| So, Star Trek: Enterprise is cancelled and the pirated next season of Battlestar Galactica will not be available for downloading for days, perhaps weeks. May I suggest a little reading material for those people hungry for some quality science fiction that does not involve Cylons or Berman and Braga?
Multiple-award-winning writer Robert Charles Wilson is currently on a North American tour with his latest science fiction novel, Spin, plugging it alongside fellow author Robert J. Sawyer and his new book, Mindscan. Born in California and now living in Canada, Wilson is the author of 12 published novels and an impressive collection of short stories over the past 20 years.
His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Realms of Fantasy, Tesseracts 3, 4 & 6, Northern Frights 3, 4 & 5, and Northern Stars, just to name a few. His first novel, A Hidden Place, was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist. He won the Canadian Aurora Award for his novel Darwinia in 1999, which was also a Hugo Award finalist and his recent novel, Blind Lake, a 2004 Hugo Award finalist, won the 2004 Prix Aurora award for Best Long-Form Work in English and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003.
"I have wanted to be a science fiction writer for as long as I could read, at the age of five," says Wilson. "I developed a fascination with it and I am enough of an obsessive-compulsive to become a writer of it. I basically grew up wanting to be Robert Heinlein."
Science fiction is more often scorned for the perceived sins of being derivative than praised for originality and insight. And no matter how many movies Hollywood has wrung out of Philip K. Dick’s body of work, sci-fi remains the bastard child of modern literature. But for Wilson, it is "the literature of human contingency."
"From H.G. Wells onward, writers of sci-fi were looking at a new cosmological environment that science brought to man. Everything from Darwinian evolution, to the geological sciences, supported a view that humanity is much more mutable in this space, that is much more ancient than previously thought," he says. "We write about who we are now and what we will become in relation to this knowledge, and science fiction is where we imaginatively inhabit that idea."
Recently, there has been a trend toward authors re-branding their work as SF – speculative fiction – rather than be subjected to the critical prejudice towards the sci-fi genre. Wilson, however, would like to reclaim the term "science fiction."
"From a Wellsian perspective, (it) makes perfect sense," he says. "The label does not imply a slavish admiration for science, or a slavish admiration for technology – this is just the area where we explore with our ideas. We are not problem solvers or futurists or prophets. We are exploring alternatives to a possibility." |
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