The Manchester Fiction Prize 2009

<b>The Manchester Fiction Prize 2009</b>

First prize: £10,000
Deadline for entries: 7th August 2009
Entry fee: £15

Under the direction of Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the Writing
School at Manchester Metropolitan University is launching The
Manchester Fiction Prize – a new literary competition celebrating
excellence in creative writing.

The Manchester Fiction Prize is open internationally and will award a
cash prize of £10,000* to the writer of the best short story
submitted. The competition is open to entrants aged 16 or over; there
is no upper age limit.

A bursary for study at MMU will also be awarded to an entrant aged
18-25 as part of the Manchester Young Writer of the Year Award*.
Eligible entrants are asked to indicate on the entry form if they
would like to be considered for the Manchester Young Writer of the
Year Award in addition to the main prize.

All entrants are asked to submit a complete short story of up to 5,000
words in length. The story can be on any subject, and written in any
style, but must be new work, not published or submitted for
consideration elsewhere. The competition will be judged by
distinguished novelists and short story writers Sarah Hall, M. John
Harrison and Nicholas Royle.

The Manchester Fiction Prize celebrates the substantial cultural and
literary achievements of Manchester, building on the work of MMU's
Writing School and enhancing the city's reputation as one of Europe's
most adventurous and creative spaces. The prizes will be awarded at a
gala ceremony, held as part of the 2009 Manchester Literature
Festival.

You can enter online by going to: http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk

If you would like a printed entry pack for postal submission, or if
you have any queries, please contact:

James Draper
Project Manager: Writing School
Department of English
Manchester Metropolitan University
Telephone: +44 (0) 161 247 1787
E-mail: j.draper@mmu.ac.uk

*Terms and Conditions apply. See
http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk for full details.

Dan Brown’s Print-run to Block Out the Sun

I posted recently about Audrey Niffenegger getting a $5 million advance for her new novel and thought that was pretty impressive.

Well, not to be out-done, news that Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol, will have a first printing of 5 million copies, a record for his publisher, Doubleday.

A FIRST PRINTING of 5 million copies! Good grief. I assume that means the unit cost on each book will be about an eighth of a cent… Don’t worry–you’ll still have to pay $35 for the hardcover 😉

– S.

The Science of Horoscopes?

Apparently, a growing body of research–gathered essentially as a by-product of other research into everything from pesticides and flu viruses to sunlight and vitamin D–suggests that the month a baby is conceived in can have serious health consequences later in life. Infants conceived in June appear to suffer from birth defects at a higher rate than others, for instance. But babies born in the fall (conceived in November or December) tend to have more asthma. Even a baby’s gender can be influenced by timing that’s out of parents’ hands: research has shown the birth of baby boys dips nine months after stressful world events such as Sept. 11.

As researchers busy themselves filling in this veritable new zodiac, parents-to-be wonder how closely they should study the calendar.

Check out some of the other weird correlations based on month of conception:

* Research out of Indiana suggested a link between American babies being conceived between April and July and a higher risk of birth defects, including spina bifida, cleft lip and Down syndrome.

* A study out of Bristol in Britain, released in February, found that late-summer and early-autumn babies in Avon were on average slightly taller (5 millimetres) and had thicker bones (12.75 centimetres squared) than those born in winter and spring.

* A team in Nashville found a 30-per-cent increase in the risk of asthma for children born four months before flu season, in late fall and winter.

* An Israeli study found that babies born in June and July had a 24 per cent greater chance of becoming severely myopic than those born in December and January.

* Many studies have found that babies born in the Northern Hemisphere in February, March and April have a 5 to 10 per cent higher risk of schizophrenia.

The full article can be found here.

– S.

My Suggested New Name for Swine Flu OR Give Pigs a Chance…

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

There’s been a lot of talk this week amongst politicians and various interest groups about needing a new name for the swine flu currently spreading across the planet.

The first I’d heard about a desire to, of all things, rebrand a sometimes-lethal potential pandemic flu strain was on Monday, when the Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said that swine flu should be re-named “Mexican flu,” because reference to pigs is offensive to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork. While I understand the religious ban on pork in both faiths, I confess I don’t really understand why the term “swine flu” is that offensive—after all, it’s not exactly something you’re hoping to get anyway, right?

I can understand why some things that people want but might not like to call by their proper name get the cushion of a euphemism or catchier sounding name. Take Botox, for example. Lots of people want it for cosmetic reasons; so many now, in fact, that there’s really no stigma associated with getting Botox treatments (unless you go all Nicole Kidman, that is…) But what is Botox a short form trade name for?

Botulinum toxin. Yeah, that’s right. A potent neurotoxin used for cosmetic purposes. Now what sounds better: “You look great since your Botox treatment!” or “Wow, those injections of botulinum toxin in your face really worked great!”

My point exactly.

But with swine flu isn’t it the other way around? You want to avoid getting the disease, so why dress it up in a bland-sounding name? “Mexican flu” sounds like a euphemism for a tequila-induced hangover. “Swine flu” sounds ugly and nasty and, well, it is. If you do come down with this flu strain you have a lot more problems to worry about than what it’s called, don’t you think?

Needless to say, Mexico didn’t take kindly to this suggestion, feeling that “Mexican flu” was a bit more offensive to them than “swine flu”. This I actually can understand: Mexico doesn’t want to be blamed for the sickness, panic, and death so far associated with this new influenza. The Mexicans have suggested “North American flu”, but why tar all of us with that brush? Why blame people when you can just blame pigs?

But then on Wednesday we learned that groups representing the pork industry — including the Canadian Pork Council, the World Organization for Animal Health, the American National Pork Producers Council, the National Pork Board and the American Meat Institute (mmm…meat institute…) — have all been in talks with the US Agriculture Department asking officials to discourage the name “swine flu” and to reassure the public that pork is safe.

“We’re discussing, is there a better way to describe this that would not lead to inappropriate actions on people’s part?” said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “In the public, we’ve been seeing a fair amount of misconception … and that’s not helpful.”

It’s impossible to get pig strains of influenza from food, but nevertheless by last weekend China, Russia and Ukraine were banning imports of pork from Mexico and certain U.S. states, and other governments were increasing screening of pork imports.

Again, this need for a change makes sense: the term swine flu is leading to confusion, with people fearing they can catch the disease from pork — which is flat-out wrong.

So what alternatives are we left with?

Well, as of Wednesday the US government and President Obama had taken to calling the outbreak “the H1N1 flu virus”–which, while its correct technical scientific name, doesn’t really have any poetry to it. (And somebody should tell the Centers for Disease Control to get with the program…)

European Union officials have suggested calling the disease “novel flu.”

…NOW WAIT JUST A DAMNED MINUTE.

“Novel flu”? Are you trying to pin this on writers now? Hmmm… What kind of writers would spin a yarn about an animal virus mutating to infect humans and cause a global pandemic? Could it be science fiction writers?

You’re not pinning this one on us, bucko! No way. No how. We get enough grief and lack of respect for writing SF in the first place—we don’t need your help to be literary or social pariahs, thank you very much…

So, what are we left with?

Swine flu? Out.

Mexican flu? No mas.

North American flu? Thank you, no.

The H1N1 flu virus? Boooring…

Which brings us to my suggestion:

El Gripe.

It’s Spanish for ‘the flu’ (thus hinting at the Mexican connection without pointing any fingers) but much like ‘the Plague’ and ‘Cher’ it has that one-name-says-it-all ominousness to it.

Whaddya think? Doesn’t it just pop?

I’m glad we’re agreed.

Via El Gripe!

Err, wait, no…

– S.

SCIENCE!

It’s been a long-standing desire of mine (for a number of obvious reasons) to write, in essence, a science fiction version of the Harry Potter books. Perhaps the kids could be Space Cadets attending some sort of astronaut academy, etc…

I’m hardly alone in this desire and if it were so easy to do that any number of writers would already have succeeded. Which gets to the heart of the problem with the Harry Potter books and, really, any and all best-sellers: no one–not author, not agent, not editor–really knows what it is that sets them apart.

Oh, there are lots of theories and you can buy (as I have) any number of books that claim to give you the secret checklist of the kinds of things to include when building your story that best-sellers or break-out or blockbuster novels have in common.

But lots of people have these books and apply their lessons, and any number of those books get published and some of those go on to success…but none of them make it like Harry Potter made it.

And the question is why? What is it about those books–that ineffable, unteachable, unplanable quality–that makes those books (or others like The DaVinci Code, for instance) such a cultural phenomenon and massive best-sellers?

While I don’t pretend to know the answer to that (if I did I’d be working on my book instead of this blog…) but I’ve often wondered whether the application of careful market research (and some of the math modeling, statistical analysis, and hard- and social science they use in modern marketing is downright scary) could deduce what the French call a certain “I don’t know what.”

Well, looks like I’m not (surprise, surprise) the only one to wonder the same thing. Scientists (in an old study that I’ve only just come across) seem to have identified quantifiable evidence of the anecdotal publishing wisdom that the best way to nail a best-seller is word-of-mouth recommendations.

Duh. This is one of those times where you shake your head and think: “They needed a study to tell them that?” It is, however, a step in the hard-fact, cold-light-of-science direction that we need in order to quantify this element.

But more interesting to me, in a slightly different context, is news that Disney has a whole marketing force, including a so-called “kid whisperer”, dedicated to tapping into that most elusive of markets: tween boys.

Getting tween girls to jump on trends and buy whatever they’re told to by the media and their peers is apparently the marketing equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, but boys in the same 11-14 year old range remain either too savvy or too oblivious to marketing ploys to spend in the way that their female counterparts do.

Not to sound sexist, but other market data indicates that more men and boys read sci-fi than do women and girls (who tend to read more fantasy and do most of the book buying, too). So if my Harry Potter in Space series is to fly, I think I need to tap into this kind of marketing data. After all, I think it was getting young boys reading that really launched Harry Potter in to the sales stratosphere.

So if you’ll excuse me I need to go turn my skateboard the other way ’round…

– S.

Cue the Terminator soundtrack…

John Connor:
Can you learn things that you haven’t been programed with, so you can be, you know, more human, and not just a dork all the time?

The Terminator:
My CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer. The more contact I have with humans, the more I learn.

John Connor:
Cool.

– Terminator 2: Judgment Day

My fear of intelligent computers and Termintor-style killing machines is well known. So perhaps you can understand how my blood ran cold when I read this

If this computer could deduce in a day what it took humanity centuries to deduce do we really want something that much faster and smarter than us running around? Hmm?

– S.

Science Fiction’s Future OR Fear and Loathing in Science Fiction

Further to my post from Monday, here’s a few more sites (one of them a bit dated in its discusson of the Fall ’08 television season…) that make some interesting points about the current state and potential future of the SF genre:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/007318.html

http://io9.com/5065675/why-science-fiction-still-hates-itself

http://io9.com/5050871/do-you-really-want-science-fiction-books-to-be-more-literary

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4065242.ece

– S.

Which Came First: the Dinosaur or the Egg?

One of the things that fascinated me most in my high school and university biology classes was study of vertebrate evolution, and specifically that sequence of photos in the textbooks showing various vertebrate embryos at different stages of development during gestation: at some point in the womb, human beings look a lot like lizards, and birds, and all sorts of other things that we used to be on our way to be primates and eventually homo sapiens.

Well, now this same principle is being considered by some scientists to create what you might call “chickenosaurus”. While not exactly Jurrasic Park, some evolutionary biologists are teaming with paleontologists in hopes of genetically altering a chicken embryo to express some of the dormant traits held over from the days when birds used to be dinosaurs.

It wouldn’t be a dinosaur, and while genetically chickenosaurus would still be a domestic chicken, it wouldn’t exactly be a chicken, either. It might look something like Archaeopteryx–the earliest and most primitive bird known–having arms with claws instead of wings, teeth, and a tail; what science calls “atavistic structures”. Chickenosaurus would be a sort of evolutionary throwback–certain genetic signaling switches would be turned off or on depending on what features we were trying to express.

The book How To Build A Dinosaur by Jack Horner and James Gorman came out last week and an excerpt of the book in the Globe and Mail can be found here.

I may have to pick up that book…

– S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Which comes first? The dinosaur or the egg?
It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken’s egg. In this excerpt from their book How To Build a Dinosaur, paleontologist Jack Horner and co-author James Gorman explore why we should take this leap.

JACK HORNER AND JAMES GORMAN

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

March 28, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT

Among the potential benefits of causing a chicken embryo to develop dinosaurian characteristics is that this is a project that could capture the popular imagination. It could be a demonstration of evolution that would be felt at gut level by nonscientists who might be uninterested in the details of genomes and embryos.

Anything that brings home to the public the reality of evolution, and its place as the foundation idea of modern biology, is important. Anything that dispels the fog of confusion about science and religion would be enormously positive.

Hatching a dino-chicken would be shockingly vivid evidence of the reality of evolution – not a thought experiment but an Oprah-ready show-and-tell exhibit. The creature would be its own sound- and vision-bite. It certainly wouldn’t convince anybody who didn’t want to be convinced. But it would cause discussion and thought.

Creating a demonstration suitable for sound-bite television is not, however a reason to do scientific experiments. In order to get to the point where the question “How did you do that?” could be answered, we would have to learn a great deal. And we would tie molecular biology to macroevolution. We would zero in on a significant passage in vertebrate evolution, the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds, and pin it down to molecular changes in embryonic cells.
It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken’s egg.
Enlarge Image

It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken’s egg.

This is the heart of the promise of evolutionary developmental biology.

Vertebrate paleontology may seem to be so remote from the daily problems of the modern world that it exists apart from society. If I were to be harsh, I might ask, “What good is it?”

There is an aspect of vertebrate paleontology that is highly useful and of great importance to us as vertebrates. That vertebrate body plan is one we share with dinosaurs, chickens, and countless other creatures.

The result of this commonality of life, in this case in the specific fraternity of four-limbed vertebrates, is that lessons we learn about the growth of any tetrapod embryos may have significance for the growth of human embryos.

If we learn about the growth factors that signal the neural tube to continue developing, it’s possible that this knowledge could be useful in preventing birth defects.

In spina bifida, for instance, incomplete development of the spinal cord can leave an infant with painful and sometimes lethal birth defects.

In the 1980s researchers pinned down the importance of folic acid to the development of the spinal cord in human embryos. This discovery was made partly by gathering information about the diets of pregnant women and the incidence of spinal-cord birth defects like spina bifida, and partly with animal research. The simple remedy of adding folic acid to the diet of pregnant women now prevents countless cases of these defects.

Knowing that there are great potential benefits answers some questions about whether such research should be done. But there are others. Is it a morally justifiable act to play with life in order to go back in time? Is it cruel? Is it dangerous?

Experimentation of all sorts on chicken embryos is widely accepted and, I think, the correct assumption is that we are not causing the embryo pain. As to ultimately sacrificing the embryo, or a fully grown chicken, there are far greater injustices and indignities that billions of chickens face every day. Common sense would suggest that not allowing an egg to hatch, or humanely killing even a full-grown chicken, are actions that society recognizes as legitimate, given even the small return of a meal. The potential return is much greater here.

No one is ready to let an embryo experiment hatch yet. But when that point is reached, when the plan is to have a fully formed dinosaurlike chick hatch, then the experiment will come under review boards that deal with animal welfare. My sense is that providing a chicken with arms with claws instead of wings, with teeth, and with a tail, would not be cruel. In fact, if the atavistic structures grew improperly or were malformed in a way that would cause the animal pain, that in itself would mark a clear failure, since the whole point is to re-create functioning atavistic characteristics, not monstrosities.

There is a whole range of possible objections that have nothing to do with the health or life conditions of what we could probably call chickenosaurus. And that is fear for the environment, for interfering with the delicate ecological balance of the planet.

But if the embryo is not allowed to hatch, then it won’t be out in the environment at all. If it were allowed to hatch, and somehow escaped, the only problem would be the chickenosaur figuring out how to survive. It would not be a danger to the environment or to the billions of chickens in the world, because we would not be changing its genetic makeup. By manipulating growth signalling factors we would be switching genes on and off at different times during development, but not changing the genes themselves. Genetically, chickenosaurus would still be a domestic chicken. And if it were somehow to breed with a chicken, the result would only be more chickens.

I can say what interventions I would find reasonable, but I am not the one to decide. That is for society at large.

What I and other scientists can decide is whether or not to pursue knowledge that has the potential to teach us a great deal and to provide powerful tools that could be used for good purposes and bad.

My work is all about finding things out, about learning, and I operate on the principle that we should try to find out as much as we can about the way the world works.

I don’t stop and say, “Could this research find out something that might be misused, might cause more evil than good?”

I follow my nose to see what is interesting. When it comes to the question of how that knowledge is used, I am just another citizen.

Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from How to Build a Dinosaur, by Jack Horner and James Gorman.