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Author Introduction: Edward Willett
May. 14th, 2009 08:52 amOK, after a few weeks of LJ emptiness here due to the end of the semester madness, I'm hoping to get back to some writing-related posts and other interesting book-related things, such as Author Introductions! I have a couple of author intros either in hand or in the works, so thought I'd start today by introducing Edward Willett (who we've met before on here, and is ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ewillett here on LJ) because he has a new book out, Terra Insegura, the sequel to Marseguro. In addition to words from the author himself, I've decided I should also give you guys the cover copy of the book, you know, to help you decide whether it would be a good book for you. So, here's the awesome cover (I love the colors in it), followed by the cover copy and then some words from Ed himself. And if you head over here, you can enter for a chance to win free books!
Cover Copy: Gene Warfare
Marseguro, a water world far distant from Earth, is home to a small colony of both unmodified humans and the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created by geneticist Victor Hansen from modified human DNA. For seventy years the Selkies and the unmodified landlings have dwelled together in peace, safe from pursuit by the current fanatical theocratic rulers of Earth.
But everything changes when Earth discovers Marseguro, and a strike force--with Victor Hansen's own grandson Richard aboard--is sent to eradicate this abomination.
Yet Marseguro has devised a defense against Earth's Holy Warriors, a plague genetically tailored to destroy unmodified humans. With the Holy Warriors defeated, the people of Marseguro are ready to put their world back together and heal the wounds of war. But no one has anticipated the actions of the traitor, Chris Keating. Chris was the one who signaled Marseguro's location to Earth. And now he is aboard a ship returning home to Earth, unknowingly carrying within him the plague that can destroy all life on the mother planet.
Richard Hansen and the Selkies feel they have no choice but to send their own mission to Earth to deliver a lifesaving vaccine. Only time will tell what awaits them when they reach their destination. . . .
**************************
And now, a few words from your author:
Terra Insegura is a sequel to Marseguro, published last year and recently short-listed for the Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction or fantasy novel.
They were born in September of 2005 when I was in Robert J. Sawyer's science fiction writing course at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, part of the Writing With Style program there.
One morning the first thing Rob asked us to do was write, cold, the opening to a story. I think we had five minutes. I wrote: “Emily streaked through the phosphorescent sea, her wake a comet-tail of pale green light, her close-cropped turquoise hair surrounded by a glowing pink aurora. The water racing through her gill-slits smelled of blood.”
I tried to turn that into a short story as the week went on, but as I asked myself story-building questions—“Why does Emily have gills? Why is there blood in the water? What is she fleeing?”--the answers quickly outgrew short story length. So when the time came to propose a new book to DAW after Lost in Translation, my first with them, I crafted an outline for Marseguro. Which Sheila Gilbert bought, and which in turn begat Terra Insegura.
Emily, I realized, has gills because she is a human who has been genetically modified to be amphibian, able to breathe in both air and water. (It was either that or make her an alien, and who would name an alien Emily?) Besides, genetic modification was on my mind because I’d just taught myself more than I’d ever before known about genetics by writing Genetics Demystified for McGraw-Hill.
But this isn’t a hard SF novel, so my focus wasn’t on how these modified humans--nicknamed Selkies, after the seal-people of Irish legend--were created. My concern lay more with questions of human nature, not only that SFnal oldie-but-goodie “what does it mean to be human?”, but even more with the question of how, once some humans have been extravagantly modified genetically, non-modified humans will react to, and interact with, them.
On the hidden water world of Marseguro (which means “safe sea” in Portugese, and thank you, Google Translator, for giving me my title), they relate pretty well. But it’s a lingering resentment of moddies that causes one non-modded human to blow the whistle on the Selkies’ hiding place and bring the bad guys from Earth running--the bad guys who were the answer to the other questions I asked about my original story-opener, “What is she fleeing?” and “Why is there blood in the water?”
To provide my baddies, I did what there is a long history in science fiction of doing, and created my own religion (though it’s unlikely to take off in the real world and become a favorite of Tom Cruise), The Body Purified . . . a religion which exemplifies one of the less-positive ways modified and non-modified humans might someday interact.
The Body sees the genetic modification of humans as an abomination, a desecration of the “holy human genome.” (They don’t like clones, either.) But it wasn’t enough just to come up with The Body Purified and its nasty God (an impersonal “It” that’s really into that whole fire-and-sword thing). I had to explain how it managed to take power.
Many religions rest on a founding miracle. For The Body Purified, it was an astronomically unlikely event: one asteroid smacking another out of its Earth-destroying trajectory at the last possible moment. Since The Body Purified had been busily extermin--um, “purifying”--genetically modified humans on Earth while telling the panicked population that this was the only way to convince God Itself to turn Its wrath away, this miraculous rescue convinced all but the most recalcitrant believers in other religions that The Avatar, the Body’s leader, had a direct pipeline to God.
By the time of Marseguro, The Body Purified has been in power for decades, is trying to export its purification policies to the handful of human colonies scattered among the stars, and would really, really like to find out where genius geneticist Victor Hansen fled to in a stolen spaceship with his abominable race of Selkies. Thanks to the aforementioned disgruntled non-mod on Marseguro and Victor Hansen’s “grandson” Richard on Earth (who is the story’s main protagonist along with Emily, the Selkie girl), the Body Purified’s Holy Warriors descend on Marseguro with guns blazing.
But you really shouldn’t underestimate the defensive capabilities of a society built on high-level genetic engineering. The Purification of Marseguro goes badly, Richard Hansen finds out he’s not who he thinks he is (rather, what he thinks he is changes--and he changes with it), and at the end it seems likely that rather than Earth purifying Marseguro of Selkies, Marseguro may have inadvertently purified Earth of unmodified humans.
And that gives us Terra Insegura (meaning unsafe Earth), as a mixed crew of Selkies and nonmods, led by Richard Hansen, head to the home world to see what assistance they can render.
So: a quarter of a million words of fiction, containing at least a couple of reasonably large ideas, all sprung from a single writing exercise involving very little thought at all.
In a way, that’s its own kind of miracle.
**********************************
ewillett here on LJ) because he has a new book out, Terra Insegura, the sequel to Marseguro. In addition to words from the author himself, I've decided I should also give you guys the cover copy of the book, you know, to help you decide whether it would be a good book for you. So, here's the awesome cover (I love the colors in it), followed by the cover copy and then some words from Ed himself. And if you head over here, you can enter for a chance to win free books!Cover Copy: Gene Warfare
Marseguro, a water world far distant from Earth, is home to a small colony of both unmodified humans and the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created by geneticist Victor Hansen from modified human DNA. For seventy years the Selkies and the unmodified landlings have dwelled together in peace, safe from pursuit by the current fanatical theocratic rulers of Earth.
But everything changes when Earth discovers Marseguro, and a strike force--with Victor Hansen's own grandson Richard aboard--is sent to eradicate this abomination.
Yet Marseguro has devised a defense against Earth's Holy Warriors, a plague genetically tailored to destroy unmodified humans. With the Holy Warriors defeated, the people of Marseguro are ready to put their world back together and heal the wounds of war. But no one has anticipated the actions of the traitor, Chris Keating. Chris was the one who signaled Marseguro's location to Earth. And now he is aboard a ship returning home to Earth, unknowingly carrying within him the plague that can destroy all life on the mother planet.
Richard Hansen and the Selkies feel they have no choice but to send their own mission to Earth to deliver a lifesaving vaccine. Only time will tell what awaits them when they reach their destination. . . .
**************************
And now, a few words from your author:
Terra Insegura is a sequel to Marseguro, published last year and recently short-listed for the Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction or fantasy novel.
They were born in September of 2005 when I was in Robert J. Sawyer's science fiction writing course at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, part of the Writing With Style program there.
One morning the first thing Rob asked us to do was write, cold, the opening to a story. I think we had five minutes. I wrote: “Emily streaked through the phosphorescent sea, her wake a comet-tail of pale green light, her close-cropped turquoise hair surrounded by a glowing pink aurora. The water racing through her gill-slits smelled of blood.”
I tried to turn that into a short story as the week went on, but as I asked myself story-building questions—“Why does Emily have gills? Why is there blood in the water? What is she fleeing?”--the answers quickly outgrew short story length. So when the time came to propose a new book to DAW after Lost in Translation, my first with them, I crafted an outline for Marseguro. Which Sheila Gilbert bought, and which in turn begat Terra Insegura.
Emily, I realized, has gills because she is a human who has been genetically modified to be amphibian, able to breathe in both air and water. (It was either that or make her an alien, and who would name an alien Emily?) Besides, genetic modification was on my mind because I’d just taught myself more than I’d ever before known about genetics by writing Genetics Demystified for McGraw-Hill.
But this isn’t a hard SF novel, so my focus wasn’t on how these modified humans--nicknamed Selkies, after the seal-people of Irish legend--were created. My concern lay more with questions of human nature, not only that SFnal oldie-but-goodie “what does it mean to be human?”, but even more with the question of how, once some humans have been extravagantly modified genetically, non-modified humans will react to, and interact with, them.
On the hidden water world of Marseguro (which means “safe sea” in Portugese, and thank you, Google Translator, for giving me my title), they relate pretty well. But it’s a lingering resentment of moddies that causes one non-modded human to blow the whistle on the Selkies’ hiding place and bring the bad guys from Earth running--the bad guys who were the answer to the other questions I asked about my original story-opener, “What is she fleeing?” and “Why is there blood in the water?”
To provide my baddies, I did what there is a long history in science fiction of doing, and created my own religion (though it’s unlikely to take off in the real world and become a favorite of Tom Cruise), The Body Purified . . . a religion which exemplifies one of the less-positive ways modified and non-modified humans might someday interact.
The Body sees the genetic modification of humans as an abomination, a desecration of the “holy human genome.” (They don’t like clones, either.) But it wasn’t enough just to come up with The Body Purified and its nasty God (an impersonal “It” that’s really into that whole fire-and-sword thing). I had to explain how it managed to take power.
Many religions rest on a founding miracle. For The Body Purified, it was an astronomically unlikely event: one asteroid smacking another out of its Earth-destroying trajectory at the last possible moment. Since The Body Purified had been busily extermin--um, “purifying”--genetically modified humans on Earth while telling the panicked population that this was the only way to convince God Itself to turn Its wrath away, this miraculous rescue convinced all but the most recalcitrant believers in other religions that The Avatar, the Body’s leader, had a direct pipeline to God.
By the time of Marseguro, The Body Purified has been in power for decades, is trying to export its purification policies to the handful of human colonies scattered among the stars, and would really, really like to find out where genius geneticist Victor Hansen fled to in a stolen spaceship with his abominable race of Selkies. Thanks to the aforementioned disgruntled non-mod on Marseguro and Victor Hansen’s “grandson” Richard on Earth (who is the story’s main protagonist along with Emily, the Selkie girl), the Body Purified’s Holy Warriors descend on Marseguro with guns blazing.
But you really shouldn’t underestimate the defensive capabilities of a society built on high-level genetic engineering. The Purification of Marseguro goes badly, Richard Hansen finds out he’s not who he thinks he is (rather, what he thinks he is changes--and he changes with it), and at the end it seems likely that rather than Earth purifying Marseguro of Selkies, Marseguro may have inadvertently purified Earth of unmodified humans.
And that gives us Terra Insegura (meaning unsafe Earth), as a mixed crew of Selkies and nonmods, led by Richard Hansen, head to the home world to see what assistance they can render.
So: a quarter of a million words of fiction, containing at least a couple of reasonably large ideas, all sprung from a single writing exercise involving very little thought at all.
In a way, that’s its own kind of miracle.
**********************************
