[Photograph]
Photo: Gale Comin

Biography, conventions, appearances and interviews

Biography

The question "Where do you come from?" tends to elicit an itinerary: I was raised in Edinburgh, Scotland and Victoria B.C. I graduated from the University of Victoria with a B.Sc. Honours Chemistry, Major Physics, and from McMaster University with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. As a post-Ph.D. fling I attended the (alas no longer extant) Writing I workshop at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts. Subsequently I worked as a postdoctoral scientist in Boston, USA and Leeds, England, before entering the University of Calgary in 1995 to study Medicine. I graduated in May 1999, having taken a study leave to write CAVALCADE, spent a year as a resident in Anatomic Pathology at Calgary, worked for a year in Ottawa as the Editorial Fellow at the Canadian Medical Association Journal and moved back to Victoria to work as a medical writer, and then as a clinical research scientist at a small pharmaceutical company.

My first "novel", lost in one of those moves, was a handwritten Robinsonade entitled "Shipwrecked on an Island", produced when I was eight. I glommed onto science fiction during a summer spent in Edmonton when I was thirteen, when I discovered John Wyndham's novels in the bookshelf owned by the son of the family whose house we were renting. My first published novel, LEGACIES, came out in February 1995 from Millennium, the science fiction imprint of Orion, London -- which cuts a fairly long story short, since it was five years plus in the writing and another two in the revising. It garnered good reviews and a spot on Locus' Best of Year List. BLUEHEART was completed during my first year of medical school, and published in November 1996. CAVALCADE was published in November 1998 and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for that year. A writer friend, Lynda Williams, and I have a collaborative novel, THRONE PRICE published by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, a new imprint in Calgary. My most recent publication was a short story, "Suspended Lives", in SPACE INC., edited by Julie Czerneda and published by DAW (2003). My subsequent three novels are making the rounds, and I have a fantasy novel in revision prior to submission.

As to why I write science fiction: To indulge a passion for knowledge of all kinds and science and medicine in particular. I have an excuse to read about everything from oceanography to nanotechnology, from colour theory to the history of microscopy. For OPAL I delved into on ethnobotany, shamanism and extremophiles (bacteria which live in hostile environments); WAIORA is allowing me to misuse my epidemiology and explore deserts. I enjoy world-building -- the devastated ecology of Burdania, the jungle of Taridwyn (both in LEGACIES), the ocean world of BLUEHEART, the alien spacecraft of CAVALCADE and the ice and tundra of OPAL, and the various worlds of the series I'm working on. And I like to be able to ditch all assumptions and conventional wisdom and start entirely from scratch, running my fictional "thought experiments" (Ursula Le Guin's words) according to any parameters I please. Science fiction gives my imagination elbow room.

Before writing took over my "spare time", I fenced competitively, competing with the McMaster Varsity Squad, and studied archery and Aikido in an admittedly dilatory fashion. I have been a member of a number of large choruses, and participated in the occasional musical. I read voraciously and omnivorously, swim, and dabble in website building.

Conventions, readings and lectures

Convention Attendance

Readings

Guest Lectures

Interviews

Biography page created September 16, 1998. Updated and edited into 2 pages 2 August 2002. Last modified September 30, 2007. Alison Sinclair