The Sun Runners/Tales from the Silence November Launch Celebrations

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As we prepare for the launch of my new YA SF novel The Sun Runners and its companion anthology Tales from the Silence, I've been setting up a series of launch celebrations to help mark and promote this.

We start in Ottawa on the weekend of November 1-3, at Can*Con. I last visited Ottawa's sci-fi, fantasy and horror literature con in 2019 and had a great time, and I'm looking forward to returning and checking out the seminars and other fun gatherings. I'll be signing in the vendor's room at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, and Bakka-Phoenix will be on hand, with copies of both books for sale. Also, as a number of authors who participated in Tales from the Silence will be in attendance, we're going to have a fun little scavenger hunt. We'll identify the authors in attendance and, if you buy a copy of Tales from the Silence and get those authors to sign beside their stories, the first ones to get a complete set of the authors in attendance will win one of five $20 gift certificates to Bakka-Phoenix. I should note that this independent bookstore has an online component and ships around the world!

As Sunday's convention programming winds down, most of the authors and I will be retiring to the Lieutenant's Pump at 381 Elgin Street for some great food and conversation. We have booked the Sun Room from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for Sunday dinner and look forward to seeing you there!

On Saturday, November 16, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Bakka-Phoenix bookstore will be hosting us at their location at 84 Harbord Street just west of Spadina Avenue. Again, I'll be there, as will a number of the authors who participated in Tales from the Silence. There will be readings, a Q&A, book signings and more. Bakka-Phoenix will be providing snacks, and we'll all be providing the conversation, so if you're in Toronto that Saturday afternoon, come out to enjoy it all.

Finally, on Saturday, November 23, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., we've booked the main auditorium of the Waterloo Public Library branch at 35 Albert Street. I'll be on hand along with authors from Tales from the Silence for more readings, Q&A and book signings. Words Worth Books will have books for sale.

Outside of these launch events, a wider scavenger hunt continues. The first person who is able to get every author in Tales from the Silence to autograph their story within the book will win a $100 gift certificate good for Bakka-Phoenix Books. The second prize is a $50 gift certificate to Words Worth Books.

I would like to thank everybody who have helped put these events together, and also everybody who helped put these books together. I think they're really special, and I'm looking forward to releasing them to the world. I hope you like them, and say so in as many venues as possible.

They Are Here, by Erin Bow (Fiction Special)

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Back in 2019, when Erin won the Governor General’s Award for Young People’s Literature for her novel, Stand on the Sky, the CBC asked her to write a short story to be published on their website. They also invited other Governor General award winners, Don Gilmour and Joan Thomas, to submit their own stories. The deadline was quite tight, so Erin asked to borrow the plot of my story that would eventually become The Phases of Jupiter, which leads off my anthology Tales from the Silence. I was honoured to be asked and, of course, said ‘yes!’ Her story was eventually published as They Are Here

This is why Phases of Jupiter is set on Ganymede, whereas They Are Here is set on Europa, and why Phases of Jupiter mentions the work of scientists on Europa. This makes They Are Here kinda-sorta part of the Silent Earth Universe, and actually, the first published story set in that universe. Though she started from my story idea, as you’ll see when you read Phases of Jupiter, we went in different directions, and not just because she had a far tighter word count to work within. That is one of the joys of you and your partner both being writers; it’s fun to compare and contrast.

Erin’s story is no longer on the CBC website, and we retained the reprint rights for the story, so as we approach the launch of Tales from the Silence, she gave me permission to reprint the story here. I hope you like it!

THEY ARE HERE, by Erin Bow

They have thirty-seven days of food left.

They do not know, and will never know, precisely what has happened back on Earth. They are aware that things have been troubled for some time. They have monitored the confusing flurry of transmissions - the tearful final one that said, “Forgive us.”

It takes time for the news to sink in: contact with the mother planet has ceased, leaving a solar system full of not-quite self-sufficient colonies on its own.

But they are not one of the colonies; they are a small scientific expedition of eighteen humans and an artificial intelligence. The crucial distinction: they are not equipped to grow their own food.

Their mission is to drill through the 10-mile-thick ice crust of the sixth moon of Jupiter, which they call Europa, to reach the ocean beneath. Though they have spread out across the solar system, humans have found no life they did not bring with them. But Europa might be different. Europa has liquid water. They think there might be life, here.

Though, one of them jokes, not for much longer.

They are here, and they think they are alone.

-#-

They have thirty days of food left.

For a week, they have worked the problem. They can create edible carbohydrates from water, carbon dioxide, and electricity, but they lack the lipids, the micronutrients. The hope of rescue.

The commander tips her head up to look out the overhead viewscreen. It is not a window - they are vulnerable to the high radiation environment - but the “view” of the “sky” fulfils some psychological need. The big moons they call Ganymede and Io are both out, and a couple of the smaller moons too. A sky full of crescent phases. She thinks: as if a bio-hazard sign exploded.

-#-

They have twenty-seven days of food left.

The commander shakes her head, and her grey braid moves in the low gravity, rippling like a tentacle in a gentle current. Some of them had begun noticing things like that.

She outlines the state of their mission. They have been drilling for six months, and are close to the ocean. Yet, she does not think they will have time to reach it, unless they speed the drill.

She asks for opinions.

For a while they fall into the science, the way they would have before. There are risks to going faster. How likely is a sudden breach, a deadly eruption of pressurized water?

Does it matter?

They still have transmitters. If they could sample the ocean directly - if they could finish the mission - they could still get the data out. Some of the colonies will survive, surely, something of Earth. The knowledge will survive them.

They decide to speed the drill.

-#-

They have nineteen days of food left.

One of the exo-life specialists is growing excited; she’s been analyzing impurities in the ice, how the chemical traces grow more complex as the drill goes deeper. She’s been afraid to use the word “biosignature” until now. She uses it now.

Overhead the moons swim by, and one limb of Jupiter rises, swelling orange and beautiful.

-#-

They have fifteen days of food left.

They speed the drill again. It makes the floor hum, but not unpleasantly. One of them remembers trains.

The exo-life specialist gives a presentation about the chirality in the amino acids she has found. Life, she says. The rest of them are skeptical but as they ask questions she begins to weep: she is sure, she is sure.

-#-

They have ten days of food left.

They have not rationed. There is no point, no reason to stretch things out. Still, they cannot help counting the packages.

The oceanographer, to distract himself from that number, tells them the numbers they already know. That Earth’s ocean reaches six miles deep. That the ocean below them might reach a hundred. The seismologist reports that the ocean is close. The exo-life specialist dreams of amoebas. The oceanographer dreams of something larger.

Around them ice flexes and creaks with huge tides.

-#-

They have three days of food left.

Little ice quakes rattle the habitat as the drill presses deeper.

The artificial intelligence requests that a hibernation mode be developed, so that it will not need to endure alone, and the systems engineer, its best friend, cries with shame because he did not think of this earlier.

The head rigger and several others work together to move the viewscreen from the ceiling to the floor, and link it to the sonar images they are beginning to obtain.

Static and phantoms eddy across it, and they each spend time alone watching it, fulfilling some psychological need.

-#-

They have no food left, and they are hungry.

They come in twos and threes to watch viewscreen. Sometimes they whisper. The sonar images are grey on white, and those that watch do not trust what they are seeing. They think it is something that moves like the commander’s braid.

-#-

They have no food left, but the hunger is gone now.

They have all gathered, around the view screen as if around a table. They have stopped whispering; they only watch. The ice grows thin. The ice grows thinner. The artificial intelligence turns on the transmitters so that they may fulfill their mission: send news to the survivors of the solar system of what they have found, under the ice.

We gather. We have brought the lipids, the micronutrients. We have brought the hope.

The drill breaks through. They are here, and they are not alone.

END.

"They're (Not) Eating the Dogs in Springfield!" (or, News Flash: Trump and his supporters are racist!)

guardisn-screen-capture-2024-09-14.pngA lot of people did the good and understandable thing of laughing uproariously when Donald Trump went on his racist non-sequitur about immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. I laughed too, because it sounded like something only someone completely unhinged would say. Except that, for me, it had eerie echoes.

You all know that my grandfather is Chinese, and faced plenty of racist policy growing up in Canada. His parents had to pay a headtax to get him into the country in 1910. And despite being brought over to build major national infrastructure like our transcontinental railway, the Chinese Canadian community were not allowed the rights of citizenship, including serving in the army and voting, until 1947. Chinese Americans faced similar systemic discrimination in the United States. So, it's more than likely that my grandfather faced personal discrimination of anti-Chinese behaviour and rhetoric, including the old trope that Chinese restaurants served up dog and cat meat. He was a chef at several of them, after all, and owned a few at one point.

So, the fearmongering about dogs and cats of Springfield the same-old same-old anti-(insert scapegoat here) rhetoric that fascists and wanna-be dictators take up to distract people from the real threats, such as the very fascists and wanna-be dictators that would co-opt their support. This isn't so much a racist dog-whistle as it is a trumpet.

But there is more to this story that should make those of us who laughed at Trump's unhinged raving stop laughing. Because it wasn't as out-of-nowhere as you think. There are real targets here, who are being scapegoated.

Springfield, Ohio, with a population of 60,000, now has 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They were taken into the United States from a collapsing country, and deposited into a city that used to be significantly larger, but had fallen on hard-times, losing population and jobs. Thanks to the policies of the Biden Administration, many of those jobs were brought back, but because of Springfield's population decline, there weren't enough people to work them. So, the new Haitian community was brought on board, to work some of those jobs and contribute their economic activity to the economy. That strikes me as a sound and mutually-beneficial arrangement for the old community of Springfield, and the newly-arrived immigrants.

Like any demographic shift, there have been points of tension, but the overwhelming majority in Springfield would tell you that this move has been a boon to the wider community. And living in a diverse community like Toronto or Kitchener-Waterloo, I can tell you that Springfield has benefitted and will continue to benefit from these hardworking immigrants. This is the story of Toronto. This is the story of Canada. Heck, it's the story of America.

But, sadly, so too is the lies that get told at immigrants' expense. We're dog eaters. We're not like "normal" people. We are people who should be feared. We are people who should be attacked and driven away.

This is why, as I write this, racists are calling in bomb threats to schools in Springfield. The Haitian community isn't laughing at Trump's racist non-sequitur, they're terrified. And they absolutely did nothing to deserve this.

Fuck Trump. Fuck his supporters. They all belong in jail.

Back to the Blog

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It has to be said: social media has gotten really bad. Worse, it has made itself addictive.

I have some understanding of addiction. I’ve never abused drugs, alcohol or tobacco, but there is a history of alcoholism in my family (a history which ended two generations go). My father and I both have fearsome sweet tooths and our justification of, “well, there are worse things to be addicted to than sugar” is only half a joke.

So, when I see myself flipping through reel after reel on Facebook or short after short on YouTube, craving these little nuggets of flashy content before suddenly realizing that I’ve been at this for an hour and I’ve been doing nothing else, alarms trip in my head. Admittedly, I am exhausted, given all that has happened this year, and my reaction may be not much different from slumping onto the couch at the end of the day, back in the day, and tuning out in front of the television. However, the social media giants have distilled this instinct into its purest form, and I feel that they are actively trying to suck me in.

Worse, the quality of Facebook’s written posts — the means I’ve used to stay in contact with friends and family and to promote my work and my employer’s work — has diminished substantially. Have you noticed how many ads and “sponsored content” have crept into your feed? Think hard: are there people you were previously close to who you haven’t heard from for months, only to look them up and see that they still have an active social media feed; you just haven’t seen their posts? Have you noticed that some of your posts appear to connect with a lot of people and get a lot of likes, while others aren’t noticed at all?

That’s the algorithm talking.

We joined Facebook to spend time online with our friends, to share our triumphs, commiserate over our tragedies, to connect, but we paid nothing for this product that Facebook offered to facilitate this. That’s because we are the product (hat tip Cory Doctorow). And now that we are hooked (and I use that term deliberately), Facebook wants to serve up as little as what we actually came for as it can, while shovelling as much sponsored content as it can get away with, including flashy baubles that will draw us into its more lucrative offerings, addicting us, while separating us from each other.

This pattern has been discussed elsewhere (see “enshittification”, again hat tip to Cory Doctorow) and it’s hardly limited to Facebook. Just about every other corporate social media structure out there is either run along these lines, or run by a crypto-fascist, or both.

I’d like to say “enough”, but it’s not easy. Social media is a big part of my job, and on a personal note, if I want to promote my upcoming novels, I have no other realistic option but social media. This is what happens when you allow a small number of corporations to monopolize the space. We used to break up companies for a lot less. In Canada, we used to buy up bankrupt competitors and run them in competition with the would-be monopolies as non-profits. I’d support doing that today, though I don’t see that happening any time soon.

But if I can’t stop my addiction to corporate social media, maybe I can find a way to slow it down.

Do you remember the blogosphere? Some of you might not. It has been at least twelve years since blogs were a thing. For those who don’t remember, many of us used to have websites where we could post our everyday thoughts every day. And people would visit and comment. And we’d have conversations and make connections. These could be individual web pages on websites called Blogger or WordPress, or if you were somewhat technically savvy, you could install your own blogging software (like Movable Type) on domains that you bought, and people would actually come to see what you had to say. There were communities of blogs on their own websites, connecting blogs from multiple websites. There were political blogs, and while there were echo chambers, there was no single algorithm that blocked content that you didn’t immediately agree with. You were still able to step out of those chambers and encounter content that differed in opinion to your own without it being the work of a troll.


What happened? Well, many of us joined Facebook and other corporate social media to connect with friends and promote our blogs for free, but that same corporate social media sucked the communities out of our blogs. Commenting and other participation dropped precipitously. Readership followed soon after, and one by one, many blogs became dead sites. Social media wanted our readers, our connections, and they took them.

My own site has flirted with dead status many times these past few years. Some blogs remain, though, like Dave Simmer’s Blogography or Steve Munro’s Transit and Politics site or the Candid Cover’s Canadian YA Book Blog, or author J.M. Frey’s blog, or Kerry Clare’s Pickle Me This. Near as I can tell, bloggers like these are focused more on their own writing and are content to let their audience come to them. They deserve a wider reach.

Do you have links to active personal or writing blogs on the Internet? Feel free to post them in the comments below.

We need to reduce the influence that corporate social media has on our lives. We have to open ourselves up to searching for connections that don’t come quite as easily. And we need to make use of some of our older technology such as RSS Newsreaders, that corporate social media has striven to replace.

If you are a Mac user and you want to read blogs, download NetNewsWire now. This app searches for and highlights new entries in your favorite blogs. Simply enter the web address of any blog, and the application should be able to give you a list of the most recent articles you can read, and highlight whenever a new entry comes online. It even reads and serves up the feeds of peoples’ Mastodon accounts. Using this application, you’ll never miss anything new without the need to constantly schlep over to each individual website — a feature corporate social media promised but then reneged on in favour of ads and sponsored content. Windows and Android users can check out this web article about RSS feeds that they can use (and do you have other Newsreaders that you enjoy? Post links to them below).

The point is, if we want better ways to connect with each other on the web, we’ve got to make them. I’ll still be making videos on YouTube; I’ll still be posting on Facebook, but I’ll try and make more time to write to this blog. Maybe if more of us take these steps, we can carve out a bigger space for the Independent Web.

I’ve promised myself and others that I’d write more on this blog before, and I’ve reneged on that promise. It’s hard to keep a journal going when you’re exhausted, but there are rewards if I can make the effort, and I intend to make the effort.

I hope you’ll join me. And if you do, consider leaving a comment below.

My Father's House

My Father's House was originally written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen for his 1982 album Nebraska. There have been a few covers, including by Emmy-Lou Harris, but this cover by the Cowboy Junkies, clearly not intended for their albums, which appeared in Rarities, B-Sides and Slow, Sad Waltzes is my favourite. I think it's likely due to Margo Timmins singing most of this song unaccompanied, in a place with great acoustics. The sounds of the rest of the band and the sound recording crew working lend a rough edge of authenticity. And though everybody jokes around a bit when they join in for the last verse, it somehow retains the power of the original song, which is about losing chances for reconnection with the people in your family. You should give it a listen.

This has been on my mind since my father's stroke and memory issues, and the fact that we've had to move him out of his home into assisted care. Thanks to a tremendous amount of work from Erin, and help from all sorts of sources, we finally cleaned out his house and sold it to ensure that my father is safe and comfortable for the rest of his life. Saying this undersells the emotional and physical tonnage of this task. We consigned close to half a metric ton to the dump, gave over fifty boxes of books to the Elora Festival Book Sale, gave even more things to charity, preserved key mementoes for the family, and still filled my garage with things I'll have to sort through sooner rather than later.

And today, I picked up the last things from this house which my father has lived in for 33 years, that my mother lived in for 26 years, that I lived in for six years after moving to Kitchener from Toronto. Empty houses sound wrong. They echo. And when they come coupled with 33 years of memories -- let's just say that I wasn't prepared for the emotions that the echoes evoked. But I am glad that I had one last look and walk around. I could not finish this journey without saying goodbye.

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Wendell Noteboom (1944-2024)

wendell-way.jpgIt may be illusionary, but parents--especially grandparents--have an air of immortality around them. After all, they have been there forever, and it's natural, though inaccurate, to assume that this will always continue. So, when reality does shatter this illusion, it hurts, no matter how prepared you may think you are for it.

A couple of weeks ago my father-in-law Wendell Noteboom passed away. While it wasn't unexpected, it was still fast, and we had to work hard to ensure that Erin was able to go down to Fresno to be with her father at the end.

I've told you about my mother-in-law Rosemarie, and how you got on her bad side at your peril. Wendell was, in some ways, the opposite of that. He always struck me as a friendly and affable man, slow to raise his voice or confront. That affability, however, masked a sharp intellect and a passionate core that bent but never broke. Just as I was proud to have earned Rosemarie's respect, I was also proud to earn Wendell's respect because he didn't just give it away. And he was, after all, someone raised in a Dutch Calvinist household who married a Catholic. Part of that comes from being affable enough to set aside differences and focus on commonalities, but part of that is also knowing what you want and committing to that, regardless of the obstacles.

Wendell and Rosemarie divorced when Erin was in her late teens. Both would go on to remarry (Judy and Michael, respectively, who stayed with them until their dying days), but they remained on good terms with each other and fiercely loved their daughter, Erin, and their grandkids. Though it meant a lot of trekking, especially around Christmas, it was still a blessing to have three sets of grandparents to watch their grandkids grow.

But time marches on, and Wendell was living on borrowed time, born as he was with a congenital heart defect. The story I heard was that, when he was five, his mother was told that he wouldn't live to see the age of twenty. Because of his damaged heart, there was nothing they could do. It was just something he was going to live with. But this was just after the Second World War. The technology improved, and he received surgery to give him more years of life. When he was in his twenties and he and Rosemarie were courting, they were told that he would pass away before their kids were in their late teens. They married anyway, and had two kids. But this was the seventies, and the technology improved, and he received surgery that gave him even more years of life. Soon after the turn of the millennium, Erin and I gathered with the rest of the family as he went to the Mayo Clinic to have a groundbreaking surgical procedure that finally closed the hole in his heart, giving him another twenty years of grace.

Finally, soon after he turned seventy-five, he was told that his heart and the technology inside him that was supporting it was wearing out, and there was little anybody could do. But why should they apologize, he asked. Wasn't this what they said seventy years ago? Successive interventions had borrowed enough time for Wendell to have a full life, with kids and grandkids. Who could ask for anything more?

It's one thing to think you're prepared for the end, but it's another to encounter it. Erin is doing as well as can be expected, and I know that the kids and I will miss Wendell fiercely. We know that his wife Judy will miss him, as will her kids, who got to call him Dad, and the grandkids. I am grateful for the times I spent with Wendell, especially so knowing how hard fought they were won.

The Cloud Riders, Chapter One: The Asteroid Scow

We successfully pushed our Kickstarter campaign past the goal line to help fund my upcoming science fiction anthology, Tales from the Silence. It and my new novel, The Sun Runners, will be released through Shadowpaw Press (and its Endless Sky imprint) on November 12, 2024. I'm organizing launch parties around these two books in Ottawa, Toronto, and Waterloo with the help of Bakka-Phoenix and Words Worth Books. Thank you to everyone who made the Kickstarter campaign a success, and look for further announcements about book launch events in the coming weeks.

I'm looking forward to sharing these books with you, especially with the different takes my guest authors had on the Silent Earth universe. Between Tales from the Silence and The Sun Runners, you will get a clear picture of how the worlds of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the Asteroid Belt fare when the Earth's climate crisis catches up to it and silences human civilization on the home world.

One of the more interesting things about this project is the fact that the writers who were setting their stories on Venus or Mars (or even the Asteroid Belt) were writing short stories that were technically anticipating their source material. The Cloud Riders is the companion novel that I'd like to publish after The Sun Runners, featuring an interplanetary Country Mouse/City Mouse storyline set on Venus and Mars which I hope will see print late in 2025 or early in 2026.

Even though the draft of my novel was written first, the writers were writing continuity that hadn't been formally established by my novels yet. I think they did a great job. But to help you judge that, and to help set up the Venus and Mars stories on Tales from the Silence (as well as to further promote The Sun Runners and ultimately The Cloud Riders), I'm posting the first chapter of The Cloud Riders as it currently stands.

I'd like to thank Ben Berman Ghan for editing my previous draft of The Cloud Riders and making this novel better. I hope you enjoy this introduction to life on Venus, and the characters of The Cloud Riders.

Cloud City at Sunset, by Belsavor
Cloud City at Sunset, by Belsavor, used in accordance with their Creative Commons license.

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