Dr. Runte / Doctor Who

Thanks to Stephanie Johanson for this.

The Missing Elephant

Sept 11 is the launch of the anthology, They Have To Take You In, in which my story, "The Missing Elephant" appears. The anthology is edited by Ursula Pflug and is a fund raiser for the Dana Fund:

The Dana Fund was created in July of 2010 at the Canadian Mental Health Agency (CMHA HKPR) in Peterborough Ontario, at the suggestion of friends and family who wished to make donations in her memory. Dana Tkachenko inspired many people through her own experiences of struggling against tremendous obstacles and succeeding in creating a stable and fulfilling life for herself and her family. Dana’s memory is honoured through the Dana Fund, by dedicating donations to the cause of supporting young women and families in transition, experiencing similar challenges, who could benefit from some help along the way." - Gordon Langill

Basically, the anthology is about the importance of family and/or its various dysfunctions. I wrote the "Missing Elephant" specifically for the anthology, so it's my first attempt at CanLit rather than SF.

I'm quite pleased with it, but it's hard to be objective and I was outside my usual genre. I had my usual editor go through it before submitting to the anthology and made the requisite changes, but my editor wondered how credible it was...but of course, it is pure autobiography. Life really is stranger than fiction. The number of times in a month I'll say, "I'd put that in my novel, but who would believe it?" in reference to this or that incident with colleagues or family...or in this case, my own stupidity. Hardly credit the incident in question myself...but absolutely accurate, save for the changed names. But presumably Ursula liked it, since she took it for the anthology, and she is a pretty fabulous writer/editor, so I'll take that as sufficient validation.

Being somewhat satisfied with "The Missing Elephant" I tried a second CanLit story, though with a slight SF edge to it. I am really happy with that one, but it is still doing the rounds of Canlit mags.... Hard to tell if the rejections are because it's not up to standard, or if even a trace of SF is a hard sell to CanLit markets. I'll try it with SF markets next time it comes back, when the question will be whether SF markets will accept anything that Canlit.... Eventually, I'll put everything into a collection of my short fiction, but I would prefer to have the validation of previous publication before I include anything in it.

30th Anniversary of Neuromancer

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

I keep trying to get my kids interested in the movies I liked, and they always ask, "Is it old?" And I'll say, "No no, fairly recent." And they'll ask, "Is it in colour?" and I'll say, "Yes! It's in Colour! Geeze! I'm not that old" and then I'll look it up and it will have been filmed in the 80s, which my kids confuse with the 1800s... "Really Dad? That old?! Then, no." Because a lot of older movies do not hold up for this generation.

Tried to recommend Neuromancer to Tigana this week, and she asked "How old?" and I had to think...

"It's a very influential book," I said, stalling. "You know, half the stuff on the Internet was named after what Gibson predicted in that book. The nerds who read that book were the same nerds that went out and built what he had described!"

And Tigana looked at me and said, "Neuromancer was before the Internet? That old? Were there dinosaurs?"

Hard to believe it's 30 years old. I remember Gibson doing readings from chapters in progress at conventions two to three years before that even. Great book. Still a great book, though feels more contemporary than predictive these days.

(Same with Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes which came out before Facebook and other social media. Fabulously brilliant predictive SF, but it only came out in 2005 and everything in those first couple of chapters is just, you know, how things are....)

Guardian article on the 30th anniversary of publication of Nueromancer.

Tigana vs Plested

My family came up to Calgary to pick me up from When Words Collide Convention, and I had arranged with Mike Plested to meet Tigana. Mike graciously dedicated his second Mik Murdoch novel The Power Within (which was launched that weekend) to Tigana. Tigana, of course, had no idea he had done that until he presented her with a signed copy in the lobby of the Carriage House Inn at the end of WWC. She was kind of impressed! The dedication reads:

For all those people who have supported Mik Murdoch: Boy Superhero and especially to Tigana Runté who told her dad Mik was worth publishing in the first place.

Of course, he then enlisted Tigana's promise to read his fantasy novel and pressure me to publish that too....