|
VANCOUVER SUN PROFILE, CONTINUED
Her first novel, The Lucifer Deck, set in the Shadowrun universe, came out in 1997.
The backdrop was darkly fantastical, the cover art cheesy, and she was limited by gaming rules, but Smedman nevertheless drew on fears and uncertainties from her own adolescence to create deeply human characters. Her protagonist was a girl who suddenly found herself homeless on the streets after her middle-class family rejected her when she began morphing into a magical creature.
She says that although her family is supportive and loving, "I have known people who came out as gay in their teens and were utterly rejected by their families. Because I'm also gay, it's easy for me to imagine what they must have felt."
Although eight more books followed, one of which made the New York Times bestseller list this year, Smedman's latest novel is her first entirely independent work -- a Canadian-published alternate-history romp called The Apparition Trail. (Alternate history, a fast-growing subgenre of science fiction, speculates about crucial points in history -- for example, what if Hitler had won the Second World War, or in this case, what if something had levelled the power imbalance between native tribes and European settlers on the Canadian Prairies in the 1880s?)
In Smedman's alternate 1884, magic has suddenly become real, and it manifests in culturally appropriate ways. The Europeans have developed perpetual- motion technology, while tribes like the Cree and Blackfoot can cast powerful spells. Faced with these new challenges, the North-West Mounted Police forms Q Division, an elite psychic task force, and Corporal Marmaduke Grayburn sets out by horseback, air bicycle and magical teleportation to investigate the disappearance of settlers, railroad workers and Mounties across the Canadian West.
"I love The Apparition Trail because it's the first novel I've had published in which I got to do anything I wanted," she says. "And I love the time period -- wide-open prairie to explore, wonderful native mythologies, Victorian-era gadgetry, and so on."
She has many more books in progress, including another gaming tie-in, Viper's Kiss (scheduled for release in 2005), a murder mystery set in Vancouver and a young-adult novel.
"I come up with a new idea for a novel, on average, about once a week," she says. "I could never write them all.
"When people ask, 'Where do you get your ideas?,' I wonder how they can even ask the question. Ideas fill my head to bursting."
With our interview almost over, she is already starting to fidget a little. After all, she has a lot of things to do.
Donna McMahon is the author of Dance of Knives.
|
|
