize-winning story for SCI FI Wire, the news service of The SCI FI Channel.

You can find the article here.

SCI FI.com gets 2 million+ unique visitors a month so I’m really excited about this profile. I know most of them aren’t necessarily reading the SCI FI Wire but if even just a fraction do… 🙂

– S.

In cool news, Google (in association with the X-Prize Foundation) has announced a $30m prize pot to private firms that land a robot rover on the Moon by 2012.

The robots will have to complete a series of objectives including “roaming the lunar surface for at least 500m and gathering a specific set of images, video and data.”

I think these kind of prizes are a fabulous way to spur interest and private investment in space exploration–I really think that’s where the true future of space exploration lies. Governments have too many other priorities to dedicate the kind of time, effort, and resources to space exploration that is really needed to get us off our little blue marble.

Can you imagine the next generation of NASA’s moon explorers showing up in 2020 only to find all these roverbots that have been spinning donuts in the lunar soil for the better part of a decade?

Then again, with a new Cold War seemingly in the offing, maybe the fear of ‘Ruskies in space’ or a ‘Moon gap’ will change all of that…

– S.

So a very cool moment for me today–my 1000th unique visitor.

Woohoo!

No doubt a lot of this traffic has come because of people visiting the site in light of my WOTF Grand Prize win. To give you an idea: in July I had 280 unique visitors (averaging 10 a day); in August (the month I won) I had 518 people find me; and though we’re only thirteen days in to September I’ve already had 209 people (an average of 17 a day) stop in to say hello.

I’ve had visitors from:

	Companies
	Canada
	Networks
	Austria
	United Kingdom
	Germany
	Australia
	Organizations
	US Educational Institutions
	Netherlands
	France
	US Governmental Entities (hello CIA!)
	Sweden
	Denmark
	Estonia
	Croatia/Hrvatska
	Argentina
	India
	Brazil
	Norway

So hello everyone! Thanks for stopping by my little tube of the internet. Hope you find something of interest while you’re here. If you’re reading my fiction, well, I hope you’re enjoying it. And if you haven’t read my stuff I hope you’ll consider doing so soon. I’d love to hear what you think.

See you at 2000 visitors!

– S.

According to this article on the New Scientist Space Blog, faster-than-light communication might be theoretically possible if the so-called “braneworld” model of reality proves true (that our 3D universe acts as a membrane floating in higher-dimensional space. Most particles and fields–except gravity–are firmly fixed to the ‘brane’, which is why we can’t see the extra dimensions or step sideways into them).

We might now be able, however, to send particles, via the magic of quantum physics, tunneling through these membranes, using the inter-dimension space as a short cut, and have the particles (containing some kind of useful information) reappear in some far-distant part of the universe almost instantaneously without having traversed the intervening space. (This is roughly the explanation of ‘sub-space’ used to rationalize Star Trek‘s FTL communication).

I guess this means we should hope that aliens have a two-tier SETI program–radio telescopes to make contact with us lesser civilizations and beam us the plans for an FTL radio, and then the FTL channel where we can talk in realtime.

Kind of like having dial-up and broadband, I guess 🙂

I have to confess that, while I’m not nearly smart enough to understand the math behind quantum physics, much of it seems like voodoo to me. I did a degree in the history of science and, remember, the history of science is the history of people being wrong.

I’m a bit more skeptical than some science fiction writers when scientists start making claims that involve ‘dark’ matter or energy, ‘strings’, ‘vibrations’, or (in this case) ‘membranes’. Seems like they’re reaching for explanations because the numbers don’t quite add up and they need something to fudge them with.

Admittedly this kind of grasping at (cosmic) straws is a good thing–it’s how science learns. And don’t misunderstand–these ideas can make for some fun science fiction and I hope I’m wrong and that we can communicate superluminally.

But membranes? Vibrations? Sounds a bit like aether or the plum-pudding model to me. And remember: those theories had plenty of believers and were ‘true’ for a time, too.

– S.