As soon as we arrived at the reception, the planetarium’s director came running over to me. “We were hoping you would come!” he said. “We’ve been trying to reach you for weeks!” It turned out that the story Asimov had liked best really only had enough meat on it for a ten-minute starshow, and so the planetarium staff had decided to buy rights to two additional stories—and one of them was mine!
Of course, they’d only had the US phone number of the vacation home, which had been vacant since the summer—so they hadn’t been able to contact me. I was absolutely stunned—it was completely unexpected.
The planetarium didn’t have much money in its budget, but they paid me US$85 for the rights to make a starshow from my story—and that worked out, almost exactly, at the then-current exchange rate, to Cdn$100. For years, I had a photocopy of the check framed in my bedroom with the words “First Sale” beneath it.
(Twenty years later, the Rochester Museum and Science Center was soliciting funds for an improvement campaign. Donors who gave a certain amount of money got to have a brick embedded in a sidewalk in front of the museum, with an inscription on it. Most of them say “In memory of…” and give a person’s name. My mother made the required donation, and her brick says, simply, “My son’s career started here.”)
The short story I sold to the planetarium was called “Motive.” It was just 5,000 words long, but contained many of the elements that went on to be major parts of my fiction. The spaceship Star Station Terra had become Starplex, which I thought was a way cool term (imagine my embarrassment decades later to find out that Starplex was also the name of a company that makes urine-specimen containers for doctors’ offices). Fifteen years later, I wrote a novel called Starplex, set aboard a very similar vessel.
In “Motive,” Starplex was controlled by a master computer, patterned after Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and like Hal, that computer committed a murder; my first novel, Golden Fleece, also dealt with a homicidal computer, and many of my works have continued this pattern of combining science fiction and mystery.
“Motive” also featured dinosaur-like aliens called Quintaglios, and I went on to write three novels about them (Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner).
The starshow that was made up of the three short stories ran for 192 performances in the summer of 1980 under the umbrella title “Futurescapes.” I saw it several times. Although some liberties that weren’t improvements were taken with my original story, it was still a fabulous experience, and I was determined to continue writing science fiction.
As I said earlier, the province of Ontario, where I lived then and now, used to be unique in North America in that it had an extra year of high school—grade 13. That was phased out in 2003, which in some ways is too bad. Grade 13 was one of the best years of my life, and I studied all sorts of fascinating topics, including a cinema course, two courses in Latin, and an independent biology course, where I got to choose my own subject matter: I studied dinosaurs and dolphins.
Indeed, dinosaurs had been a life-long passion of mine, and I had thought for sure that I’d go on to university to become a vertebrate paleontologist specializing in the study of dinosaurs. But in grade 13, I started looking at the actual paleontological job prospects, and I was astonished to find them quite dim. Back then, there were only 24 dinosaurian paleontologists in the entire world, and only three in Canada…and it didn’t seem likely that one of those three was going to volunteer to retire just because I had arrived on the scene.
I’d always sort of assumed I’d go to the University of Toronto—not only was it local, but my father still taught there, and that meant his children were entitled to free tuition. But, suddenly, I had no idea what I was going to do for my future.
Fortunately, a new direction fell into my lap in November 1978. We were allowed to take a day off school to go to a “Tour and Discussion Day” at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, which offered bachelor degree-programs in applied arts and technology. I was thinking of maybe studying journalism—I had been founder and editor of my school’s newspaper, The Northview Post, and thought that a journalism degree might let me write for a living (writing fiction for a living seemed like a ridiculous dream). Ryerson was the only place in Toronto to offer a journalism degree, so I signed up to tour that department—but you could stay away from school for the whole day if you signed up to tour two departments, so, on a whim, I selected Radio and Television Arts for my second tour, because that book The Making of Star Trek had fascinated me so much.
The tour was spectacular—all that wonderful television equipment! The dimly lit control rooms reminded me of the mission control center from the TV series Search.
I was told this was a very competitive program—only one in five applicants got accepted for it—but I decided to try, and, lo and behold, I got in. I started my studies there in September 1979, and I had my first piece of fiction published at the end of my first year, in Ryerson’s literary annual, White Wall Review.
From the start, my fiction was full of Canadian content, and that was in direct response to what I’d grown up watching on TV. In the 1960s and 1970s, most Canadian-made episodic television was lousy. CTV—Canada’s only commercial television network at the time—had precisely one Canadian drama, a cop show called Police Surgeon, and one Canadian sitcom, a completely unfunny long-suffering-husband-and-daffy-wife show called The Trouble With Tracy. Even as a kid, I was infuriated by these programs, because although they were made in Canada, they were set in the United States. I remember being appalled when one episode of Police Surgeon was filmed at my beloved Royal Ontario Museum, but they called it by another name and had raised the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole out front.
Still, this was part of the Canadian psyche back then: a belief that the only way to succeed on the international stage was to disguise the fact that you were Canadian. Indeed, when I was starting off writing, people kept telling me not to set my stories in Canada if I wanted them to be published in the States.
Ever the rationalist, I wondered where this pervasive belief had come from and started looking for quality modern works by Canadians that were set in Canada and published in the U.S. I expected there to be a list of failed books, movies, and TV shows that had formed the basis of this belief—but there was nothing. It seemed everyone had just assumed that this would be true, and that no one had tested it.
Well, when I did start publishing, I decided to test it, being flagrantly Canadian in my work. I just couldn’t believe that Americans could be so provincial (if you’ll forgive the pun) to reject a book just because of its setting. Lo and behold, I turned out to be correct. I’ve never once had an American editor, reviewer, bookseller, or reader complain about the Canadian content in my books.
Many writers have long resumes, listing all the odd jobs they did to support their craft. Not me; I’ve only ever had two jobs since graduating in 1982. Ryerson hired me to return for the following academic year to help teach television studio production techniques to second- and third-year students. I’d applied for this job for three reasons. First, 1982 was the middle of a recession in Canada, and for the first time in its history, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—Canada’s giant state-owned radio and TV factory—was laying off people. Normally, Ryerson grads waltzed into entry-level positions at Canadian studios, but that year we were all competing with seasoned veterans from the CBC who were also looking for work.
Second, the job at Ryerson paid well, by the standards of what entry-level broadcasting positions offer: Cdn$14,000 a year. It seems like peanuts today, and it wasn’t very much back then, but, according to a salary survey done by Ryerson it made me the third-highest-paid Radio and Television Arts grad in my year.
Third, and most important, my girlfriend—and now fiancée—Carolyn was also studying at Ryerson (Graphic Arts Management—a business course for the printing industry); she had one more year to go, and I wanted to be close to her.
Still, I graduated in April 1982,
and the job at Ryerson didn’t begin until September—meaning I had four months off with nothing to do. I’d moved away from home after my second year at Ryerson, and had bills to pay.
Enter John Rose, the elfin proprietor of Bakka, Toronto’s science-fiction specialty bookstore. I’d been a regular customer of the store for eight years by this point, and John offered me a summer job. The pay was just $4.25 an hour; I probably could have found something somewhat more lucrative, but the chance to work in a science-fiction store was too appealing to pass up.
I worked the cash desk, shelved books, and counted inventory—but there was one part of the job I managed to avoid. Books go into bookstores on a returnable basis, meaning if they don’t sell, the retailer can return them to the publisher and owe nothing. But for paperback books—the format back then that most science fiction was published in—only the covers of the books are returned. They’re ripped from the body of the book, and the store destroys what’s left. The other clerks, who were long-term employees, all had to do this, but I managed not to have to do it; I said—only half-kidding—that I thought it would scar me for life.
I really didn’t end up making any money at Bakka. As an employee, I was entitled to a 40% discount on everything in the store, and I spent almost my entire earnings buying books.
Still, in June of that year, John Rose did something remarkable. He took me to the annual convention of the Canadian Booksellers Association. It was, in many ways, a crazy thing to do—John had to (a) pay me my wages for the day I attended, and (b) pay a fee to get me in. But John knew I wanted to be a writer, and he thought I should really see how the retailing industry works. The CBA convention—now called BookExpo Canada—is where publishers come to show retailers their upcoming books, and where big-name authors sign copies of their new books for retailers (the comparable American event is, not surprisingly, called BookExpo America).
That summer was an incredibly eye-opening experience for me. Many of my writing colleagues are astonished about how savvy I am about the business of publishing; well, the seeds of that came from that summer working in a bookstore, and that day at the CBA.
(Twenty years later, in the summer of 2002, I was back at BookExpo Canada, this time as an author; it wasn’t the first time—I’d been signing at BookExpo Canada since 1995—but it was particularly memorable, as, to my astonishment, I had the longest line-up of any author at the show. The reason was the launch of Hominids, my first novel in the two years since my book Calculating God had become a surprise top-ten national mainstream bestseller in Canada.)
I went on to a successful writing career after working at Bakka, but I wasn’t the only one. In the two decades that have followed, several other Bakka employees—all hired long after I’d left—went on to writing careers, including Tanya Huff, Michelle West, Nalo Hopkinson, and Cory Doctorow. In honor of the store’s thirtieth anniversary in 2002, John Rose asked each of us to write an original SF story to be published in a limited-edition anthology. He couldn’t afford to pay us for the stories, but we all agreed—we all owed John far too much to worry about doing some work for free.
And, besides, I’d been doing free writing for Bakka for a long time. I got my first computer in December 1983. The very first thing I wrote on it was a piece for Bakka’s occasional newsletter summarizing the accomplishments by Canadian science-fiction writers. That was the first of many things I did to help other writers, and Canadian science-fiction writers in particular. Indeed, from 1984 to 1992, I coordinated a social group of Toronto-area science-fiction writers founded by legendary SF editor Judith Merril; I spearheaded the successful movement to establish a Canadian region of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; and in 1998, I served as that organization’s president.
My girlfriend Carolyn did graduate from Ryerson in 1983, but Canada was still in the middle of a recession, and it was a full year before she found a job. We were living together, and needed money, so I went after as many freelance writing contracts as I could. They were all nonfiction—articles for newspapers and magazines, press releases and brochures for corporations, newsletters for government departments. The work was actually pretty lucrative, but I didn’t find it at all creatively satisfying. Still, I spent five years doing that sort of thing, producing mountains of promotional materials and over 200 articles for computing and personal-finance magazines. All the while, I was putting money in the bank.
I did learn a lot during this period, even though I wasn’t writing much fiction. Many of the articles I wrote required interviews, which I had to transcribe. People talk in a very disjointed manner, but I learned to fashion quotes that captured what the person intended to convey without presenting their words verbatim. Since the work I was doing was contracted for, I also learned about making deadlines, and to write even when I didn’t feel like doing so.
I hadn’t given up my dream of writing science fiction, but it had very much been on the back burner. I’d sold a few short stories after “Motive,” had won a couple of minor writing contests, and had outlined a novel in the summer of 1980—but by 1988, when I was 28, that novel remained unwritten. My only really significant publication to that date was the novelette “Golden Fleece,” which appeared as the cover story in the September 1988 edition of Amazing Stories, the world’s oldest science-fiction magazine.
Carolyn and I had gotten married four years earlier, in 1984. I now told her I wanted to really try to concentrate on writing science fiction. Although I was still doing a lot of corporate and government work (my big project for that year was editing a study about the future of the parks in and around Niagara Falls, Ontario), I made a concerted effort to clear time in my schedule to work on writing the novel I’d outlined eight years ago. The result was that by December 1988, I had finally written that novel, End of an Era. I queried a literary agent named Richard Curtis in New York, sending him a copy of the September 1988 Amazing Stories with my cover story. He asked to see my novel manuscript, and in January 1989 he agreed to represent it.
It never even occurred to me to wait and see what would happen with End of an Era. I continued turning down guaranteed non-fiction work, and launched straight away into my second novel, expanding the “Golden Fleece” novelette from its current 13,000 words to 60,000. (Back then, it was possible to sell 60,000-word science-fiction novels; today, the lower limit seems to be 80,000, with 100,000 preferred. I found it very hard work the first few times trying to get even 60,000-word books written, and I wonder if the acceptable lower limit had been higher then whether I would have ever managed to finish one.)
The first three publishers Richard Curtis submitted End of an Era to all turned it down. By October 1989, I’d finished the novel-length Golden Fleece, and sent it to Richard. He sold that one to the first publisher he submitted it to, Warner Books.
I’ve always been an early adopter of computer technologies. I’ve had Internet access since 1984, and in 1987 I became active on CompuServe, then the world’s largest online service. There, I made friends with John E. Stith, an established SF writer. John gave me the best advice I’d ever gotten: he said that publishers really don’t do anything to push mass-market paperback original novels. Lately, John had started making his own bound galleys (advance copies of a book, usually given to booksellers or reviewers). I took John’s advice, producing seventy-seven bound galleys at my own expense, using a copy shop at the University of Toronto. I sent the galleys to various reviewers, including Orson Scott Card, who wrote the “Books to Look For” column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was a shot in the dark.
On July 24, 1990, one of the best moments of my life happened. My phone rang, and a voice said, “This is Orson Card.” Not only had he read my book, he had loved it—and he promised a rave review was forthcoming. I was ecstatic.
Sadly, though, Golden Fleece tanked in the marketplace. It had a horrendous cover, and Waldenbooks, one of the major US chains, hadn’t taken any copies. Richard Curtis had sent End of an Era to
the editor at Warner who had bought Golden Fleece, presenting it as my second novel. My Christmas stocking that year had a lump of coal in it: just before the holiday, the editor passed on publishing another book by me.
I’d seen the highs and lows of publishing in that single month: my first book had come out, and my publisher had dumped me. Richard admitted it would be very hard to find me a new publisher, because the first question one would ask is why I had left Warner, and as soon as the answer was given—that I’d been dropped because my sales stunk—I would be dead in the water.
But then, something wonderful occurred. Orson Scott Card came out with his year-end summation in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he declared Golden Fleece to be the best science-fiction novel of 1990. And, of course, I hadn’t been sitting on my behind; by this point, I had finished my third novel, Far-Seer, about the intelligent-dinosaur aliens I had introduced a decade earlier in my planetarium-starshow story, “Motive.”
Richard Curtis thought Far-Seer was “a masterpiece.” Armed with Card’s original review, plus the other excellent reviews that Golden Fleece had received, Richard organized an auction for my next two books—and Peter Heck, an editor at Ace Science Fiction (now part of Penguin USA), made the winning bid. Suddenly, I was back in the game. I decided to give up all non-science-fiction writing. For my fourth book, Richard suggested I do a sequel to Far-Seer. I had never intended such a thing, but followed Richard’s advice, producing Fossil Hunter before Far-Seer was actually in stores.
Ace then asked for a third Quintaglio book. I agreed to do it, but hated every minute of writing it. I’ve never liked reading series; the last thing I wanted to do was spend my career writing one. I made up my mind that Foreigner would be the final Quintaglio book.
Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner got great reviews, but they didn’t sell particularly well. I blame a large part of that on the covers, which made the books look like fantasy, not SF. End of an Era, which came out after Foreigner, confused the marketplace, too. Although completely unrelated to the Quintaglio books, it also involved dinosaurs and the “End” in the title made people think it was the concluding volume of that series.