The Friends of the Merril Collection

SOL Rising
Number 6, November 1990

Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy
Library Report
Building Committee Report
The Starr Chamber
Famous Fantastic Quotations
An Interview With Robert Sawyer
An Interview With Tanya Huff
An Interview With Karen Wehrstein
Elizabeth Pearse
Northern Lights: Canadian Science Fiction News
Canadian Fiction 1989
Awards For 1989 Fiction

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Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy

At the annual meeting of the Friends of The Spaced Out Library in May 1990, the members of The Friends approved a motion recommending to the Toronto Public Library Board that the name of the Library be changed to the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy.

The Toronto Public Library Board subsequently accepted the recommendation of The Friends and approved the name change. The new name will become effective on January 1, 1991.

The name change issue generated more discussion than any previous single item at an Annual Meeting of The Friends.

Larry Hancock, on behalf of the Executive Committee presented the arguments in favour of the name change. However, the recommended name was not that which was discussed in SOL RISING 5 (April 1990).

After reading the arguments presented in SOL RISING 5, Judith Merril wrote to The Friends, withdrawing her objections to the use of her name in the name of the Library.

Based on other restrictions which Ms. Merril had still asked be taken into consideration, the Executive recommended "Merril Collection of Speculative Literature" to the membership.

John Robert Colombo presented the arguments opposing the name change.

Following lengthy discussion, a secret ballot was taken. The ballot ended in a dead tie.

Having no clear mandate on the issue, the Executive therefore withdrew their motion and turned to the membership for settlement of the matter.

To gauge membership support for a name change, a motion was put forward from the floor recommending that the name of the Library be changed, but without specifying a replacement name. This motion was approved with a two-thirds majority.

After further discussion and reference to the letter from Ms. Merril, a motion from the floor suggested "Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy". The motion was approved and the recommendation was later forwarded in writing by the Chairman of The Friends to the Toronto Public Library Board.

In other business at the Annual Meeting, Loma Toolis, Head of Collections, presented the staff report, Larry Hancock presented the Executive Committee report, John Millard presented the Building Committee report and Doris Bercarich presented the Treasurer's report.

Peter Fitting did not stand for re-election as Chairman of The Friends, nor did Keith Soltys as a Member-at-large. For 1990/91 the elected Executive Committee of The Friends will be Chairman: Larry Hancock, Treasurer: Doris Bercarich, Members-at-large: Robert Hadji, Lum Do-Ming and John Millard, Past Chairman: Peter Fitting.

In related news, noted Canadian artist, Martin Springett has designed letterhead and a new logo for the Library.

The Library is currently in the process of printing new brochures and other materials which will be released January 1, 1991 in coordination with the name change.

Library Report

by Lorna Toolis, Head Of Collection

New Acquisitions at the Library

The Spaced Out Library has acquired a complete run of New Worlds in very good to fine condition as part of the Library's program to complete the runs of pulp magazines and replace damaged issues. Other noteworthy acquisitions include a set of Hannes Bok prints, known as "The Powers", a signed copy of Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers, and a scarce title by Ray Bradbury, Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby, is a Friend of Mine.

Orson Scott: Card was kind enough to deposit a photocopy of the manuscript of Xenocide, sequel to the 'Ender Wiggins' books, from which he read as a guest of the Library in November 1989. Mr. Card's courtesy is greatly appreciated by the staff and patrons of the Library.

New Staff At The Library

Nancy Soltys took a year's maternity leave; her new son's name is Edward. Until her return Mary Cannings has assumed the responsibilities for catalogue card maintenance. Mary worked in the Metro Library before transferring to TPL, most recently she has been working at the Bloor/Gladstone branch. She has a keen interest in Young Adult fiction as well as fantasy; her favourite author is Andre Norton.

Annette Mocek has also taken a year's maternity leave; her new daughter's name is Eva Teresa. Until her return Lisa Shirley is responsible for cataloguing and reference. Lisa comes to the Library from Anaheim Public Library in California. Lisa has read science fiction and fantasy for many years, attends the conventions, and finds employment The Spaced Out Library "a logical step".

Joan Flavell has returned to the library after an absence of several years. Formerly of the Palmerston branch, regular visitors to the Library will remember her as the person who re-filed the author/title card catalogue. She works three days a week at the Library, handling periodicals and conservation work on the pulps.

News From The Library

The circulating collection holdings are now listed in the TPL system catalogue, greatly increasing the interloans and usage of the Library's 7,000+ volume paperback circulating collection.

Cards for the Library's catalogue are now being produced on the Library computer, using the Ultramarc program.

The Library gratefully acknowledges the donations of Mr. John Marshall, and Mr. Paul Campbell.

Building Committee Report

At the September meeting of the Building Committee, the members voted approval of the proposed design for the new building which will be located at 239 College Street. Shortly thereafter it went to the Board of the Toronto Public Library for approval; the Board also approved the design.

The Spaced Out Library (or the Merril Collection, as it will be known as of January 1, 1991), will occupy the entire third floor of the new building. The circulating collection will be at the front of the building in a sunny, friendly room; the non-circulating collection will be directly connected to both the circulating section and the workroom, in order to facilitate the retrieval of materials from the temperature and humidity controlled stacks.

Staff can hardly wait for the new facilities to be ready; the anticipated moving date is sometime in mid to late 1992.

Several members of The Friends of The Spaced Out Library are members of the Building Committee.

The Starr Chamber

In anticipation of the forthcoming appearance by Lois McMaster Bujold at The Spaced Out Library in March 1991, Jane Starr takes a look at her latest novel.

Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Vor Game. New York: Baen Books, 1990. (Note: part of this book was previously published in slightly different form as "The Weatherman" in Analog.)

The Vor Game marks the welcome return of Miles Vorkosigan: junior Vor lord, son of Barrayar's most influential man (next to Miles' boyhood chum, the Emperor Gregor), ensign newly graduated from the Imperial Military Academy, and former mercenary commander. A failed assassination attempt on his father before his birth damaged Miles in utero and he was born with serious physical problems. He compensates for this with intelligence, hard work, keen observation and pure natural deviousness.

When Miles' first post-grad assignment goes wrong he is sent off-planet on a relatively minor job for Imperial Security, the only arm of the Barrayaran Imperial Service that will still touch him (abeit reluctantly). He runs straight into trouble and the Emperor Gregor, who has skipped out on his handlers to experience "real" life incognito. Miles must regain control of the Dendarii Mercenaries and use them to rescue Gregor, foil a devious plot by a rival mercenary leader, and beat back a Cetagandan invasion. Challenging, even for Miles and the Dendarii.

Ms. Bujold provides an exciting adventure in the best sf tradition (yes, I know that's a cliché). The plot is intricate and fast moving, she has a talent for dialogue and a nice wit. Her characters and their societies and worlds are carefully wrought and consistent. Miles of course, stands out. He thinks, learns and grows and he makes mistakes and pays for them. Ms. Bujold has the knack of making even the bit-part characters breathe, without seeming to spend extra words on it. She does the same with their surroundings, providing a clear and quite visual sense of place.

Although part of a series, The Vor Game stands on its own, as do all Ms. Bujold's books. They were not published in order, though, a problem which is addressed at the end of The Vor Game in a handy chronology of Miles' life and universe, so that readers who care to can read the series in sequence. The Vor Game is highly recommended.

Other books by Lois McMaster Bujold: Shards of Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, Ethan of Athos, Falling Free, Brothers in Arms, Borders of Infinity.

Ms. Bujold has delivered a new novel to her publishers, describing the events taking place on Barrayar shortly before Miles' birth. She won a Nebula for her novel Falling Free and her short story "The Mountains of Mourning" won both the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Jane Starr is a librarian at the Alberta Agriculture Library and a regular reviewer for SOL RISING

Famous Fantastic Quotations

By John Robert Colombo

I have been collecting and publishing compilations of Canadian quoted matter since the Centennial year. So from 1967 on, I have spent at least an hour a day clipping and typing and storing and keyboarding and editing and printing out "quotable quotes" made by Canadians about all subjects under the sun and by foreigners about Canada. I now have over 20,000 separate quotes on three-by-five cards, and perhaps 8,000 more in electronic memory.

My efforts have not been limited to Canadian quotations. One of my books, for instance, is devoted to Hollywood quips and quotes made both on and off the screen. That book was called Colombo's Hollywood in this country. The title in the United Kingdom was The Wit and Wisdom of the Moviemakers. But in the United States it bore my preferred title: Popcorn in Paradise.

Quote-collecting is not particularly taxing, but it is labour-intensive and time-consuming. One day, while filing some quotes manually, it occurred to me that the material I was marshalling all belonged to a given class. What were the characteristics of that class, I mused? Here were real quotes made by real people. Then a notion came into my head. It was not yet an idea, merely a notion. I idly wondered if there existed the inversion of this class: Are there unreal quotes made by unreal people?

If that class existed, what would be the characteristics of its members? It then hit me, quite suddenly, that there was, indeed, a category of imaginative quotations and that these were attributed to imaginary beings. Could I think of one? "Up, up and away!" came to mind. These words were attributed by his creators to Superman, as he takes to the air—on the airwaves, in the days of the Superman radio serial, to be sure.

I immediately chose three words to describe such quoted matter. Accordingly, I opened a file and marked it "Famous Fantastic Quotations." I did this with a mental nod in the direction of the late Mary Gnaedinger, the wonderful lady who edited that well-loved (and well-thumbed) pulp magazine of my teenage years: Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

All this happened more than a dozen years ago. Since then I have been squirreling away, salting away, stowing away, filing away, familiar and characteristic remarks made by superbeings. I now have about five hundred quotes attributed to characters in fantastic literature, comic art, radio, television, film, video, advertising, interactive computer games, etc. Jeff Rovin's encyclopedic books on monsters, superheroes, and supervillains were a big help in collecting such utterances.

Even so, I have yet to establish a definition of "superbeing." At this point all I am saying is that the words I am collecting have all been uttered, with some exceptions, by persons or beings "whose powers are not ours" or "whose experiences are extraordinary beside ours." The exceptions are people who associate with such personalities or otherwise share an imaginary and imaginative universe with them.

Here are some familiar or characteristic remarks of fantastic characters whose names all begin with the first letter of the alphabet. The last is my all-time favourite fantastic quotation—so far at least!

Aelita: "The Earth, the Earth—dear giant, take me to the Earth. l want to see the green hills, the waterfalls, the clouds, the big animals and the giants. I do not want to die." Aelita, the Empress of Mars, falls deeply in love with Los, the engineer from Earth, and expresses her yearning to return with him to his home planet, Earth, in Aelita (1922), a novel written by Alexei Tolstoi and translated from the Russian in 1959 by Lucy Flaxman. Alas, the wish of the delicate, blue-skinned Martian woman does not come to pass. By the end of the novel, she is heard crying out across the reaches of interplanetary space to her lost lover Los: "Where are you, where are you, where are you, Son of the Sky?" Yulia Solntseva played the unhappy Empress of Mars in the film Aelita (Amkino, 1924) directed by Yakova A. Protaz-anov.

Alveron: "You know, I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don't like our little Federation? Something tells me they'll be very determined people. We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one." Alveron, alien captain of the starship that attempts to rescue mankind from possible destruction, makes this confession to his deputy Rugon, when they come to the realization that mankind—although the youngest civilization in the universe (less than four hundred thousand years old)—has rescued itself. Arthur C. Clarke ends "Rescue Party" (1946) in The Nine Million Names of God (1967) with the ominous sentence: "Twenty years afterward, the remark didn't seem funny."

Andoheb : "Kharis still lives!" Andoheb, the High Priest of Karnak, utters these words, his last, to Mehemet Bey, his successor as the guardian of the mummified Prince Khans. In the movie The Mummy's Tomb (Universal, 1942), George Zucco appeared as Andoheb, Turhan Bey took the role of Mehemet Bey, and Prince Khans was played by Lon Chaney, Jr.

Appleton, Jennie:

"Where I come from

Nobody knows;

And where I'm going

Everything goes.

The wind blows,

The sea flows—

And nobody knows."

A young girl named Jennie Appleton half-sings, half-recites these lines of verse, and the appearance of the girl and the sense and sound of the verse haunt the young painter Eben Adams. Jennie unaccountably ages and mysteriously dies at sea, but not before she inspires his finest painting. "I wish you'd wait for me to grow up," she says, in Robert Nathan's novel Portrait of Jennie (1940). Jennifer Jones played Jennie in the movie version of the novel.

Asterix the Gaul: "They're crazy, those Romans!" Characteristic and xenophobic remark of the dwarfish, bemoustached Gaul who lives in the village of Armorique (the ancient name of Brittany) which is the last holdout in a country overrun by the Romans in the year 50 B.C. Aided by the stupid giant Obelix, fortified with the drudic brew of Getafix, Asterix travels around the world and even through time fighting lost causes. The popular French comic strip series Asterfx le Gaulois was created by Rend Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo and first appeared in Pilote, the comic weekly, 29 October 1959. Since then Asterix's adventures have been told in countless forms, including two animated feature films.

Audrey Two: "Fee-e-e-ed me!" This is the cry of Audrey Two, the cannibalistic flowering giant plant, which is sprouting from seeds from outer space. It grows by leaps and bounds in the little shop owned by Mushnik the Florist. This comes about in Little Shop of Horrors, the Broadway musical, with book and lyrics by Howard Ashman and music by Alan Menken, which premiered in New York. The musical was based on the movie Little Shop of Horrors (1960) directed by Roger Corman. In the movie, the plant was called Audrey Junior. Audrey—retro-nymically named Audrey One—is the hapless heroine, a clerk in the florist shop, who lives in terror of the menacing (and man-eating) plant.

Arnot, Lieutenant Paul d': "Fingerprints prove you Greystoke. Congratulations." These words are among the most moving and meaningful in world fantastic literature. The five words comprise the complete message of the terse cablegram sent from Paris, France, by Paul d'Arnot, Lieutenant in the French Navy, to Tarzan of the Apes, then visiting in Boston, Mass. Intrigued with an infant's smudged finger-prints in the diary of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, d'Arnot has them examined by experts in Paris who prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prints of John Clayton's infant child match those of the man now known as Tarzan. Thus Tarzan of the Apes comes into his own as heir to the Greystoke title, estate, and fortune in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1912).

John Robert Colombo, nationally known as the Master Gatherer, edited Other Canadas, Friendly Aliens, Years of Light, and other books in the field of Canadian fantastic literature. All his recent books, like Mysterious Encounters, have dealt with the paranormal.

An Interview with Robert Sawyer

By David Nickle

There are few among us who have not at one time or another held the dream of quitting our day job, dusting off the word processor, and, in a flurry of inspired keystrokes, making our living as freelance writers. And there are fewer still who have actually followed up on that dream and made it into a workable reality. What we tend to forget is that a freelance writer doesn't live by his fiction alone; the days are gone when a writer could begin selling short fiction to pulp magazines and hope to make a subsistent living thereby.

Toronto SF author and journalist Robert J. Sawyer has, since 1983, been making decidedly more than a subsistent living writing freelance, but he's done it by doing more than writing speculative fiction. Since he graduated from Ryerson's Radio and Television Arts program, Sawyer has divided his time between business journalism for publications such as The Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine, writing corporate and government reports and press releases and, of course, his first love—science fiction. He's also written and narrated two documentary series for CBC Radio's Ideas series, in 1986 and 1990, both on science fictional themes.

Sawyer has published short science fiction in Amazing Stories, 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories, Leisure Ways and The Village Voice.

In December, his first novel, Golden Fleece, is coming out under Wamer's Questar banner, and he's recently completed his second novel, End of an Era.

Golden Fleece is an expansion of a novelette of the same title published as the cover story in the September 1988 Amazing Stories. The story is told from the point of view of JASON, a vast artificial intelligence who at once controls an interstellar ramship voyaging to a nearby star, and desperately tries to keep the secret of the mission's true purpose from the 10,000-odd crewmembers on board.

In a recent conversation at Sawyer's Willowdale home, we talked about Golden Fleece, Canadian science fiction in general, and the business of freelance writing.

David Nickle: You're managing to make a go of it as a freelance writer completely. It's an enviable position to be in. How do you do it?

Robert Sawyer: I've been doing this full-time since 1983, and, yeah, I do make a go of it. Unfortunately the more you want to write something, the less people want to pay you for it. As long as you're willing to write what other people want you to write, there's money to be had. I do corporate work: press releases, brochures, and reports for industry and government. None of that gives me any real pleasure, but it's lucrative. If it wasn't for the corporate work, I probably would not be able to make a living as a writer.

I also do a lot of magazine work. That doesn't pay as much as the corporate work, but I enjoy it more: it's for publication, it's bylined, and you get to put a little more of your personality into it.

But what I really enjoy is science fiction, and that pays bottom money. So it's always a question of tradeoffs. I would love to be able to write science fiction full-time, but that doesn't seem to be realistic monetarily. So I try to strike a balance between the time I spend on my science fiction and the time I spend on my corporate work. I'm devoting more time to science fiction right now because it's selling. If things dry up there, I'll move back to corporate work and try to find whatever balance it takes to meet the financial obligations of being half of a family.

DN: With your first novel out, that split is no doubt going to become a bit more even-sided.

RJS: Yeah. It's nice to have a novel coming out and it's nice that it's coming out from a major American publisher. The advance was about average for North American rights for a first novel paperback original. But for six or eight months work, it's very little money. On the other hand, it's encouraging that Brian Thomsen at Warner likes what I'm doing. I've finished a second novel. He's got it now, and I'm waiting anxiously to see if he's going to take it.

Indeed, I've almost finished my third novel, Face of God. I'm trying to strike while the iron is hot: there's an editor who's interested in my stuff right now, so I'm trying to keep material going across his desk. In publishing, editors move around, publishing lines change their priorities. Because there's an opportunity here today that might not be here tomorrow, I figure I've got to arrange my life so that I can seize that opportunity. And that means I'm almost exclusively working on SF right now, living off savings and so forth. But I've been trying to plan my financial affairs over the past seven years of freelance writing so that if opportunity were to knock, I would be able to do something about it. It's not turning out to be a hardship. But it would be nice if the advances went up, too.

DN: Have you always wanted to write SF?

RJS: Yes, absolutely. The very first things I wrote in public school were science fiction stories, and it's always been my main love. I don't know if I'm going to stay exclusively an SF writer, though. I do like science fiction, but I'm also aware of the limitations of SF publishing. As long as you are a category genre author the chances of making a living at writing fiction are really slim. So although I love SF, I think I'm going to want to try my hand within the next five years at writing either a mainstream novel or a mystery novel. But yes, SF is definitely what I enjoy reading and writing the most.

DN: You're very much interested in technological, "hard" SF. What's the attraction to that end of the genre?

RJS: As a journalist, for the last seven years I've been writing about high technology, computers, and office automation. My clients tend to be high-tech companies or government agencies dealing in technology or telecommunications. My degree is in broadcasting, and for that I studied broadcast technology. So yes, I have a strong personal interest in things technological, and it just seemed natural for me to write what's traditionally called hard SF.

Most hard SF is divorced from humanity—very cold, mechanical, puzzle-oriented stuff. Now, there's no doubt that Golden Fleece is a puzzle-oriented story; it's in essence a mystery story. But in the novel-length version, I really enjoyed humanizing what in the novelette had been a very normal hard SF story, a story that emphasized the plot and technology but did not really do much with the characters. I couldn't have written the novelette any shorter and still have covered the plot ground, but I was delighted to be able to expand it by five times and try my hand at more human-oriented stuff. If I can make a contribution to hard SF over the years, I'm hoping it will be to humanize it.

DN: That's interesting. The personal problems that Aaron, your novel's hero, has pulled from his past are very contemporary. In particular, the scene in which he recalls being molested by his uncle, is almost show-stoppingly intense. Why did you pick child molestation in this case?

RJS: It is very intense, and it was the most difficult thing I've ever written. Why that trauma? I think there are two answers.

Dramaturgically, the plot required a character who is so reserved in his demeanour, so non-demonstrative of his emotions, that even under the most rigorous computer monitoring, his inner state of mind could not be perceived. I didn't want my computer, JASON, to be able to read minds directly. But JASON comes very close to being able to do that by monitoring physiological signs, and thus reading emotional states or whether someone is lying.

Well, the logical threat to put up against that computer is a person it cannot read. I had people take that on faith in the novelette: here's a guy who's not very demonstrative. In the novel, I had the room to make people understand why this character was the way he was.

I could have devised some futuristic trauma, but I think this comes back to what I was saying about humanizing science fiction. I don't think that child molestation is going to go away, as much as we would all like it to. I don't think that broken homes—Aaron comes from a broken home—are going to go away. These are things that have been with us for as long as there have been human beings.

There is a school of science fiction, the sanitized Star Trek school, that says we're just about to turn the corner and be done with all those things for all time; we're about to all become self-actualized, and relate—I'm okay, you're okay—and the world will be a bright and sunny place. I'd love to think that was true but I don't see it really being so. The cornerstones of human interaction—good and bad, jealousy, guilt, those who are strong taking advantage of those who are weak, as Aaron's uncle did when Aaron was a child—those things seem universally part of the human experience, and I don't think that they're going to go away.

There are other things in Golden Fleece that are contemporary. People still toss Frisbees around for fun in my novel, and there are references to Fred Flintstone and Mickey Mouse. I don't think the 20th century is a passing fad. It's going to be just as much a part of the future as the 19th century and the 18th century have been parts of this century.

In the novel, there's also a great deal about Aaron's family life and his religion. Now, there's a tendency for SF writers to portray a secular future. I'm not a religious person, but I do think that religions that have endured for thousands of years aren't on the verge of evaporating. So Aaron is Jewish, he participates in Jewish cultural tradition, and that seems to me to be more realistic, to be a more viable prediction of what life two hundred years down the road is going to be like, than saying, no, we're starting with a clean slate on January 1, 2001, and all the problems and all the culture we had before will disappear. I just don't see it happening that way.

DN: Another noteworthy aspect of Golden Fleece came in the copious references to Toronto and Ontario locations. I had to wonder, are you, as a Canadian SF writer, operating from a hidden agenda on this?

RJS: (laughs) I think it was a blatant agenda; I don't think it's hidden at all. If you think this book is rabidly Canadian, my second is even mare so. John Robert Colombo called my second book, End of an Era, "Consummately Canadian." He says, "Even I was reeling" at the Canadian content.

It's wholly appropriate for a Canadian writer to spotlight things Canadian. I feel very much that Canada has a place on the world stage. If there's any propaganda in Golden Fleece, it's that two hundred years down the road there will be a Canada and it will still work.

So, yes, absolutely it's deliberate. I'm not attempting to flaunt things Canadian, but if there's a choice between having a reference that's Canadian and a reference that's American and both serve the dramatic purpose equally well, I'm absolutely going to choose the Canadian reference every time.

DN: You may have partially answered this already, but how do you see yourself as an SF writer? Do you see yourself as a Canadian SF writer or an SF writer who happens to come from Canada?

RJS: That's an interesting question. I'm a dual citizen; I hold both American and Canadian citizenship. But I consider myself a Canadian first and foremost. I grew up in this country, but my mother is an American who, when I was born, had my birth registered with the U.S. consulate as a foreign birth to an American national.

It's tricky. Every writer wants to say there are no limits to what he or she does, but the reality is that I'm writing in a category—science fiction. It's probably not economically advantageous for me to resist categorization at this stage.

Throughout my career, I want to be reflective of Canada in whatever I'm doing. I'm very proud to be a Canadian. And, look: no one would bat an eye if an American wrote a book in which all the references were blatantly American and in which the author made clear his or her patriotism.

People on both sides of the border look at it with interest: a blatantly Canadian SF writer. So far, though, there has been zero negative reaction. Nobody has said that's a mistake, that I shouldn't be doing that. My editor in New York has no problem with it; my agent, Richard Curtis, also in New York, has no problem with it; and the readers here and in the States seem to have no problem with it.

DN: There have been a lot of comparisons made between JASON in Golden Fleece and HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Do you like that or does it bug you?

RJS: Who is this HAL people keep mentioning? Seriously, I'm obviously influenced by 2001 and by Clarke. I think Clarke is the best practitioner of broad, sense-of-wonder science fiction. He doesn't do characters worth a damn, but he does the sweep of the universe better than anyone else currently writing.

I've seen the movie 2001 twenty-six times. I love the movie; it's a brilliant piece of cinema and it's still the best science fiction film ever made. But Arthur C. Clarke does not own the idea of computer intelligence. He didn't invent it, he wasn't the first to use it, and he won't be the last. There are all kinds of other literary parallels that one could make with JASON besides HAL. And, in fact, if 2001 had been only a book and not a movie, people would be just as likely to compare JASON to Mycroft in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or HARLIE in When HARLIE Was One, or P-1 in The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. Ryan.

But, yes, I knew that everyone was going to leap on 2001, and I went to great pains, I thought, to try to minimize the similarities. Then I thought, okay, we'll just play this down and let the book stand on its own merit. Then Warner's advertising for the book came out and it's full of 2001 references: "For fans of 2001" and "the latest descendant of HAL" and that sort of thing. Who am I to argue with Warner? If this is what's going to sell the book, then fine by me.

In any event, HAL came out in 1968. Computers have changed monumentally in 22 years, so it was time for an updating, for another look at the idea of artificial intelligence controlling a spaceship. There are lots of worse things than to be compared favourably to one of the forest films in the genre and to one of the best books by one of the masters of SF. It's a flattering comparison.

David Nickle is a journalist employed by the North York Mirror.

A Robert J. Sawyer Bibliography

Novel

Golden Fleece, Warner Books/Questar December 1990

Short Fiction

· "If I'm Here, Imagine Where They Sent My Luggage", The Village Voice January 14, 1981

"Caught In the Web", White Wall Review 1982
"Ours To Discover", Leisure Ways November 1982
"The Contest", 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories, Doubleday 1984
"Uphill Climb", Amazing Stories March 1987
"Golden Fleece", Amazing Stories September 1988
"The Good Doctor", Amazing Stories January 1989

Criticism (partial list only)

· Author, Entry on Science Fiction, The Canadian Encydopedia, Hurtig, 1988

Writer and Narrator, "What If? An Exploration of Alternative Histories", Ideas series, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 1990

· Writer and Narrator, "Other Worlds, Other Minds", Ideas series, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, January 1986

Science Fiction reviewer, Canadian Book Review Annual, 1981 to date

An Interview With Tanya Huff

By Michael Skeet

Tanya Huff is a frank, straight-forward woman with a very straight-forward approach to—and attitude toward—writing. For her, speculative and fantastic writing is a way of "exploring the big questions." But a conversation with her is refreshingly lacking in homilies or mumbo-jumbo. She is comfortable with her craft.

Huff's latest novel, The Fire's Stone, appears at the end of September. It's her fourth in the space of less than three years, and she promises to be equally prolific for some time to come. But then, she's always had a good idea of where she was going.

Asked when she decided to be a writer, she refers to George Carlin's response to a similar question: "Not in the womb, but shortly after that." She was already writing her first book at the age of eight, and was published (poetry in the local newspaper) at ten; but it wasn't until her first year at university, she says, that she discovered that people actually made a career of writing.

"I was studying forestry," she says, "and writing as well. Then I decided that, if I could do this part time, why not do it full time?"

For the first few years, she wrote "woman's magazine stuff—essays, poetry. Lots of stream-of-consciousness stuff that didn't mean much to the reader but meant a lot to the writer." She spent part of a year in Hollywood, trying her hand at such pop-culture subjects as The Hardy Boys.

Upon returning to Toronto, she discovered science fiction fandom.

There's a perception that Huff has "come up through the ranks" of fandom to become a pro writer. It's a misleading perception, though Huff does credit fandom with introducing her to the idea of writing SF and fantasy for a living.

"I'd always read science fiction and fantasy," she says. "But I discovered fandom when I was twenty. I' d just come back from California and been accepted at Ryerson in the Radio and Television program. I figured they might not necessarily be able to teach me anything about writing, but they could teach me about writing where the money is."

While at Ryerson she discovered Bakka, the Queen Street SF bookstore where she now works. And through Bakka she discovered Ozymandias, a Toronto science fiction convention.

"What really got me into fandom was Bill Marks," she says. "We started going out together, going to cons together." And at conventions she met writers, and discovered that she could write the kind of fiction she'd always enjoyed reading. "I didn't start writing fantasy until I met people who wrote it," she says. Her first professional sales were short pieces published (to favourable reviews) in Amazing. She very quickly moved on to novels.

"What I like about speculative or fantastic writing," she says, "are the broader internal parameters. Externally the structure is like any other form of literature, but internally you're able to do a lot more." Within her novels, the reader cannot automatically assume that a thing is what it seems, or the way we perceive it in our own world. She enjoys the process of detailing a world "where a car isn't necessarily a car as we know it."

Fantasy's appeal for her goes deeper, though, than the building of fictional worlds from the ground up. "One of the reasons I write fantasy," she says, "is that fantasy is almost the last stand of writing about things like honour, duty, self-sacrifice. There isn't a lot of that in mainstream fiction these days. I don't want to try to identify with how people feel after their fourth divorce. Fantasy allows me to write about the broader emotions, as opposed to the specific."

Where the emotions are broad, so are the concepts. Evil, for instance. Huff's last novel, Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light, is a fantasy set in contemporary Toronto, but its discussion of evil is timeless. Given this, why the contemporary setting? "I don't really decide to do anything," she says when asked if she had set out from the start to write a contemporary fantasy. "I just think of a story and I tell it. (Gate) is based on the perception that simple people are god's children. I asked myself: what if this were true?

"Part of it was that with this novel I had some things I wanted to say about the contemporary world—about the treatment of the retarded, about the nature of evil." The contemporary nature of the story allowed her to place evil in a context to which readers could more easily relate: "It's easier for someone to understand landlords who rent out sleazy apartments with no plumbing—especially for readers in Toronto." The novel was well-received, and Huff says it actually drew readers back to her first two novels.

Those novels—Child of the Grove and The Last Wizard—were fantasies of a more mythic type, a type that has become virtually the default mode for modern fantasy. Huff admits that she's a little worried about the way fantasy has developed recently. There's a tendency, she says, "for it to be a formula. That's not always the writer's fault. Television has conditioned people to want the same thing, time after time."

She's feeling pressure in that regard herself. Her agent, she says, tells her that she has got to have a "focus"—to be known for producing a certain type of work. It's something with which she's not comfortable. She'd much rather write the stories that are important to her while she's writing them; the alternative means a risk of finding herself forced into a creative box. "As much as I'd like the money," she says, "I'd hate to be David Eddings right now. He's gotten into a situation where he's forced to write nothing but The Belgeriad. "

Huff's latest novel, The Fire's Stone, is a heroic fantasy "about growing up and finding out who you are as an adult." Then it's back to contemporary fantasy, the first of four books she intends to write over the next couple of years (negotiations for the series are currently under way). She insists that she will not be trapped into an open-ended series.

It might be considered intimidating, knowing that you're on the verge of committing yourself to delivering that many books in that short a time. Huff is unconcerned—almost. "It bothers me a little that two years of my life are tied up in this," she says. "But I'm not worried about being committed to them, because the novels are outlined already." She recently made a list, she says, of all the novels she'd write if she had the time. There are seventeen of them.

At her current pace, Huff finishes a novel every nine months—writing part-time. She starts work at Bakka at eleven in the morning, so she tries to be out of bed by seven. "If I'm at my computer by seven-thirty, I can be guaranteed two or three hours of solid writing" every day. She's never suffered writer's block, she says—once she gets started. Getting started is the hard part. "I have a lot more trouble with 'I don't want to' than with 'I can't.' I pretty much have to walk straight to the computer or I'm lost. If I stop to pick up a book or something, the morning's shot."

She works better with a contract; knowin

SOL Rising Number 6, November 1990

Building Committee Report

SOL Rising
Number 6, November 1990