Noah Chinn, reads Darwin on the ferry to Sechelt, BC
People from all over the world are evolving with Darwin’s Paradox…. Artists, construction workers, teachers, students, healers, entrepreneurs, councillors, and shop-keepers … all journeying together toward the singularity. Look who’s here today:
Noah Chinn is a writer, cartoonist and traveller, having lived and worked in Japan and England, and biked through a dozen countries worldwide. Noah currently lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife Gillian. His paranormal romantic comedy “Bleeding Heart Yard” and unique take on an apocalyptic novel Trooper #4 are both currently in print from Mundania Press, and his first murder mystery (without the murder!) “Getting Rid of Gary” will be released before Spring of 2013. In addition, he has collections of short stories available for e-readers on Amazon.
If you are a Darwin reader and wish to share your favorite place to read Darwin, email me your shot of you reading the book and I’ll feature you. Include a little about you and what you’d like to promote (yourself, a group, an event or place, world peace…) and a link. Email me at: nina.sfgirl@gmail.com (message line: Look who’s reading Darwin).
Noah Chinn reads Darwin's Paradox, Sechelt, British Columbia
Carina S. Burns, author of The Syrian Jewelry Box says, “…I’m reading Darwin’s Paradox and I’m hooked onto Nina’s work. I have never before met a “goddess of metaphors”, but, lo and behold, now I have. You can’t help yourself, but, to be “drawn into” this ingenious author’s world. I so look forward to cuddling up in my bed with my best friend, Darwin’s Paradox tonight:-) You can bet that I will be reading all of Nina Munteanu’s books.”
Some time ago, PhD student at the University of Bucharest in Romania and member of the Central European Association for Canadian Studies, Marilena Dracea-Chelsoi, contacted me with an interest in Romanian diaspora artists in Canada. We struck up a friendship through our collaboration and I met Marilena later at the Gaudeamus Book Fair in Bucharest where I celebrated the launch of my book there in late 2011. But I’m getting ahead of myself—as usual.
Here’s the spring 2011 interview with Marilena:
MDC: When I first came across your name on the Internet, I realized immediately that you have a certain Romanian descent. Could you speak a little bit about your roots?
NM: My father is Romanian; he grew up in Kovin and Beograd, Serbia. My mother is German, from Malente. After marrying in Paris, they immigrated to Québec, Canada. I was born in a small town in the Eastern Townships, the youngest of three siblings and with a propensity to read like my mother and tell stories like my father. My father was a poet, a historian and worldwide traveler, who never lost his passion for literature and writing.
MDC: You collaborated with Romanian magazines (Imagikon, for example). How did you become acquainted with them?
NM: They found me! Editor in Chief, Mircea Pricajan, contacted me and invited me to be part of their excellent magazine. And next thing I knew, I was helping them with their English and writing a weekly movie/book review. Imagikonwas, at the time, Romania’s only all-English speculative magazine and I was proud to be part of that very cool endeavor.
MDC: Why did you choose the SF genre as the main way of expressing yourself? I read your book The Fiction Writer. Get Published, Write Now! It is a short course for those who want to write. However, I noticed that it was included in The Alien’s Guidebook Series, which is again sort of connected to the SF realm. Yet the book has many chapters that can very usefully be applied to other genres, as well, and the guide can be used by teachers during class writing lessons. So, why do you focus mainly on SF?
NM: I was always fascinated with science and eventually got my degree in ecology and limnology. In high school, my professor of English inspired me to investigate our humanity in literature through symbols, metaphor and imagery. Science fiction is an excellent genre for this exploration through the introduction of “the other/the unknown”. My ecological training also helped me as a world-builder. So, writing science fiction came naturally to me.
MDC: Was the guide inspired by your own career as a SF writer?
NM: Definitely. I brought much of my personal experience as a professional author to this guide in addition to using over a dozen other expert writers and editors, from science fiction and other genres of writing. I even used my own rejection letters in the guide!
MDC: I noticed that in Darwin’s Paradox you chose a Canadian setting – more specifically the Toronto of the future. This surprised me because I expected, in the future, to see less clear borders between towns, between countries…What’s your own opinion about globalization and the future of humankind?
NM: The huge city of Icaria-5, while set in former Toronto, Canada, lies in the jurisdiction of North-Am (which encompasses all of North America). In this world, cities—because they are so huge with nothing but wilderness between them—behave and operate somewhat like autonomous fiefdoms, with their mayors acting as “barons” who, in turn—if chosen—may sit on a government panel, the Circle. The governing body of the entire continent is actually not known by the public and I don’t reveal much of it in Darwin’s Paradox. Some of this is revealed in the prequel Angel of Chaos. I modeled the political structure loosely on the technocratic model, where scientists and technologists run the government. Regarding globalization, I think there are many practical challenges to a global government; based on our relationship with the environment and climate and reflected in our culture. People operate at the individual, family and community level and less so globally; this is why governments logically operate at these levels, too. Of course, if you remove these factors—many of which were removed through enclosed cities like the Icarias—then it is more possible to create a global identity removed from the distinctive characteristics of a locale.
MDC: At the end of the novel Darwin’s Paradox, Julie and Daniel have to leave Icaria and return to the heath in order to protect their unborn child. Was this a message to the people of today that no matter how much society technologically evolves, pure nature unspoiled by any human action is the best place for safety and happiness? The name Icaria clearly comes from Icarus whose attempt to fly succeeded only for a while and then failed because the wax on his wings melted. So, I thought that somehow any attempt to change the natural state of human beings doesn’t lead to a perfect…improvement, let’s say. Am I right?
NM: Yes, you are, and then some! I was definitely evoking the Greek myth of Icarus in naming the enclosed cities of North-Am and using this myth as a metaphor for our relationship with and use of technology. Icaria is also the name French philosopher and utopian sociologist Etienne Cabet gave to a fictional communist utopian community in 1843—a communal society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. So, Icaria is both of these and the book reflects the paradox and irony of an imperfect humanity “realizing” a utopian model.
MDC: What can you tell us about Angel of Chaos, the prequel to Darwin’s Paradox, a book that came out at the end of 2010? (Just a few hints about the actions and the main characters)
NM: Well, of course Julie Crane and in-her-head AI, SAM, figure prominently in the prequel, which plays out as a fast-paced medical mystery-thriller in the enclosed city of Icaria-5. Readers learn about humanity’s relationship with technology and machine through Julie’s interaction with the AI inside her mind. We also find out more about Julie’s past as an orphan in the slums of Icaria, how she met Daniel, the future father of her daughter Angel, and other characters like the mysterious Gaia and Frank, Julie’s lascivious boyfriend. Julie’s relentless search for a cure to Darwin’s Disease leads her to a horrifying discovery that incriminates her in a heinous conspiracy to recast humankind. And, of course, we find out why Julie must flee Icaria at the end of the book.
MDC: You are involved in writing projects, in teaching courses in science and environmental education, you travel a lot and you have a blog THE ALIEN NEXT DOOR on which you discuss with your readers. What other projects do you have in mind for the near future?
NM: I am working with editors on revising two books for publication next year. One is a historical fantasy that spans from medieval times in Poland to near future Paris. I also have a space adventure trilogy coming out about a bad-attitude galactic cop trying to solve the mystery of a slaughter of a religious sect. A book of my short stories is also due next year. Of course, I continue to travel; I hope to get to Romania. A publisher in Romania is considering my fiction writing guidebook and I’m excited about touring the country with it. I am also actively teaching my online courses, doing workshops, and personal manuscript consultations and personal coaching.
The Spring 2011 interview was recently published on Academia.edu. You can go to this link to read the full interview, which appeared in Issue 6 on January 2012.
******
P.S. This interview was conducted in Spring 2011, so I’d like to give you a publication update on it—mainly, because so much has happened since then!
The historical fantasy that starts in medieval Poland The Last Summoner was released in July 2012 and has been an amazon.ca bestseller in historical fantasy for several months. The space trilogy I was referring to is The Splintered Universe Trilogy. The first book, Outer Diverse, was released in October 2011. Book two, Inner Diverse, will be released December 2012 and the final book in the trilogy, Metaverse, is scheduled for sometime in 2013. Natural Selection, my collection of short stories, is scheduled for release in spring of 2013.
In addition, I am happy to report that my writing guidebook The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now! was accepted by Editura Paralela 45, who translated it into Romanian and published it in June 2011. I attended its launch at the international Gaudeamus Book Fair in Bucharest and finally met with Marilena! Editura Paralela 45 has picked up another of my guidebooks and is currently translating it for publication in early 2013. This guidebook is for diarists and journal keepers; it’s called The Journal Writer: Finding Your Voice. The English version will be released by Starfire in Spring 2013.
In Darwin’s Paradox Nina Munteanu displays her awareness of scientific discourse: focussing on areas like chaos theory, biological theories of co-evolution, symbiosis and virology, and ecological theories. Her protagonist, Julie, is patient zero in a spreading epidemic that has infected most of modern civilisation…
Munteanu’s plot is full of family secrets, the hidden past, and the resurfacing of guilt (particularly Julie’s guilt about being patient zero in the spreading viral apocalypse)…
Media plays an important role in Munteanu’s vision of the future, illustrating the continuance of the media hegemony for defining the nature of “truth” as media messages replace facts and political leaders manipulate the media system to enforce their own controls over society and further embed their interests into the developing social system… In Munteanu’s vision of the future, it is impossible to trust anyone completely and layers within layers of plot are illustrated…
Munteanu raises questions and challenges the development of society’s current systems, asking her readers to think critically about messages they are given and to question everything. She illustrates that the truth is socially constructed and that ideas of the truth serve social purposes and can be used to support hidden agendas.
A devastating disease. A world on the brink of violent change. And one woman who can save it or destroy it all. Julie Crane must confront the will of the ambitious virus lurking inside her to fulfill her final destiny as Darwin’s Paradox, the key to the evolution of an entire civilization. Darwin s Paradox is a novel about a woman s fierce love and her courageous journey toward forgiveness, trust, and letting go to the tide of her heart.
You can purchase Darwin’s Paradox on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters and other quality book stories near you. You can also purchase the book from the publisher’s website Dragon Moon Press here.
“Don’t get your shorts into a knot,” the man growled in a basso voice. “I’m not here to torture you or anything. I think you did a fine job on yourself already, jumping on my gun.”–excerpt from Darwin’s Paradox by Nina Munteanu
The Pixl in charge...
I was recently reminded of this rather revealing interview of me conducted in 2007 (when Darwin’s Paradox was released) by my esteemed colleague, fantasy writer Jennifer Rahn. Read and enjoy:
I stayed late at the lab the other day, missed my supper and had a long drive home in the dark. As I stepped out of the Medical Research Building and blearily stumbled to my car, I had a notion that the night was eerily silent, yet I was too tired to discern its portent. At the time, it didn’t trouble me that almost every street lamp was out and the traffic signals were constantly flashing yellow in slow, long intervals.
I was about halfway home, out of the city and into the rural areas, when the lights on my dashboard blinked once, then the engine cut out, and my car slowly drifted to a halt, the headlights still reaching feebly for a few metres ahead. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought a saw a beam of light flash down from the sky. Damn, I thought, it was only one more week until my next service appointment, and this had to happen now. I was reaching for the glove compartment to see if I had some sort of contact information for the AMA, when the radio snapped on of its own accord. At first it emitted nothing more than a static hiss, then a jumble of sound, like a modem connecting, danced through the speakers. As abruptly as it started, it stopped.Something dark and fast bounced across the hood of my car and disappeared into an empty field at the left side of the road.
My heart pounding, I ripped open the glove compartment, grabbed a flashlight and my insurance policy. Yep, I was covered for collision with aquatic vehicles, falling aircraft or parts thereof, meteoric impact, and damages to the vehicle and/or my person resulting from alien abductions provided I was within 50 metres of the vehicle for which I was the primary driver when the incident first initiated. 51 metres constituted fraud. I got out of the car and entered the field.
Once I crossed the ditch, I was in a corn field, with the leafy plants reaching up past my shoulders. I scythed through the darkness in front of me with the flashlight, looking for something with a too-large head, too-white skin, too-skinny frame, and large, black bug-eyes. I was getting a little twitchy, jerking my beam suddenly to the left or right with each imagined sound, which I could barely hear over my own panicked breathing.
Jennifer meets a small celebrity...
Finally I did hear something, a high-pitched squeaking sound. Straining my ears to catch the direction of the noise, I finally realized it was coming from my feet. I turned the beam downwards. There, was a two-inch-high, green bug-thing waving a ray gun at me. I hunkered down for a closer look, and felt an evil grin stretch across my face as I recognized the wee mite. It was The Alien Sometimes Known as Nina Munteanu.I pulled an empty CD spindle from my satchel, scooped her up in it, and twisted on the base. She was my prisoner.
Before you judge me too harshly, dear reader, you should know that my abduction of the little, oh, let’s just call her Nina, was not my first encounter with this entity.Shortly before this, she had assumed a human guise, lured me aboard her mothership with false promises of anime on large-screen, and instead had me brutally interrogated. It was payback time.
I ran back to my car, chuckling with malicious intent as I mercilessly tossed the CD spindle into the back seat and raced home. Once there, I twisted the key in the lock and dropped it down the drain before finally twisting open the spindle and letting Nina tumble into my kitchen sink. The clear plastic was dotted with burn marks where she had tried to blast her way through.
She gasped a few times, having nearly run out of air inside the plastic prison, then tried futilely to scale the stainless steel walls, and finally tried to ray-gun me to death.It was of no use. She had completely wasted the charge trying to escape the spindle.
“Jen, we don’t have time for this!” she squeaked.
“Oh?” I countered. ”What’s so important? Or are you just trying to distract me from turning on the taps?” I grinned maliciously.
Nina suddenly straightened up as tall as she could make herself (she is pretty short, even in her human form). “Without a doubt I’d say ignorance and its cousin, apathy.” To my puzzled look, she added, “I think that most environmental problems currently faced by this planet are largely due to our own lack of knowledge: of how we relate to our environment, what we are doing to it (and to ourselves) and how we are really affecting it. Without knowledge of consequence, we’re incapable of feeling the compassion needed to drive us to altruistic acts. If I were to point to a single environmental issue that reflects this the best I’d have to say ‘Global Warming’. And the price of wine.”
“Wine?” I was momentarily derailed. “Don’t you mean oil?”
“What’s oil?” asked Nina.
“Oh, right. You drive on plutonium.”
“I do not!” said Nina hotly. ”I collect photons from the sun and run them through chloroplasts in the skin of my spaceship to produce biodiesel!”
“Even if that’s true, no one will believe you,” I said. ”Not after you participated in that ridiculous event … tsk … oh, what was it again?”
“I think it’s this interview.”
Now she had me really worked up. I began digging through one of my kitchen drawers, looking for a spatula. “Where was it that you were born? Maybe you should return there!”
Nina anad special friend
“Well, thanks to my older brother, I grew up for a long time thinking I was born in the city zoo or the garden field behind our house (his story kept changing; which should have alerted me to his sophistry) and my father—who is in the habit of rescuing strays—found me and took me home, like a puppy. I’ve since discovered irrevocable evidence that I’m an alien. I might return [to my homeworld] someday but I’m having too much fun right here…although,” she glanced with a sour frown at the sink walls, “not right this very minute…”
I had located my spatula and was now putting a frying pan on my stove. I turned on the burner and put some oil into the pan. Nina was waving a small book at me.I picked up a magnifying glass and peered through it into the sink. On the cover, I saw the title: Darwin’s Paradox.
“Do you know what this is about?” she asked me. ”Hope, cooperation and faith in oneself and in others. The main character begins as a somewhat controlling mother with a natural distrust of traditional entities of suspicion. By the end of the book, she is forced to think outside the box, trust herself—and her ‘worst enemy’—and give in to faith. Essentially, she must enact a paradox: surrender to be victorious. I think that’s a hard but valuable lesson we can all learn.”
“Are you trying to be David Suzuki, or something?”
“I think he is an amazing scientist and story teller. I think he is one of the most courageous scientists I’ve met and I respect his controversial decisions to help humanity. Essentially, Suzuki decided that it was worth being branded an environmentalist and radical by the scientific community in order to get an important message out. He survived the wrath and ridicule (much like Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and many other scientists who walked out on a limb and persisted in their staunch beliefs) and has earned back that respect.”
“Yah,” I said, trying to regain the upper hand, “But what does your Mum think of your writing?”
“While several of my short stories have been translated into Polish, Greek, Hebrew, and Romanian, nothing has gotten off the planet yet…that might be a good thing.” She grinned like an urchin with something to hide.
That passed right over my head. She wasn’t giving away any secrets. I decided I had waited long enough. It was time to start frying. I raised the spatula.
Jennifer and Nina having fun with DM staff at a convention
“You can’t do this, Jen!” shouted Nina. ”How will you explain it to Gwen Gades? She’s the publisher of my book!”
“What? How? Why did you end up with Dragon Moon Press? That’s MY publisher!”
“Isn’t it obvious? For the cool Dragon Logo, of course! I am, however, extremely pleased that Dragon Moon Press is publishing my book because they are a very reputable Canadian publisher and Darwin’s Paradox is set in Canada. It’s actually a very Canadian story.”
Nina snapped open the little book she was holding and began to flip through the pages.
“Listen, you might like this bit:
“Her father’s hands were pale and smooth like her mother’s, with slender fingers. They were the hands of a scientist who wrote intelligent words. Secure in his firm grip, she was convinced that her father and his words would protect her against anything…”
Oh, wait, here’s another fav:
“Julie listened to the carillon of the birds and let her gaze stray to where the heath melted into sky. Five hundred kilometers beyond that shimmering horizon lay what used to be home.”
Then there’s this one:
“Don’t get your shorts into a knot,” the man growled in a basso voice. “I’m not here to torture you or anything. I think you did a fine job on yourself already, jumping on my gun.”
And this one:
“A universe in which a daughter and a mother, miles apart, could talk to one another through a virus. A world that fed into an eternal cycle of altering form…nano-soup…the cell of a beating heart…the suspended dust upon which bloomed the blushing sky. In her father’s universe you took it as far as you could, then let nature’s wisdom take care of the rest: stable chaos.”
Oh, and how about this one—”
I grew impatient. “Maybe you should be trying to find out what the heroine ofDarwin’s Paradox would do if she were trapped in a sink by an evil scientist,” I growled.
“She would contact SAM, her AI friend (through veemeld), and have him shut your place down then have the AI-assisted vacuum cleaner tie you up and rescue her. I’m assuming you have an AI-assisted vacuum cleaner…you look like the type.”
“Bwa ha ha ha ha! No such luck Nina, Wal-Mart doesn’t sell AI—” I gasped, suddenly remembering that I had purchased my vacuum cleaner at London Drugs.
“Help!” Nina shouted. ”I’m trapped in a sink by an evil scientist, I’m out of ammo and I need to be rescued!”
Nina in Vancouver
My faithless, dastardly vacuum cleaner roared from the broom closet, zipped up into the sink and for a moment, a allowed myself a brief glimmer of hope that it would entrap Nina in the HEPA filter, but no! I watched helplessly as the dust catcher transformed into a cockpit, the beater bar folded back into a turbo nacelle, and wings burst out from the sides. Nina jumped in, fired up the tau-lepton rockets and blasted the roof off my condo. She engaged the particle accelerator engine and soared up into the night sky.
I stood there, shaking my fist in futility until I realized she had turned the vacuum cleaner around and was preparing for a dive-bombing run. Well, I wasn’t about to take that sitting down. I ran to my IKEA sofa set and pressed the secret button on the side of the tastefully machined wood frame (the button that the Swedes don’t want us to know about) and had a minor panic attack as I imagined the sofa would not transform into a combat chassis quickly enough. However, as practical and utilitarian as ever, my sofa came through and I leapt into its reorganized frame, appreciating the pillowy softness of the transformed cushions as I did so. The retro rockets fired, and I was propelled into the sky just in time to avoid being blasted to smithereens by a massive dust bunny that Nina had fired at me. I reoriented the gun turrets that had evolved out of the armrests and let fly a series of small metal assembly tools (and you thought they had no use after you put the sofa together! Tch!)
Unfortunately, small metal assembly tools are not very aerodynamic, and only work as projectile weapons in the vacuum of outer space. I completely missed my target.Nina had popped out the circular saw attachment on the vacuum and was coming at me with horrendous speed. I dodged.
I was fast, but not fast enough. The power cord whipped out of its retractable holder and wrapped around one of the protruding sofa legs, holding firm. Nina swung around me like a Rebel Snowspeeder around the legs of an Imperial Walker and buzzed me with the saw, nearly taking my head off. I punched the retro rockets into reverse and snapped her off. Now it was time to retaliate. I shot several rounds of white glue-covered wooden pegs into Nina’s engine nacelle at the same time as she aspirated all of my rocket fuel into the vacuum’s HEPA filter.
Our eyes met.
We both underwent motility failure simultaneously, and fell spiraling back to Earth. I wondered if the contents insurance I had on my condo would cover this. Nina shouted curses at me for cheaping out and not buying the deluxe model vacuum cleaner that came with a parachute attachment. Alas.
Nina drinks pastis in Paris
We crashed through the roof of a nearby Baskin-Robbins.
When I came to, Nina was already digging her way through a three-scoop serving of Cherries Jubilee, a deep cut over her right brow and a look of utter contentment on her face. The smashed vacuum cleaner rested in pieces around her stool, wisps of smoke rising from the burnt plastic shards. My sofa had not fared much better, and I saw that it had been foolish of me to ever have worried about the mustard stain on one of the cushions.
I pulled myself up to the counter and ordered a triple scoop of Pistachio Almond. As I let the cool flavours melt over my tongue, I turned to Nina and asked, “Same time next week?”
She was holding the handle of her spoon in one fist, with the top of it pulled back by the fingers of her other hand, catapult style. A hefty payload of ice cream rested in the bowl of the spoon.
MDC: Why did you choose the SF genre as the main way of expressing yourself? I read your book The Fiction Writer. Get Published, Write Now! It is a short course for those who want to write. However, I noticed that it was included in The Alien’s Guidebook Series, which is again sort of connected to the SF realm. Yet the book has many chapters that can very usefully be applied to other genres, as well, and the guide can be used by teachers during class writing lessons. So, why do you focus mainly on SF? 
The historical fantasy that starts in medieval Poland The Last Summoner was released in July 2012 and has been an amazon.ca bestseller in historical fantasy for several months. The space trilogy I was referring to is The Splintered Universe Trilogy. The first book, Outer Diverse, was released in October 2011. Book two, Inner Diverse, will be released December 2012 and the final book in the trilogy, Metaverse, is scheduled for sometime in 2013. Natural Selection, my collection of short stories, is scheduled for release in spring of 2013.
