Back in 2006, when my novella “Identity Theft” — which makes up the first ten chapters of my new novel Red Planet Blues — was a Nebula Award finalist, I was asked to comment about the story’s origin for the SFWA Bulletin. Here’s what I had to say (“Identity Theft” first appeared in Mike Resnick‘s Science Fiction Book Club anthology Down These Dark Spaceways):

There’s a tendency in our industry to pooh-pooh theme anthologies. Somehow, the notion of writing a story to order strikes people as inherently wrong, and the idea that a story might be commissioned, as opposed to written on spec, seems outrageous to some. I disagree. For me, many of the greatest challenges I’ve faced as a writer came from anthology commissions, and they’ve resulted in me successfully going in directions I simply never would have otherwise.

When I sit down to do a new novel contract, my publisher is, quite rightly, looking for me to propose something that plays to my strengths and builds on my existing audience (and all those who complain about commissioned stories never seem to discuss novel commissions, the engine that drives our industry — but I digress). But when a short-fiction editor approaches me for a theme anthology, very often it’s in an area that is new to me, and those commissions have inspired me to produce some of the work I’m most proud of.

A few years ago an anthologist asked me to do libertarian SF — me, the bleeding-heart big-government Canadian liberal — and the result was the Hugo Award finalist “The Hand You’re Dealt.”

The same editor came to me later looking for horror — me, the hard-SF quantum-computers-and-aliens guy — and the result was the Bram Stoker Award finalist “Fallen Angel.”

My Hugo finalist last year, “Shed Skin,” likewise was commissioned for an anthology, one that also contained work by such other hacks as Nalo Hopkinson and Cory Doctorow, produced in honor of Bakka, the SF bookstore we all used to work at.

And this year, “Identity Theft” isn’t just a Nebula finalist, it’s also a Hugo finalist and has already won the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing, the 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción — in blind judging, I might add. And yet, I never would have written it — or even once thought about creating an SF hard-boiled-detective story — if Mike Resnick hadn’t come knocking.

If it weren’t for theme anthologies, and commissioned works, if it weren’t for creative and versatile editors like Mike Resnick and Marty Greenberg and Julie E. Czerneda and John Helfers, and for publishers like DAW and now the Science Fiction Book Club that have vigorously supported the original-anthology market, quality stories like these by myself and dozens of other authors simply wouldn’t exist. My hat is off to those editors and publishers, and I am honored and thrilled to be the first-ever Nebula nominee for an original Science Fiction Book Club publication.

2006 Bio:

Robert J. Sawyer is the author of 17 science-fiction novels including the Nebula Award winner The Terminal Experiment (serialized in Analog as Hobson’s Choice), the Hugo Award winner Hominids, the Nebula and Hugo Award finalist Starplex, and the Seiun Award winners End of an Era, Frameshift, and Illegal Alien.

Three of his ten Hugo nominations and four of his nine Aurora Award wins have been for short fiction, and he’s won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, Analog magazine’s Analytical Laboratory Award, and Science Fiction Chronicle‘s Readers’ Award, all for best short story of the year, as well as France’s Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for Best Foreign Short Story of the Year.

Rob’s latest novel is Mindscan from Tor, and his next, Rollback, will be serialized in Analog starting in the October 2006 issue, with the hardcover to follow from Tor in April 2007. His novels have earned starred reviews in Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kliatt, and Quill & Quire, have hit the top-ten national mainstream bestsellers’ lists in Canada, and have reached number one on the Locus bestsellers’ list. He runs an intensive week-long SF writing workshop in Banff, Alberta, each year, will be writer-in-residence at Odyssey this summer, and edits the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint for Fitzhenry & Whiteside, one of Canada’s leading publishers. His million-plus-word website is at sfwriter.com.

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Authors? We got ‘em: Aurora Award-winner Julie E. Czerneda, Hugo Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer, Aurora Award-winner Élisabeth Vonarburg, and Hugo Award-winner Robert Charles Wilson.

Editors? The most important ones in the history of Canadian SF: Order of Canada member John Robert Colombo and Hugo Award-winner David Hartwell.

Academics? Of course! From all over North America! In all areas of academic study! Just a small sampling of the speakers:

• James Christie, Faculty of Theology, University of Winnipeg, on “Remembering the Future: Science Fiction and the Emerging Art of Dialogue Theology”

• Carrie J. Cole, School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona, on “Science and the Staging of the Speculative Imagination: Interdisciplinary and Intertextual Performance Strategies”

• Herb Kauderer from Hillbert College, Hamburg, New York, on “Fedora Hats and the Great Gazoo: Pop Culture Referencess in Robert J. Sawyer’s novels Triggers and Red Planet Blues”

• Wendy Gay Pearson from Western University, London, Ontario, on “Queer Time, Postcoloniality, and Canadian SF”

• Amy J. Ransom from Central Michigan University on “Hockey & Science Fiction in Canada: A Combination Seen Rarely But in Québec”

• Sherryl Vint from University of California Riverside, on “To Corrupt and Control the Present in Order to Win the Future: Continuum as Post 9/11 Television”

Of course, as befitting an academic conference about Canadian science fiction, we’ll have papers presented in both English and French.

In total, 35 papers have been accepted so far for the acdaemic conference, and there will be readings by all the attending authors and speeches by the attending editors.

A website dedicated to this amazing academic conference about Canadian science fiction is coming soon. For now, more details are here.

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A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by John DeNardo of Kirkus for an article about expanding short works into novels, which is what I’d done with my latest book, Red Planet Blues.

The full by-email interview is below, and here is the finished article, with a couple of my quotes used and quotes from other authors, as well.

1. Why did you choose to extend the shorter story to novel length?

In February 2004, Hugo Award-winning author Mike Resnick approached me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: write a “science-fictional hard-boiled private-eye novella” for an original anthology he was editing for the Science Fiction Book Club called Down These Dark Spaceways.

That story, “Identity Theft,” went on to win Spain’s Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, which, at 6,000 euros, is the world’s largest cash prize for science-fiction writing. It was also a finalist for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora”), as well as for the top two awards in the science-fiction field: the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award (SF’s “People’s Choice Award”) and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award (SF’s “Academy Award”) — making “Identity Theft” the first (and so far only) original publication of the SFBC ever to be nominated for either of those awards.

Over the years, I’d gotten so much fan mail for this novella, it seemed there’d be an appetite for further adventures of the character.

Also, frankly, following on the success of FlashForward, I want to sell another TV series, and Hollywood is way more likely to develop a best-selling novel than it is any short work, no matter how lauded that work might be.

2. Where does the original story fit into the novel? (Is it the first X chapters? Does the novel begin and end the same but is stuffed with new story components to make it meatier?)

In a slightly modified form, “Identity Theft” makes up the first ten chapters of the novel Red Planet Blues. The remaining thirty-seven chapters are all new (of the 105,000 words in the novel, 82,000 appear in Red Planet Blues for the first time).

I actually added about ten percent new material to those first ten chapters, but it was all description or bits of business that had occurred to me over the years. I didn’t change anything though; I wanted people who had read and remembered the original to not feel I was cheating just to make the rest of the novel work better. I was true to what I’d already established about the characters and settings; I didn’t change any of the in-story facts. Here’s an example of the new material:

When I’d first come here, I’d quipped that New Klondike wasn’t a hellhole — it wasn’t far enough gone for that. “More of a heckhole,” I’d said. But that had been ten years ago, just after what had happened with Wanda, and if something in the middle of a vast plain could be said to be going downhill, New Klondike was it. The fused-regolith streets were cracked, buildings — and not just the ones in the old shantytown — were in disrepair, and the seedy bars and brothels were full of thugs and con artists, the destitute and the dejected. As a character in one of the old movies I like had said of a town, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” New Klondike should have a sign by one of the airlocks that proclaims, “Twinned with Mos Eisley, Tatooine.”

The biggest was to recapture the tone. I’d immersed myself in noir mystery fiction when writing “Identity Theft” back in 2004, and really do think I got the voice right then. But it had slipped away in the eight ensuing years, and I had to really struggle to make sure that the whole book had the same narrative voice.

Also, I learned a lesson: I thought it would be easier to create a novel this way; it turned out to be much harder. The word novel means “new,” and the best way to write one is by starting fresh.

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The library recommends advance registration; you can register here.

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Today is my 30th anniversary of being a full-time self-employed freelance writer.

On Friday, April 29, 1983, I finished the last job I ever had — being a teaching assistant in the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson in Toronto. I’ve never had a boss since then.

I spent most of the rest of the 1980s doing freelance newspaper and magazine journalism, plus writing projects for corporate and government clients; I didn’t transition to full-time science-fiction writing until the early 1990s.

It’s been an amazing thirty years. I’m a lucky guy.

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Twenty-five years ago this month, the April 1988 issue of the late, lamented magazine Books in Canada published this interview by me (Robert J. Sawyer) with Toronto science-fiction writer Terence M. Green, then a high-school English teacher and now a lecturer in creative writing at Western University in London, Ontario.

Green writes wonderful novels, two of which were World Fantasy Award finalists. I reprinted his Children of the Rainbow, referenced below, in a slightly updated form as Sailing Times Ocean under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint from Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

Sailing Times Ocean is still in print, and other books by Terry have been reissued by Arc Manor’s Phoenix Pick line and from Richard Curtis’s E-Reads. You can find out more about those editions and what Terry is up to today on his blog.

And here’s that interview again, a quarter of a century later — an intriguing piece of Canadian science-fiction history:

Terence M. Green is quietly becoming Canada’s best science fiction writer. His first book, The Woman Who is the Midnight Wind (Pottersfield Press, 1987) collected his angst-filled short stories from Aurora: New Canadian Writings, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. St. Martin’s Press has just released his first novel in hardcover. Barking Dogs is a police thriller set in a near-future Toronto where infallible lie detectors — Barking Dogs — are everywhere. He recently completed another novel, Children of the Rainbow, a time-travel tale juxtaposing an Incan religious revival, Mutiny on the Bounty, and the anti-nuclear efforts of Greenpeace.

Terry Green was born in Toronto in 1947. He has a B.A. and a B.Ed. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Studies from University College, Dublin. He teaches high-school English at East York Collegiate Institute in Toronto and is the father of two boys. Green spoke about his life and work with journalist Robert J. Sawyer:

Robert J. Sawyer: Your first novel, Barking Dogs, is a violent work in the popular-fiction mold. Your second, Children of the Rainbow, is a more cerebral, literary book. It’s almost as if they were written by two different people.

Terence M. Green: For Barking Dogs, I studied what makes popular commercial fiction work and I consciously set out to include those elements. Since it was a first novel, I wanted to be sure it would sell. I wrote the second novel without those constraints. Each book satisfies different things in me, and I think they will satisfy different audiences. Am I two different people? I think everybody is many people. When I do my third novel, you will meet yet another Terry Green.

Sawyer: The main character of Barking Dogs, Police Officer Helwig, takes the law into his own hands. Is this book a call for urban vigilantism?

Green: No, but unfortunately a lot of people will read it that way and I’ll take a lot of criticism for it. If people read the book the way I intended it, they will see that it’s not a call for anything. Rather, it presents a new situation — a world in which the cop on the beat can know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether the person he is arresting is guilty. All I’m asking is for people to think about that.

Sawyer: So the theme of Barking Dogs is truth?

Green: Yes. I’ve always been intrigued by the degree to which we need to or should tell the truth. The job of the fiction writer is to tell the truth, but the job of so many people in the world — politicians, for instance — is not to. As a writer, I’ve always been interested in how you find the truth, how you deal with it. Truth is the crux of personal relationships; it’s what we all want to discover.

Sawyer: How did you go from that abstract philosophy to the concrete vision of a world full of hand-held lie detectors?

Green: I realized that legal truth — as distinct from moral or personal truth — is what our society revolves around. I read an article in the newspaper several years ago about the voice-stress detectors that are used to see if a job applicant is lying. I was astonished that such things existed and are used. I got some sales literature and read more articles about them. I just pushed the idea of absolute truth to its bitter end, to the point where it became a personal tragedy.

Sawyer: How did you develop your vision of Toronto at the turn of the next century?

Green: I looked backward 15 years. The world of 1973 had minor but significant differences from our world of today. Back then, I bought an electric typewriter which was regarded as the ultimate achievement in writer’s tools. Today, we have a computerized world. The video tape has revolutionized home entertainment. Now there’s an outlet for them every six blocks. A person from 15 years ago reading today’s Toronto Star would be astonished at the things that are for sale. And yet, our lives haven’t significantly changed. We still worry about and care about our children, our careers. It’s the peripherals to our lives that change. Fifteen years hence there will be similar changes. The Barking Dog might be one such: a sensing device that can correlate information about body functions, voice inflection, and so on and come up with an absolutely correct determination of whether a person is lying or telling the truth. And yet, despite such devices, people will still be worrying about the same things, having the same anxieties, trying to build the same kinds of personal relationships.

Sawyer: Science Fiction gives you a huge canvass: all of space, all of time, all forms of life. Yet you limit your stories almost exclusively to Earth, to human characters, and to the present, the recent past, or the near future. Why choose science fiction as your field and yet not take advantage of its scope?

Green: There hasn’t been a lot of good science fiction. Most of it is just outrageous fairy tales for adults. But I’ve always thought the genre could produce literature. This may sound presumptuous, but I like to think one of the reasons I set myself the task of using this field is so that I can help elevate it to the level of literature. To do that, you can’t divorce it from all the literature around it. So I move very slowly from standard literature, rather than taking a quantum leap and writing about the year 1,000,000. I’m not aiming my fiction at a hard-core science-fiction audience. I’m aiming at a wider audience and to get that wider audience you have to welcome them into the world of the fantastic a little bit more slowly. I don’t regard myself as a science-fiction writer; I regard myself as a writer who gives a fantastic twist to his stories.

Sawyer: You’re a full-time English teacher. Is writing going to replace that as your career?

Green: I don’t see writing as a career, nor as an avocation. I see it as a passion and as a life. I see it as something I have to do because I can do it. I have no idea where it will lead. It’s like being able to play the piano and not playing it. There’s a sense of waste. I have to write these books. It’s not easy to keep both teaching and writing going. I’ve put in many years teaching. I have commitments and a future in it, so I’m not prepared to toss that aside for the wild fantasy of being a writer. But I do try to make time for writing. I have taken four years’ salary spread over five so that I could have a year off to write. If, by wild happenstance, the writing takes off, I may be able to more evenly balance my time between writing and teaching. Teaching, like writing, is a great thing, but to ignore the writing would make me one-dimensional.

Sawyer: You’ve got a short story collection in print as well as your first novel. Which form do you prefer?

Green: The short story is a home I’m comfortable with. If you had read only my short stories, I think you’d probably call me a sensitive writer. A novel has to be more dramatic. You have to take at least three plots and weave them. It’s very much a plotting job. I think one form is a break from the other. You have to do novels, you have to stretch your wings, try to reach a large audience. But I will go back to short stories.

Sawyer: Barking Dogs started out as a short story in the May 1984 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Why did you decide to expand it into a novel?

Green: I wanted to write a novel. It’s the greatest commitment a writer can make, representing the greatest amount of pain, the greatest fear. But I needed a place to start. Somebody said to me, `I put down your short story and I was just getting into it. I wanted more.’ I realized I had more to say. Doing a novel version is a completely different experience, both esthetically and from a marketing point of view. Both the short story and the book have lives of their own and may find wholly different audiences.

Sawyer: Your short story collection was published in Canada. Your novels are published in the United States. What are the differences between the two marketplaces?

Green: If you want to sell in this genre, you have to go for the U.S. market — it’s ten times the size. To be published means to be read, to be appreciated, to be considered. You need numbers to do that. Something that’s just published in Canada never seems to make it. My short story collection is a case in point. Pottersfield Press produced a book that was lovely in conception, in achievement, in physical product. It’s getting excellent reviews [see Books in Canada, June-July 1987, p. 18]. But that book is history already. The publisher doesn’t have the money to promote it and there’s just not enough readership here to keep it alive. If The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind had been published as a mass-market paperback south of the border, I’d have 60,000 readers instead of 1,000.

Sawyer: Barking Dogs is set entirely in Toronto; the main character in Children of the Rainbow is Canadian; there are no American characters in either book. Despite your interest in the numbers of readers in the States, aren’t you rebelling against that country?

Green: Rebellion is a strong word, but it is a conscious decision. I may lose as a result of it. I’d like to think there’s a place for Canadians on the world stage. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find no negative reaction to the Canadian settings and characters from my U.S. publishers. Canada is an interesting place. The rest of the world thinks so, even if Canadians themselves don’t.

Toronto writer Robert J. Sawyer is The Canadian Encyclopedia‘s authority on Science Fiction.

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Join me in celebrating the launch of my 22nd novel, Red Planet Blues. The book tour begins with a gala launch party Monday, March 25, in Toronto, and continues with events in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, and Montreal, and Quebec City. All except the Montreal and Quebec City events are free; all the events are open to the public.

• Book-launch party
  for Red Planet Blues
  Dominion on Queen Pub
  500 Queen Street East
  Toronto, Ontario
  Held in conjunction with (but not at) Bakka Phoenix Books
  Monday, March 25, 2013, at 7:00 p.m.
  Dominion on Queen

• McNally Robinson Booksellers
  1120 Grant Avenue
  Winnipeg, Manitoba
  Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. in the Atrium
  McNally Robinson Winnipeg

• McNally Robinson Booksellers
  3130 8th Street East
  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
  Wednesday, March 27, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. in the Alcove
  McNally Robinson Saskatoon

• Sentry Box
  1835 10 Ave SW
  Calgary, Alberta
  Thursday, March 28, 2013, at 7:00 p.m.
  Sentry Box

• Audreys Books
  10702 Jasper Avenue
  Edmonton, Alberta
  Tuesday, April 2, 2013, at 7:00 p.m.
  Audreys

• Vancouver Central Library
  350 West Georgia, in the combined Alma VanDusen and Peter Kaye Rooms on the lower level of Library Square
  Vancouver, British Columbia
  Held in conjunction with (but not at) White Dwarf Books
  Wednesday, April 3, 2013, at 7:00 p.m.
  White Dwarf Books

• Ottawa, Ontario
  Clocktower Brew Pub at Westboro Village
  418 Richmond Road
  (Note: this is a different location of the Clocktower chain than we’ve used in previous years)
  Held in conjunction with (but not at) Perfect Books
  Monday, April 8, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.
  Clocktower Brew Pub Westboro

• Salon international du livre de Québec
  Québec City, Québec
  Wednesday, April 10, 2013, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.
  SILQ.ca

• imagiNation Festival
  Québec City, Québec
  Wednesday, April 10, 2013, at 8:00 p.m. in the Morrin Centre
  $10 ($5 for students)
  imagiNation Festival

• Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore Redondo Beach
  2810 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach, CA 90278; phone 310-542-6000
  Los Angeles, California
  Tuesday, April 16, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.
  Mysterious Galaxy

  Paragraphe Bookstore
  “Breakfast and Books” (this is a multi-author ticketed event and includes breakfast; details TBA)
  Venue TBA
  Montréal, Québec
  Sunday, April 21, 2013, at 10:00 a.m.
  Paragraphe Bookstore

• Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario
  Tuesday, April 30, at 7:00 p.m.
  Kitchener Public Library, Country Hills Community Branch
  1500 Block Line Road
  Kitchener, Ontario
  NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE!
  Held in conjunction with (but not at Words Worth Books)
  Tuesday, April 30, 2013, at 7:00 p.m.
  Words Worth Books

• North York Central Library
  at Mel Lastman Square / North York Centre subway station
  Part of “The Eh List” Reading Series
  Toronto, Ontario
  Wednesday, May 1, at 7:00 p.m.
  The Eh List
  

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Twenty years ago, the March 1993 issue of Books in Canada — at the time, an influential book-review magazine, although long defunct now — devoted a special issue to science fiction. It was a watershed moment in Canadian SF&F — some of the first serious consideration the field got by the mainstream press here. For that issue, two decades past, Andrew Weiner — journalist and then-frequent F&SF and Asimov’s contributor — profiled me. Here’s what he had to say: Books in Canada.

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My novel Triggers — first published by Ace after serialization in Analog, and currently eligible for nomination for the Hugo, Nebula, and Aurora Awards — had a very good showing on year’s best lists, and has just been nominated for one of Canada’s top literary awards.

The award is the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award for Best Canadian Adult Book of the Year. Note that that’s best book, not best novel — the shortlist of ten books makes no distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The Evergreen Award is a big deal, with the nominees chosen by librarians and Ontario residents voting in a year-long promotional campaign for their choice of winner.

As for year’s best lists, I was thrilled that Triggers came in at #3 on Barnes and Noble’s official year’s best science-fiction list, was named #1 science-fiction book of the year (by authors of any nationality) in Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal, and also made the general year’s best fiction/nonfiction list in The Maine Edge, and the SF&F year’s best lists in January Magazine and The Christian Century.

Triggers comes out in paperback at the end of March 2013, after this very successful run in hardcover.

Mr. Sawyer works through the permutations with one surprise after another, including the president’s deep, dark secret — now in somebody else’s possession — that would make him a one-termer for sure. The positive side is that the president can appreciate firsthand the cost of the orders he’s given. He now shares the memories of a returned Iraq veteran, called for him up by the trigger phrase “crying babies … and the smell of smashed concrete.”

Techno-future, telepathy: The third ingredient is a consideration of terrorism itself. Mr. Sawyer, a Canadian, remembers what Pierre Trudeau did back in 1970, when he took such drastic action following the murder of one of his ministers that terrorist cells have never surfaced in Canada again. What might an American president do? Get away with doing? Be justified in doing? And is there another way out? Triggers is constantly gripping on the surface and seriously provocative deep down. — Tom Shippey in The Wall Street Journal

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Apropos of nothing at all …

Scientists dream of having their work published in either Science (the leading American scientific journal) or Nature (the great British one).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a commission from Dr. Henry Gee, the Senior Editor of Nature, to write an original 800-word science-fiction story for that magazine (a commission that concluded, in delightful British fashion, by proffering “apologies for this intrusion”). Nature was publishing a series of short stories, beginning with a contribution from my favorite SF writer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, in celebration of the dawn of the new millennium.

I was thrilled to contribute the following. I deliberately touched on the theme of my twelfth novel Calculating God, since that book would be hitting the bookstore shelves just as this story saw print in the summer of 2000.

Darth Vader’s booming voice, still the network’s trademark 600 years after its founding: “This is CNN.”

And then the news anchor: “Our top story: Pope Mary III abdicated this morning. Giancarlo DiMarco, our correspondent in Vatican City, has the details. Giancarlo?”

“Thanks, Lisa. The unprecedented has indeed happened: after 312 years of service, Pope Mary III stepped down today. Traditionally, the conclave of Roman Catholic cardinals waits 18 days after the death of a pope before beginning deliberations to choose a successor, but Mary — who has returned to her birth name of Sharon Cheung — is alive and well, and so the members of the conclave have already been sealed inside the Vatican Palace, where they will remain until they’ve chosen Mary’s replacement. Although no new pope has been elected for over 300 years, the traditional voting method will be used. We are now watching the Sistine Chapel for the smoke that indicates the ballots have been burned following a round of voting. And — Lisa, Lisa, it’s happening right now! There’s smoke coming out, and — no, you can hear the disappointment of the crowd. It’s black smoke; that means no candidate has yet received the required majority of two-thirds plus one. But we’ll keep watching.”

“Thank you, Giancarlo. Let’s take a look at Pope Mary’s press conference, given earlier today.”

Tight shot on Mary, looking only a tenth of her four hundred years: “Since Vatican IV reaffirmed the principle of papal infallibility,” she said, “and since I now believe that I was indeed in error 216 years ago when I issued a bull instructing Catholics to reject the evidence of the two Benmergui experiments, I feel compelled to step down …”

“We’re joined now in studio by Joginder Singh, professor of physics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Singh, can you explain the Benmergui experiments for our viewers?”

“Certainly, Lisa,” said Singh. “The first proved that John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, proposed in the late 20th century, is in fact correct.”

“And that means …?”

“It means that the many-worlds interpretation is flat-out wrong: new parallel universes are not spawned each time a quantum event could go multiple ways. This is the one and only extant iteration of reality.”

“And Dr. Benmergui’s second experiment?”

“It proved the current cycle of creation was only the seventh such ever; just six other big-bang / big-crunch oscillations preceded our current universe. The combined effect of these two facts led directly to Pope Mary’s crisis of faith, specifically because they proved the existence of — one might as well use the word — God.”

“How? I’m sure our viewers are scratching their heads …”

“Well, you see, the observation, dating back to the 20th century, that the fundamental parameters of the universe seem fine-tuned to an almost infinite degree specifically to give rise to life, could previously be dismissed as a statistical artifact caused by the existence of many contemporaneous parallel universes or a multitude of previous ones. In all of that, every possible combination would crop up by chance, and so it wouldn’t be remarkable that there was a universe like this one — one in which the force of gravity is just strong enough to allow stars and planets to coalesce but not just a little bit stronger, causing the universe to collapse long before life could have developed. Likewise the value of the strong nuclear force, which holds atoms together, seems finely tuned, as do the thermal properties of water, and on and on.”

“So our universe is a very special place?”

“Exactly. And since, as Kathryn Benmergui proved, this is the only current universe, and one of just a handful that have ever existed, then the life-generating properties of the very specific fundamental constants that define reality are virtually impossible to explain except as the results of deliberate design.”

“But then why would Pope Mary resign? Surely if science has proven the existence of a creator …?”

Singh smiled. “Ah, but that creator is clearly not the God of the Bible or the Torah or the Qur’an. Rather, the creator is a physicist, and we are one of his or her experiments. Science hasn’t reconciled itself with religion; it has superseded it, and —”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Dr. Singh, but our reporter in Vatican City has some breaking news. Giancarlo, over to you …”

“Lisa, Lisa — the incredible is happening. At first I thought they were just tourists coming out of the Sistine Chapel, but they’re not — I recognize Fontecchio and Leopardi and several of the others. But none of them are wearing robes; they’re in street clothes. I haven’t taken my eyes off the chapel: there’s been no plume of white smoke, meaning they haven’t elected a new leader of the church. But the cardinals are coming out. They’re coming outside, heading into St. Peter’s Square. The crowd is stunned, Lisa — it can only mean one thing …”

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