From the January 2012 issue of Locus Magazine Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a [...]

From the November 2011 issue of Locus Magazine I inaugurated this column in 2008 with an editorial called ‘‘Why I Copyfight’’, which talked about the tricky balance between creativity, culture, and the relationship between audiences and creators. These have always been hard subjects, and the Internet has made them harder still, because the thing that [...]

From the September 2011 issue of Locus Magazine One of my most important formative experiences as a writer was working in bookstores. I worked in three shops: a specialist science fiction store (Bakka Books in Toronto), an academic store near the University of Toronto campus, and a dreadful suburban mall bookstore. Going into my first [...]

From the July 2011 issue of Locus Magazine My 2009 novel Makers concerned itself, partly, with the upheaval that might attend cheap, ubiquitous 3D ‘‘printing.’’ I put ‘‘printing’’ in scare quotes because calling a device that produces arbitrary, articulated three dimensional objects (including functional, assembled multipart mechanisms and solid-state devices) on demand a ‘‘printer’’ is [...]

From the May 2011 issue of Locus Magazine ‘‘Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?’’ It’s a question I get asked so often that I have a little canned response I can rattle off without thinking: ‘‘In order to be an activist, you have to be both: pessimistic enough to believe that things will [...]

From the March 2011 issue of Locus Magazine If science fiction’s unofficial motto is ‘‘All laws are local and no law knows how local it is,’’ then the purest expression of that law is the ‘‘Explaining things to a Martian’’ story – a tale in which humanity’s irrational frailty and manias are laid bare because [...]

From the January 2011 issue of Locus Magazine Imagine this: you pick up the phone and call Vito’s, the excellent pizza joint down the road where your family’s gotten its favorite pepperoni and mushroom every Friday night for years. The phone rings once, twice, then: ‘‘AT&T: The number you have called is not engaged, but [...]

From the November 2010 issue of Locus Magazine Standing in Melbourne airport on the day before this year’s World Science Fiction convention, I found myself playing the familiar road-game known to all who travel to cons: spot the fan. Sometimes, ‘‘spot the fan’’ is pitched as a pejorative, a bit of fun at fannish expense, [...]

From the September 2010 issue of Locus Magazine Last week, I found myself wide awake in bed next to my wife, mulling over an e-mail I’d gotten just before lying down (checking e-mail before bed being as bad a habit as eating before bed – both of which I’m trying to stop doing). The e-mail [...]

From the July 2010 issue of Locus Magazine From time to time, people ask me for an inventory of the tools and systems I use to get my work done. As a hard-traveling, working writer, I spend a lot of time tinkering with my tools and systems. At the risk of descending into self-indulgence (every [...]