Hi all –

The Prix Aurora Prize has arrived! Online voting closes Saturday, May 17th at 5 pm (Central Std Time).

My story, “Saturn in G Minor”–which has previously won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize–is a finalist in the Best Short Form in English category. You can read the story for free right HERE.

Any Canadian citizen anywhere in the world and all landed immigrants, as well as all attending members of Keycon/Canvention, are eligible to vote.

Online voting (available HERE) and on-site voting at KeyCon 25 must be completed by Saturday, May 17th at 5 pm (Central Std Time).

Don’t delay! Vote today!

While I won’t be attending KeyCon myself I will post as soon as I hear who won what at the Aurora Award presentation on Sunday night.

Best,

– S.

So I’ve been woefully behind in regular postings of late–I’ve been traveling a lot for work–but I saw something today that I just had to post about.

Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Fr. Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

Now as a Catholic myself and as a sci-fi writer it was nice to hear this. I’ve been thinking it for a long time, but it’s nice to have my opinion backed up 🙂 But what was even more interesting to me was Fr. Funes’ speculation that some aliens could even be free from original sin, that primordial break with God that gave rise to (amongst other things) the saying “forbidden fruit”.

The funny thing is when I was about twelve I asked my dad, who was in seminary for a while and who has a Church degree in Tomistic philosophy, whether he believed in aliens–we’d been watching a lot of ST:TNG at the time and were also having a debate about whether Data could have a soul (my father assures me that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that would be impossible. He backed this up by assigning me some reading from the Summa Theologica on the nature of the soul–I was TWELVE…)

As I recall, he didn’t ever give me a yes or no to the alien question (which I think means it’s a “no”), but dad did speculate–as does this Vatican astronomer–that if there were aliens they might not have suffered original sin. If that were the case, he reasoned, these perfect aliens in their state of grace might not want anything to do with us, or perhaps we simply wouldn’t have anything to say to each other. My dad used this to duck the question and say something to the effect of “So what does it matter if there are aliens, then?”

You can imagine how this infuriated a young, would-be SF writer… 🙂

– S.

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy group on Facebook has been running a series of interviews with Aurora Award nominees on their discussion board, and the interview with me (conducted by fellow Fledgling Karen Danylak) is now posted and available here.

In the same thread you can also find posts by a number of this year’s Aurora nominees, including most of the rest of the finalists in the Best Short Form in English category.

Special thanks to Donna Farley, one of the admins of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy group, for starting and organizing the interview thread. Great idea, Donna!

– S.

Hi all –

Just a reminder that Prix Aurora Prize voting is underway and is rapidly drawing to a close.

My story, “Saturn in G Minor”–which has previously won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize–is a finalist in the Best Short Form in English category. You can read the story for free right HERE.

Any Canadian citizen anywhere in the world and all landed immigrants, as well as all attending members of Keycon/Canvention, are eligible to vote.

Mail-in paper ballots (available HERE) are due by Friday, May 9th–a mere three weeks away!

Online voting (available HERE) and on-site voting at KeyCon 25 must be completed by Saturday, May 17th at 5 pm (Central Std Time)–a slightly less mere four weeks away!

Don’t delay! Vote today!

Best,

– S.

For those of you in the GTA, there’s a great upcoming series of SF&F lectures and readings sponsored by the Toronto Public Library and (gasp!) the Canada Council.

The series, Foresight: Speculative Fiction in Canada, starts next Monday at the Lillian Smith Library (College & Spadina). Notables include Kelley Armstrong, Guy Gavriel Kay, Nalo Hopkinson, and two of my editors Cory Doctorow and Julie E. Czerneda amongst many, many others.

You can see the whole list of events here.

It all kicks off with a panel discussion with Karl Schroeder, James Alan Gardner and Peter Watts on the pursuit of foresight in Canadian science fiction. Not to be missed!

– S.

Oh, let me taste your tears! Mm, your tears are so yummy and sweet! Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness! My-yummy!

Now I can enjoy the spring! 🙂

– S.

I was thrilled to discover my contributor copy of ESLI, the Russian science fiction magazine, in the mail yesterday–that’s the cover up above. In university I took one semester of Russian language and I discovered that I remembered just enough Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet to find my story.

The title page of my story. At the top
of the page is my name rendered in
Cyrillic characters and then the title of
the story. In Russian it translates (I think)
as “Time Borrowed”–but that works, too!

So cool!

ESLI is the same kind of newsprint digest-sized magazine as Analog or Asimov’s and the production values are very similar. I realize, too, that this is my first magazine publication of any kind–my stories have so far appeared only in anthologies. And each story also comes with an illustration on the story’s title page–and mine is spot on. I’m really pleased! I hope that ESLI will be interested in other stories of mine in future–working with them has been a wonderful experience, and a great first foreign language sale and publication.

– S.

Further to the article I posted a few weeks ago about a lawsuit trying to prevent CERN from starting up their Large Hadron Collider due to the very small risk that it might cause global destruction via a black hole or a stranglet, yesterday’s New York Times had another article about the risks posed by such high-end, high-energy physics experiments.

The article quite rightly poses the question of how one determines acceptable risks “in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high.”

Check it out here.

– S.

(PS: The article also links to some really interesting academic papers about risk assessment for these kinds of experiments. Unfortunately, you can’t get access unless you either buy the articles or have access through a university subscription to something like ProQuest. If you can get hold of them–I can because I have ProQuest access through my day job–I highly recommend them.)

There was an interesting (and slightly terrifying) article from the New York Times today about a man who has “written” 200 000 books.

Yup. 200 000.

I was prepared to despair at my lack of having finished writing even a single book until I discovered that this fellow–Philip M. Parker, a professor of management science–has used computer algorithms to trawl the internets collecting publicly available information on a subject–broad or obscure–and then, with the aid of a small army of computers and a few programmers, turned the results into books, many of them in the range of 150 pages and produced as print-on-demand only when a customer buys one. He is the ultimate long-tail retailer.

He’s used these algorithms to automate the (his words) “repetitive tasks” involved in producing a book.

Repetitive tasks. You know, like stringing words together into sentences? That kind of repetitive task.

I was prepared to laugh all this off (his customer feedback on the quality of his content sounds pretty negative from the article) until I read that he’s designing new algorithms to generate romance novels. Because, as he points out, there are “only so many body parts.”

My blood ran cold. If one type of fiction, why not others?

This reminds me of a story called “The Word Mill” by Don D’Ammassa that I read in the June 2003 issue of ANALOG. It was one of ANALOG’s short-short stories in the Probability Zero section and was a very funny tale of an author who enlists the aid of a series of artificial intelligences to do all his writing for him (you know–the repetitive bits) in multiple styles and eventually under numerous pseudonyms

Like I said, it was a fun story, I laughed at the end, but I turned the page and never thought it was possible. Even the review on Tangent called the story “amusing but slightly far-fetched.” Famous last words.

Now it turns out that there are actually jerks out there dedicated to such endeavors?

Swell.

I realize that we’re still a way away from best-selling (or even competently written) AI-authored fiction, but if there’s one thing the history of science fiction has taught me it’s that often just what you think is impossible is the stuff that ends up coming true. And sooner than you think.

At the end of the article the interviewer asks whether any of the acrostic poems Parker has had the computer generate are as good as something Shakespeare would have written.

“No,” he answers. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”

I’m glad that’s the only reason…

– S.

I was quite gratified to read this news item today–I think it means I have a shot with Natalie Portman…

– S.