Turtleduck Press began almost three years ago, when several writers (including yours truly) decided to band together and pool our strengths to start a science fiction and fantasy press. We knew we wanted to operate like a traditional publisher in that everything we published had to be:

• approved by one or more members
• edited by an experienced editor (that would be me — editing is how I make my living)
• formatted and designed to look professional
• advertised on our website and everywhere else we could get the word out

…so we’d be publishing works of quality and also look professional — both good ways to attract (and keep!) readers.

But we also wanted to make decisions on a consensus basis, and have the flexibility to try new things and put out more unusual content than a bigger, more established publisher could. So we’re publishing on Smashwords as well as Amazon, we’re writing in the nooks and crannies of the spec-fic subgenres, we’re experimenting with length and with linked short stories, and so on.

So far we’ve published:

• 6 science fiction and fantasy novels
• 2 speculative fiction anthologies
• 2 books of poetry
• close to 20 short stories and poems (available for free on our website)

Now that we have some experience, a better handle on what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, we’re ready to expand. That’s why we’ve put out this call for submissions. We’re looking for like-minded new members. If that’s you, we’d love to see what you’ve got!

And if you’re a reader, stay tuned for lots more good SF&F stories from Turtleduck Press in the months and years to come…

This week’s WANA Friday topic is a favourite or inspiring work of art — a painting, a piece of music, and so on.

Here’s one of mine:

This is a group called Barbara Furtuna, who sing in a traditional Corsican polyphonic style. (Corsica is a Mediterranean island belonging to France, although they have a distinct culture and language. It’s also the birthplace of Napoleon.) To me, the music sounds something like medieval Gregorian chanting, but with undertones of Africa. I love the minor-key sound and the lush harmonies…they touch something deep in my soul. Of course, it’s even better live! Americans, they’re coming your way in the fall…

Other WANA Friday participants this week:

Rabia Gale

Ellen Gregory

Liv Rancourt

Linda Adams

Margaret Miller

Tami Clayton

Cora Ramos

Kim Moser Griffin

That’s it for the weekend. See you back here on Monday!

—

Second, a bit of trivia for you. Norway is my ancestral home — three of my grandparents were born there — and I was lucky enough to visit in 2001.

This Friday is the Seventeenth of May, the Norwegian equivalent of Independence Day or Canada Day. It originally commemorated the signing of the Norwegian constitution in 1814, although Norway didn’t achieve independence (from its union with Sweden) until nearly a century later, in 1905.

As a holiday, the Seventeenth of May, or Syttende Mai in Norwegian, has become a day to celebrate the country, mainly with flags and children’s parades and the singing of the anthem — “Ja, vi elsker dette landet”, or “Yes, We Love This Country”.

So in honour of Syttende Mai, here are three things I love about Norway:

1. The people. When I visited, I was surprised at how much Norwegians were like Canadians. The self-deprecating sense of humour, the quiet reserve, the ability to thrive in a cold, forested climate..they could have been anyone I knew back home.

2. The language. Norwegian is a Germanic language, distantly related to both German and English. There’s a lovely lilt to it that makes it sound intrinsically good-humoured. I studied it in university, and enjoyed surprising people during my visit, since nobody learns Norwegian as a second language!

3. The landscape. I loved the crazy landscape of the Lofoten Islands — and the colourful houses, which again reminded me of Canada, specifically the Maritimes. And of course, I can’t forget to mention the fjords. One of my grandparents came from a little valley at the end of a fjord, hemmed in by steep mountains. (And I still have family ties to at least three of the farms in the valley.) Finding that place felt like coming home.

Have you visited a place that’s significant in your family’s history? What was your experience?

Right now, I’m on vacation, getting to spend Mother’s Day with my mom for the first time in many years. So in her honour, we’re talking about mothers and reading.

Both my parents valued reading — it was my father who told us bedtime stories about Middle Earth. But it was my mother who took us to the library and let us lug home literally as many books as we could carry (and a determined preteen bookworm can heft a lot of books, even if she doesn’t look that strong!). And it was she who hunted down her childhood favourites to share with me and my siblings.

Thanks to her, I read so many British children’s classics that I started talking like an old-fashioned English schoolchild (ironic, since we were homeschooling).

If you asked her, she wouldn’t claim to be responsible for my love of any particular book. But she certainly facilitated or introduced me to:

• my love of Anne of Green Gables and pretty much everything else L.M. Montgomery ever wrote
• Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels and other forms of science fantasy
• sleuthing with Trixie Belden
• my favourite childhood alter egos, Sara Crewe of A Little Princess and Laura Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie
• Swallows and Amazons and the rest of Arthur Ransome’s work
• the wanderlust-inducing world of travel memoirs (most of the books on that list, I discovered via her bookshelf!)

…all books that she loved first. And many more, of course, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

Thanks, Mom!

How did your mother influence your reading? If you are a mother, what books do you and your kids both love?

Roof-line of Wat Prathat Doi Suthep

Quick note: This week I’m over at Turtleduck Press, talking about my latest “ooh, shiny!” obsession — gardening.

—

It’s time for another installment of travel tales from my trip through Asia. In this episode, we’re still in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Chiang Mai is famous for more than the adventure tourism I mentioned last time. It’s also known for its temples, or wats….

Wat Prathat Doi SutheP

Detail of the naga (serpents) guarding the long flight of stairs up to the temple

Early in our stay, we took a group tour up Doi Suthep, a mountain next to the city. The main attraction of the mountain is the temple it hosts, Wat Prathat Doi Suthep. There’s a legend about its founding — involving a white elephant (sacred in Thailand) and a relic of Buddha — which you can read on Wikipedia.

This temple was our first experience with Thai religious architecture and Buddhism as practised in Thailand. I’d seen pictures, of course, but the sheer lavishness of the decoration was amazing in person. I wandered around in a daze snapping photos of everything, drunk on the beauty and worldbuilding potential.

Golden stupa

One enters the temple via a long staircase that leads into a courtyard containing a smallish building, a golden stupa, and some subsidiary shrines. We had to cover our shoulders to go inside the temple complex, and remove our shoes to enter the sanctuary. The complex had more tourists than worshipers inside, an odd and sometimes uncomfortable mixture.

Although the temple complex is more than six hundred years old, it has been kept freshly painted over the years, so it looks new. Even the murals that line the covered walks around the inside edge of the courtyard are repainted regularly, because they don’t last in that climate.

On the way up to the temple, our group tour stopped at a village belonging to the Hmong minority group, for some of that cultural tourism I mentioned last time. Had I known, I would have gone with a different tour.

The villagers seemed happy enough to see us, but the whole place had an air of unreality, like a theme park (so did the temple, a little). The main square was full of tour minivans and souvenir stands, and little old ladies in traditional dress wandered around selling trinkets.

Our Thai tour guide enthusiastically explained that this group of Hmong is originally from China, their language is mutually incomprehensible with Thai (though most now speak both), and they’re Christian…in other words, look how exotic. Sigh. So I deliberately didn’t buy anything or take any pictures.

Wiang Kum Kam

This Buddha statue is covered with a golden cloth to signify that it is still worshiped today

On another day, we took a morning boat cruise along the river to Wiang Kum Kam, a ruined city that predates Chiang Mai. Most of what remains is, unsurprisingly, temples.

The cruise involved a short boat ride in a beautiful wooden boat, then a horse and (tiny) carriage ride that took us around the remains of the temples, and finally a fruit snack before the return boat ride. We were the only two people on the cruise, which made things a little weird, especially since it was clearly a family operation – we were served the snack by a little girl in what was basically a poor farmyard.

My guidebook defined Wiang Kum Kam as an ancient ruined city. What it failed to make clear was that the ruins are interspersed in a more modern village – not surprising, really, but also not the lost jungle-eaten city I’d been picturing (damn that imagination!). And the ruins themselves weren’t very evocative. Though I looked hard, for the most part I couldn’t see anything more than old piles of bricks.

Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phan Tao

Wat Chedi Luang

Back in Chiang Mai that evening, we headed out to explore the Old City, starting with one of Thailand’s famous outdoor night markets. This one was largely full of tourist goods (we bought placemats whose clones we later saw all over Thailand) but also full of locals. We saw children doing a music performance and monks wandering through the crowd.

We also had our only experience of hearing the national anthem played in public – apparently this is done twice a day, but we were never in crowds when it happened. Everyone stops moving until the anthem finishes, then goes about their business. It’s slightly surreal (especially when one or two tourists don’t get the memo and keep walking around) and also kind of moving.

Wat Phan Tao

While exploring the market, we ran across at least three temples, including my favourite of all those we saw in Chiang Mai, Wat Phan Tao.

Wat Phan Tao was built in the traditional northern Thai style, but unusually, it was constructed entirely from wood, including the Buddha statue inside. The warm wood makes a beautiful contrast to the golden glitter and glitz of Wat Chedi Luang next door and Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep on the mountaintop. And it’s especially magical at night.

Next time, we head south, to the hustle and bustle of Bangkok…

Your turn. Do you have a favourite building or a favourite architectural style? Religious architecture tends to be particularly extravagant all over the world — which kind do you like?

Iron Man 3

Okay, I know this is out now, but I haven’t seen it yet. I saw The Avengers, but skipped Iron Man 2 because one movie starring a full-of-himself billionaire was enough — he worked much better for me in an ensemble cast. But from the trailers, this installment features a fallen Tony Stark who’s struggling to find his feet again. That’s a story I can get on board with. Add in the superhero setting and the wisecracks, and I’m there.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Again, mixed feelings about this one. As a longtime fan, I thought the Star Trek reboot was a fun action movie, but it lacked the sense of wonder and reverence for science (even pseudoscience) that, to me, were central to Star Trek. Plus the cockiness of Chris Pine’s Kirk annoyed the hell out of me. (Sense a theme here?) On the other hand, it’s still Star Trek, and where else am I going to get my Spock fix these days? The trailers have me cautiously hopeful for that balance of character and explosion I mentioned above.

After Earth

Spaceship crash-landing on a far-future Earth that’s been abandoned to animals? Okay, you’ve got my attention. From the trailer, this could be a great father-son story disguised as an action movie…or it could be an action movie with a couple of nods to their relationship. But I tend to like Will Smith’s science fiction movies, so I’m hoping for the former.

World War Z

I’m a sucker for a good apocalypse movie. This one is an adaptation of a zombie novel I’d heard a lot about but hadn’t gotten around to reading. Add in the fact that the screenplay is by J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame, and I’m definitely hopeful.

Elysium

This is the latest film by Neill Blomkamp of District 9, so I’m already interested. The premise of haves vs. have-nots is pretty well-worn in written science fiction, but I’ve not seen it lately on the big screen, and I expect Blomkamp to have some interesting things to say about it.

—

And finally, a couple of movies that aren’t SF/F, but are on my list:

Much Ado About Nothing

Not SF/F, but directed by Joss Whedon, so that counts for something, right? If you’re a Whedon fan, you’ve probably already heard about that movie he shot at his house in 12 days between other projects. Well, this is it! The trailer makes it look cool and modern without trying too hard, so I’m excited to see what Whedon does with it.

Stories We Tell

This isn’t fiction at all — it’s a documentary by Canadian actor Sarah Polley, about her late-in-life discovery that the man she knew as her father wasn’t her biological father. Her mother died of cancer when she was a child, so she can’t go to the source. Instead, she interviews everyone she can, trying to find the truth after years and layers of lies. Polley’s first film, Away From Her, was beautifully done (a story about a woman with Alzheimer’s and the husband who loves her), so I’m looking forward to this one as well.

Over to you. What do you look for in a blockbuster? What movies are you looking forward to this summer?

—

I’ve been thinking a lot about something I wrote here two weeks ago:

3. The Internet isn’t that important. When I was travelling, Internet time was severely limited. What did I spend it on? Email and Facebook, to stay connected with people back home. Blogging. Travel research. A handful of other sites. Everything that didn’t make the cut is superfluous. Instead of being bombarded with a flow of information and LOLcats, I was bombarded with new sights and new experiences…in other words, with life. As a writer, I can’t stay away completely — I need to keep up with blogs and other social media, publishing news, and so on — but I can take a good, hard look at my Internet usage.

As you might imagine, it’s hard to make lasting change, no matter how good one’s intentions. The Internet is my entertainment of choice, up near books and way ahead of TV or movies or music — plus it’s a social hub and a professional necessity. So I’m finding myself getting sucked back in…and then feeling guilty about it, of course. But this time, I’m paying attention.

I’ve been deliberately staying away from some of my worst time-sucks from before the trip — Pinterest, Twitter, my extensive list of blog feeds — but I know that, as a writer who’s trying to network and stay informed, at least two of those need to be reinstated as part of my life. The trick will be keeping them as a small part of my life. And if I somehow manage not to gorge on those, then there are always more — Facebook, brain candy like Buzzfeed or Cracked.com, or, heaven forbid, the news online.

Which leads me to this post by Adam Brault:

I used to believe that time was the most important thing I have, but I’ve come to believe differently. The single most valuable resource I have is uninterrupted thought.

His comments were made in reference to Twitter, but the same sentiments hold true for the rest of the Internet. He talks about intending to put Twitter “in a box”, but knowing that doing so is harder to maintain than quitting entirely. He talks about having a clearer mind and better ability to focus.

The Internet encourages our “Ooh, shiny!” or “SQUIRREL!” tendencies; it discourages deeper thought, at least the way most people use it. And of course, deeper thought is kind of important for a writer. Even if you’re telling yourself that you’re reading these blog posts on writing to better your craft, is that really the most efficient way to better your craft…or would it be better to spend that time writing?

But we can’t live without it.

For now, I’m trying Freedom, a software program that locks you out of the Internet entirely for the time you specify. I put it on for an hour at a time and focus on my novel-edit-in-progress. It works beautifully. Next step will be to increase the length of time.

But that still doesn’t solve the problem of how to use, engage with, and yes, play on the Internet without letting it take over.

Over to you. I know I’m not the only one with this problem, writer or not. How do you balance the Internet with the rest of your life?

For example…

(NOTE: This post contains spoilers through A Storm of Swords, which is the third book of the five that are currently out. If you’re watching the TV series and haven’t read the books, you probably won’t want to read further — the current season will end halfway through the events of A Storm of Swords. I haven’t read the last two books yet, so if you have, please don’t post spoilers for the last two books.)

1. Some readers will follow you anywhere…if they trust you. Martin is infamous for killing off characters you thought were safe by the rules (or tropes) of fantasy writing. Granted, he’s lost readers because of it — dark, gritty fantasy isn’t for everyone. But he still has huge numbers of readers clamoring for more. Why? Because they’ve grown to trust his storytelling skills. He’s shown that he’s in control, that his plotting is well thought out, that he doesn’t kill characters without a good reason. More than that, he tells a story that people want to hear, despite the risks.

2. Juggling many points of view (POVs) is hard, even for experts. Epic fantasy is known for its multiple-POV storytelling style, and Martin is no exception. But it’s difficult to keep up the pacing on that many plotlines at once. Even Martin has a couple of POVs per book where not much is happening for most of the book. He’ll never scale back the complexity, but for the rest of us, maybe less is better.

3. Don’t be afraid to go dark. You’ve heard the writing advice — figure out what your character most fears and then make it happen, or figure out what s/he most values and then take it away. Martin does this to (among others) Jaime Lannister in A Storm of Swords, to brutal effect on Jaime’s state of mind. What is a knight without a sword hand? Where is his place in this world? What does this world really look like, anyway? Now that’s how to strip down a character to his core. Being that brutal wouldn’t work for every story, but it’s a reminder to dig deep and not let your characters off too lightly.

4. The twistier the better. By the end of the first half of A Storm of Swords, I thought I had the series figured out. I knew who the major players were, and the major puppeteers — we saw most of them slot into place in A Clash of Kings — so I knew the direction things were going. And then they didn’t. By the time the carnage (and the book) ended, several of the most central people were dead, others had removed themselves from the playing field, and I had no idea at all what was going to happen next. And I still trusted Martin to be in control.

5. Play with expectations. This ties in with #1 and #4 above. Martin knows what you, the epic fantasy reader, are thinking. He knows where you expect the story to go — and he tempts you with it, and then pulls the football away like Lucy in Peanuts, over and over again. Again, this is a fine line — you don’t want to frustrate the reader too much, and for some readers, he’s already crossed the line. But, as with stories involving sexual tension, the fun is in keeping the tension going.

6. Give the readers what they want…sort of. To continue on from #5, A Storm of Swords features several scenes where readers’ desires come true…in the worst possible way. Everyone loves to hate Joffrey, right? Everyone wants him dead, right? Even if he dies in a way that makes Tyrion look guilty of regicide, right? Wait…this is the only possible way that Joffrey’s death could make things worse instead of better! Yep. That’s how Martin rolls.

7. Good writing is important at all levels. So far I’ve been talking a lot about the broad strokes of plot and character. But Martin is also good at the details. He’ll give us a host of minor characters, each so vivid that we remember them all later (Varys the eunuch and Dolorous Edd are just two). He’ll give us a fight scene, for example the Mountain That Rides vs. the Red Viper (nicknames are another thing he’s good at!) and it’s a miniature story in itself — it looks like one side is winning, the other makes a valiant effort and is subdued, the final stroke is about to be delivered, and the underdog comes back after all. He’ll balance grimdark with banter or outright humour (think of the scarecrows on the Wall).

What do you think of A Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire? If you’re a writer, what storytelling lessons have you learned?

If you liked this post, you might also like my earlier posts, Women in A Game of Thrones and If You Liked… A Game of Thrones.

—

Our first stop in Thailand was Chiang Mai, the country’s second-biggest city. It’s in the northwest part of Thailand, among rolling hills that keep the temperatures down to something very reasonable for North Americans. This means it’s a popular destination, not only for North Americans but also for Chinese tourists, whose numbers have exploded recently due to cheap flights.

We found Chiang Mai to be more intense than Malaysia, in all sorts of ways. Because we’re geeks, we quickly started to talk about this as “levelling up” — a video-game term referring to mastering a level and moving on to the next. For example…

The Traffic

The stupa in front of our guesthouse

Our guesthouse, Kamala’s, was on a tiny side street. (Note on addresses: Non-main streets are known in Thailand as sois. Thai addresses give the nearest main road, then the number of the soi, because the sois themselves don’t have names, even though they may be large streets. So Kamala’s was on Chai Sriphum, Soi 1.) Across the soi was an old Buddhist stupa, a useful landmark since it was visible from several streets away.

The soi was lined with other guesthouses and the occasional Thai massage place, but it was short on restaurants. This turned out to be a problem because the traffic was utterly terrifying…

Don’t be deceived by the canal down the middle — this is the evil street!

On our first day, we walked to the nearest proper road and discovered two solid lanes in each direction of cars and songthaews (red minibuses) and tuk-tuks (think golf carts acting as taxis – basically the same as auto-rickshaws in India, except with a deeper growl to their engines), with extra “lanes” of motorcycles squeezed in between and weaving in and out among the bigger vehicles. And there were no sidewalks, and no traffic lights immediately apparent, and a canal to cross in the middle.

The patio and soi in front of our guesthouse

So we beat a hasty retreat, not feeling up to braving such a thing just yet. Our soi was reasonably quiet, but all the restaurants and the old part of the city lay across the evil road. Also on the other side of the road was the nearest ATM – another problem, because we’d changed our leftover Malaysian ringgit into Thai baht at the airport, but had forgotten to pull out more cash. We had barely enough for dinner that first night.

On our second day in Thailand, we got a little braver and ventured out a little further (remember what I said about levelling up? The whole point is that it’s gradual). We penetrated the tangle of sois around our guesthouse, found an ATM, crossed a busier street, got lost coming back, got successfully un-lost, and managed not to get run over.

(So how do you deal with being a pedestrian in Thailand? An ex-pat friend advises that you don’t. Taxis are cheaper than tuk-tuks for short trips and don’t mind doing them, even if it’s just to help you get to a destination on the other side of a busy road!)

The Ziplining

One of the reasons we chose to go to Chiang Mai is its reputation as an adventure-travel destination. Nearby activities include whitewater rafting, ziplining, riding and bathing with elephants, rock climbing, and trekking (multi-day hiking).

(That last one is all about “ethnic tourism”. Basically, the main attraction in this part of Thailand isn’t the scenery, but the remote villages, and their unusual cultural practices (and dress, and so on). While I’m all for learning about unusual cultural practices (hello, I write fantasy), the idea of parading past and gawking at some poor people just trying to live their lives is just too weird for me. I try to imagine it happening on some Aboriginal reserve in Canada, and I just can’t. Similarly, we made a point of skipping tourist-oriented cultural shows and museums. I suppose they’re a way to keep traditional arts and minority cultures alive or at least remembered, but until I could figure out where the line is for me, I resolved to give them all a miss.)

What I did do was ziplining.

Me leaping into the abyss. Photo credit goes to an anonymous fellow zipliner.

Ever heard of it? It’s like a playground on steroids. You climb up to a wood platform built around a massive tree, from which a cable stretches out high above the forest floor to another tree. You’re wearing a harness, which is hooked to the cable. Then you push off the platform and zoom along the cable to the next platform. Rinse and repeat.

I’d never tried anything like this before, canopy walks notwithstanding, so I was pretty nervous. (My travelling companion decided he wasn’t even going to try it.) A mixup with the pickup time didn’t instill confidence. The bumpy ride out from Chiang Mai on sketchy roads to the jungle site didn’t help. Neither did learning that I was the only non-Chinese tourist there.

Me reaching the far side. Photo credit goes to my anonymous fellow zipliner.

The two young men who accompanied our little group looked like young punks, but they were very friendly, had an air of great competence and attention to safety details, and showed sympathy to my knocking knees. I expect it wasn’t a coincidence that I was sent down the lines first out of our little group for nearly the whole way (except the very first zipline, where I hung back and made someone else do it!). Our guides also had an air of nonchalance about jumping off the platforms to zoom along the cables. One even had a habit of going upside down.

I found the experience quite scary but also thrilling. It was really quite safe — the harnesses are doubled up for redundancy, and one guy pushes you off from one platform while the other catches you at the far end. You sit in the harness as if for rock climbing, and you can hang on but it doesn’t really help anything (I hung on anyway). The platforms are crazy high, but there’s so much vegetation that you can’t see straight down to the forest floor anyway as you zoom along between the branches.

Bromeliad!

The emphasis was on adrenaline, not nature, so I don’t have much to report about the jungle flora and fauna. But while catching my breath on one of the platforms, I saw a bromeliad — a plant that grows on tree branches up in the canopy. I first learned about these many years ago from Terry Pratchett’s Diggers series, and never thought I’d get to see one.

Rappelling down from the platform

For the final touch, we rappelled down a rope to the forest floor. Most of the gang seemed to find this the scariest, but I actually found it less so, maybe because I’d done it before while rock climbing. I can tell you that my legs were wobbly afterwards, though!

The Food

I can’t talk about Thailand without mentioning the food. We ate a lot of coconut-milk curries, very spicy and delicious (though thank goodness for the ubiquitous rice to take the edge off the heat!).

One night we splurged on a restaurant, Dash!, recommended by our well-travelled friends from the Cameron Highlands. The restaurant was a beautiful teak-wood building with a patio outside and romantic lighting throughout, and little cushioned nooks upstairs overlooking the candlelit patio below. Appetizers and entrees were European-style – shrimp wrapped in bacon, then tilapia (yum). Then when none of the desserts proved to be gluten-free, they offered to make a traditional Thai dessert – sliced banana in warm coconut milk (double yum). It was the first time I’d had this, but not the last!

Besides adventure tourism, Chiang Mai is also famous for its temples. In the next installment, I’ll talk about those and share more photos.

For another angle on my experiences with long-term travel, pop on over to Turtleduck Press, where I’m talking about some of the things I’ve learned that will stay with me for a long time.

Have you tried “levelling up” while travelling or elsewhere in real life? What was your experience?

I’m a quiet but staunch environmentalist, and I suspect that books had a lot to do with this side of my personality (and most of the rest, for that matter). Here, then, are some books to celebrate on Earth Day…

Cautionary Tales

For those of us growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s, science fiction for teens (the term “YA” hadn’t been invented yet) tended to follow a few familiar tropes. Dystopian tales were popular, as were stories about aliens and spaceships. And it was almost taken for granted that our planet was going to come close to destruction, usually for environmental reasons.

One example was the Canadian writer Monica Hughes. She wrote a variety of stories about near-future humanity divorced from its natural environment…and, because she was writing for teens, the young people in her stories usually found their way back to nature and solved the core problem in their societies while they were at it. Devil on my Back and its sequel The Dream Catcher, for example, are about a society that lives in a city under a dome and believes the outside world is toxic. The Crystal Drop is about a North America ravaged by drought.

In the TV world, there was The Girl From Tomorrow, an Australian series about a young time-traveller who comes from a future era where half the planet has been destroyed. While the story wasn’t overtly environmentalist, it certainly made you think, especially when the characters find themselves in an alternate timeline where the entire planet is a blasted husk.

More recently, Scott Westerfeld‘s trilogy beginning with Uglies features a similar setting. His society lives in utopian cities and looks down on our era as the age of the “Rusties”, who nearly destroyed the planet. Of course, SF readers know that utopias always come at a price….

And adults aren’t left out. Adult fiction of this type includes:

• Hammered by Elizabeth Bear, the first in a near-future trilogy that, while not explicitly environmental in its themes, certainly deals with trying to save the Earth from a threat to the ecosystem
• Dry by Barbara Sapergia, a literary spec-fic novel about crops and genetics in Saskatchewan
• Don Coyote de la Merika by Kathryn Anthony, a novella about connections in a world of scarcity

Close to the Earth

Against all this doom and gloom, I also grew up with books about living close to the Earth and its cycles. I’ve mentioned before that my father was raised on a farm. So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that I loved stories about pioneers and ranchers.

My favourites were, of course, the Little House books. My sister and I often played Laura and Mary, especially when we were outside helping in the garden. My father grew vegetables, my mother loved flowers, and while I have forgotten everything I might have learned from them, I did like helping, pretending I was on a farm growing everything I needed to survive the prairie winter.

Add to that:

• Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan, about a widower who brings a mail-order bride from the east to look after his farm and his two children
• The Wilds of Whip-Poor-Will Farm by Janet Foster, a non-fiction book for children about a couple who buys a farm, builds a house, and gets to know the comings and goings of all the wildlife that share the land with them

And a recent publication that I’m looking forward to reading, poet Jenna Butler’s book Seldom Seen Road promises to evoke farming life from an intimate perspective — she also runs an organic farm in northern Alberta.

Your turn. What can you add to the list of books worth celebrating on Earth Day?