Sent this to Metro Morning today after I woke up to a discussion of the Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball.

Metro Morning is Toronto’s top-rated morning radio show, hosted by Andy Barrie. While the discussion was interesting, I think the assumption was that the future is farther off than it actually is…

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Dear Mr. Barrie –

I listened with great interest to your discussion Friday morning with Scott Regher and Michael Hlinka about the Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball. However, I think your contention that genetic modification of athletes—so-called ‘gene doping’—will be common “in fifteen years” is a little optimistic. I can assure you that the future is now.

Experts believe that athletes at the Beijing Olympics this coming summer will be amongst the first who have undergone gene alteration to enhance their performance. Far from a sci-fi dream, the technology for gene doping—modifying an athlete’s own genome by inserting specific high-performance genes targeted at performance enhancement—already exists and is widely available. It is the same process currently used for gene therapy in hospitals around the world.

I am an award-winning science fiction author, and as is the case in my latest story, “Citius, Altius, Fortius” in the new Canadian anthology Tesseracts Eleven, the difficulty with gene doping is in the detection. Unlike steroids, growth hormone, or blood doping there are no telltale byproducts of metabolism that can be tested for. The delivery system for most gene therapy is a modified virus—the common cold. And unless we have a pre-modified copy of an athlete’s genome to compare against it will be almost impossible to determine whether a homerun champion or gold medal winner has been altered for enhanced performance.

After all, you can hardly disqualify someone for having a cold, can you?

Best wishes,

Stephen Kotowych
Winner of the 2007 Writers of the Future Grand Prize
http://kotowych.blogspot.com/

I was going to write all these up…but you’re smart people and can see for yourselves how they’re linked. I try to find and read as many hopeful stories as I can about the environment, lest I slip into the blackest despair. Some of these ideas let a little light peek through the gloom.

– S.

Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

Airborne Wind Turbines (from Canada, eh?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09_1_turbine.html

How technology can help fight climate change
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071212.wbaliside12/BNStory/Technology/home

Hydrogen Car Is Here, a Bit Ahead of Its Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/automobiles/autoreviews/09HONDA.html

The first issue of my new LOCUS subscription (the December 2007 issue) arrived yesterday and includes a review of Tesseracts Eleven by Rich Horton, the same reviewer who recently reviewed Writers of the Future XXIII for LOCUS.

I don’t think there were enough hyperlinks in that last paragraph…

He calls Tesseracts Eleven as a whole “one of the stronger entries” in the Tesseracts series and “a very solid anthology, full of enjoyable and thoughtful stories.”

Of my story he says, in part:

“The most straightforward SF is “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, by Stephen Kotowych, about a failed sprinter with some talent who is lured to a fictional African country for a radical program of bodily alteration that makes him an Olympic champion…(A) solid look at an athlete’s obsession.”

Nice!

– S.

That recent Russian elections appear to have been fixed, that Vladimir Putin–barred from seeking a third consecutive term as President of the Russian Federation, yet still determined to wield power after he leaves office–yesterday named his crony Dmitry Medvedev as his preferred successor, that this apparently all but ensures Medvedev will be anointed Russia’s next president, and that he’s played his part as political stooge properly by announcing today that (surprise, surprise) Putin will be appointed the next Prime Minister under President Medvedev–doesn’t concern me as much as the fact that no one seems to care.

Russia is a nuclear power with great power instincts and ambition; it has tremendous energy resources, a resurgent economy and an increasingly active military. It is making its voice heard on the international stage, on issues as diverse as Iran, Arctic sovereignty–remember that flag capsule they planted to claim the North Pole for Mother Russia?–and military exercises with China.

Why are we in the West less concerned about what’s going on in the former Soviet Union than we are about Linday Lohan’s bar tab?

I hate that I know this, by the way, but that’s my point–even if you don’t care, it’s impossible these days NOT to know. When “real” media outlets like ABC, CBS, and CNN are covering this crap and not letting it remain rightly the purview of Entertainment Tonight, it’s impossible for someone like me–who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Lindsay Lohan’s stupidity and misbehavior–not to be exposed to such trivialities.

That the notion of peacefully replacing leaders through a free and legitimate democratic process has not yet taken hold in the former USSR should be an issue of concern for Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia, etc. etc. etc.

That the current president of Russia is a former KBG agent who apparently sees targeted assassinations of opponents and critics like Alexander Litvinenko (by use of radioactive polonium-210–doesn’t get much more Bond villain-esque than that) and journalist Anna Politkovskaya–as a legitmate means of getting things done in a “democracy”, and that the Russian people–accustomed to the ‘strong man’ in Russian politics since the days of Ivan the Terrible–should like it this way should have people very deeply worried.

I was watching From Russia With Love again the other day, and it struck me how much Putin resembles the chess grandmaster/SPECTRE tactician Kronsteen–Number 5, as he’s better known in the SPECTRE hierarchy.

See for yourself:

Now, I think physical resemblance is where the comparison ends. Kronsteen, after all, sees his plan fail and is killed in the second act via poisoned boot knife as the price for failing SPECTRE. Putin, given that his plan is succeeding nicely, is much more like SPECTRE’s criminal mastermind and Number 1, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

– S.

Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth/
I want to be ready.
– “Celebration of the Lizard”, The Doors

For those of you living in the City of the King AKA Regiopolis AKA Kingston, Ontario AKA my home town, you should know that fellow Writers of the Future winner Tony Pi and I will be signing copies of the anthology tomorrow, Saturday December 8th from 11am until 3pm at the Chapters in Kingston, located at 2376 Princess Street (map here).

Hope to see you there!

– S.

DEC 8TH, SAT (11:00-3:00)
CHAPTERS KINGSTON
2376 Princess Street
Kingston, Ont K7M 3G4

A big congratulations today to my Writers of the Future buddy Jeff Carlson, who has just sold German rights for his book Plague Year and its two sequels to publisher Piper via the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

The book was sold in a best bid auction, for what Jeff assures me was a “significant deal” in high five figures. Included in the contract are bestseller bonuses, which, if attained, will make the overall deal worth six figures, plus royalties.

Piper intends to publish the first volume in September 2008 as “part of a special marketing campaign aiming to link phantastic and mainstream novels in order to widen the range for ‘phantastic thrillers’ in both the mainstream and the science fiction/fantasy market,” including advertising, special pages in Piper catalogues, and cross-promotion in genre and non-genre media.

Spanish rights for Plague Year were also sold to Minotauro in a preemptive bid over Plaza / RHM.

Jeff won First Place in the first quarter of last year’s Writers of the Future contest and somehow found time to get his first novel published between then and attending the workshop and awards week this past August. Plague Year has one of the best blurb quotes I’ve ever read on the front cover: “Part Michael Crichton, part George Romero…full of high-altitude chills. – EE Knight”. Cool, right?

The first sequel, Plague War, is slated for release in North America in August 2008, with the next title set to follow in Summer 2009.

All of us WOTFists from this year are thrilled for Jeff. And, as Jeff has so kindly decided to include many of us as minor characters/cannon fodder in Plague War, it means that yours truly will now get to die an exotic death in at least three different languages. w00t! 🙂

Well done, Jeff!

– S.

Hello all –

Sorry I’ve been so quiet of late–a combination of a cold and trying to finish a freelance project I’ve been working on with the deadline fast approaching. Don’t worry–it’ll get done 🙂

But I wanted to come out of seclusion to highlight this article, ‘Why Don’t We Love Science Fiction?‘, from the (Sunday) Times Online.

It’s a wonderful interview with Brian Aldiss that makes a passionate argument for the desperate need the world has for science fiction right now. It’s written from a British perspective, but you can easily substitute in Canadian, American, Russian, German, etc. disdain for SF and come out with the same message: that science fiction (not fantasy or horror or ‘new weird’) is, as the article points out “the most vivid and direct chronicler of our anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called ‘the mysterious fears of our nature’…How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom, rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead? Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever.”

Ahhhh… Now that’s encouraging. Would that more people would take that advice. I feel energized just reading that; makes me want to go and write something.

And, thanks to this article, I finally know what I want on my tombstone:

“The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most ‘literary’ fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary.”

– S.

Congratulations to Nalo Hopkinson–Canadian SF writer and winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Prize, the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, the World Fantasy Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award–whose book, Brown Girl in the Ring, was announced today as a finalist for the annual CBC Canada Reads contest.

Five celebrity panelists will debate the merits of each title in a series of CBC Radio broadcasts from February 25 through 29, 2008, eliminating one book at a time until one remains. In Nalo’s case, her book is being championed by hip-hop poet Jemeni.

I loved the Quill & Quire‘s description of the book as “science-fiction flavoured” in their announcement of the finalists.

This has a kind of personal connection for me, in that in the 2005 edition of the contest the University of Toronto Press’ (my day job’s) own Rockbound by Frank Parker Day was the winner. In the final round Rockbound bested the well-written yet still terrible Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s most recent sci-fi-but-not-sci-fi-because-I’m-a-literary-type effort.

Rockbound is a 1928 novel about life and nature on the small maritime island of Rockbound and is a really fantastic read.

For the winner, Canada Reads can mean a huge sales boost–some have sold close to 40,000 copies based on their win.

While I can’t divulge the exact sales figures of Rockbound, I can tell you it rapidly became one of UTP’s all-time best-sellers, putting it in the same category as Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy and John Porter’s The Vertical Mosaic.

Good luck, Nalo!

– S.

Hey gang –

Some cool news this morning–I’m going to be published in Greek!

The Greek SF magazine The Dramaturges of Yann (you can find an English
version of their website here) is going to publish a reprint of my story “Borrowed Time” in an upcoming issue. The story first appeared in the DAW anthology Under Cover of Darkness in February of this year and was my first fiction sale. The magazine only pays in contributor copies, but I think it will be cool to put on a resume/cover letter 🙂

I also have a Greek uncle so hopefully he’ll get a kick out of reading the story in Greek. And, unlike most foreign language sales I’ll ever have, hopefully it means I can get report on how accurate the translation is… 🙂

I’ll keep you posted on when the issue appears (I gather from the editor that it might be a while, as there’s a backlog).

The beauty of foreign reprint sales (besides the potential for found money and the ability to say “and his work has been translated into sixteen languages” in a cover letter) is that because each magazine is looking for rights in different languages you can send the same reprint out to twenty different markets at a time, like I did last week. That’s a lot better than having to wait for one editor to get back to you and only then send it along somewhere new…

If any of you other writers types are interested in shopping your reprints internationally (and why wouldn’t you be? Some of them do pay in more than copies, after all), I recommend you start at the website of fellow Canadian SF writer and friend, Doug Smith.

He has a helpful article on publishing with foreign markets here, and an invaluable list of foreign markets here.

– S.

Hi all –

Just a reminder that this Saturday, November 24 in Toronto there will be a launch for Tesseracts Eleven at 3pm at Bakka-Phoenix (just west of Bathurst on Queen St. W).

I’ll be in attendance doing a reading and signing copies, as will several of the other authors, including Susan Deefholts, David Nickle, Sandra Riedel, Claude LaLumiere (also editor of next year’s Tesseracts Twelve), and Douglas Arnott.

You can read more about the book here on Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow is one of the volume’s co-editors).

The complete list of launches is:

Tesseracts Eleven Toronto Book Launch, November 24th
Bakka Books, 697 Queen
Street West, Toronto, Ont.
3:00pm

Hot off the Press Fall Book
Launch, November 30th
Historic Firehall (next to 10 St. Bridge), 1111
Memorial Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta.
7:00pm

Tesseracts
Eleven Vancouver Book Launch, December 2nd
White Dwarf Books, 3715 West
Tenth Ave., Vancouver, B.C.
3:00pm

Each launch will have authors from Tesseracts Eleven reading from their story in the anthology, and co-editor Holly Phillips will be attending the Vancouver launch.

Hope to see some of you at Bakka on Saturday!

– S.