Robert Dawson, the author of “Folklore of Lunenburg County”, is my guest interviewee today. I loved Robert’s story and enjoyed a little insight into what inspired it, as well as what Robert thought of the anthology as a whole. I suspect you will too 🙂

Who or what was the inspiration for your story in Metastasis?

To be honest, the starting point was the setting and the bootlegging, not the cancer. That came into the story because I was wondering “what could an alien artifact do on the scale of an individual human life?” and that was the answer that came to me.

When it comes to cancer, what gives you hope?

We do seem to know a lot more about it than we used to, individually and collectively. And knowledge is power.

Not counting your own, which story or poem in Metastasis is your favourite?

That’s not a fair question! They’re all so different. How to compare Jay Lake’s dispatch from the trenches with the giggly gallows humor of David McLain’s spoof article? The narrative with perfectly-embedded metaphors of `Hunter’ with the sparse sting-in-the-tail abstraction of `A Murder of Crows’?  The reassuring hard SF of `Tide Pools’ and `Quantum Therapy’ with a classic ghost story like `The Lady in the Doorway’?  And where to put the truly weird ones like `Painter X’ and `Cancer Maximized’?

Sorry. In the word supposed to answer a Zen koan, “Mu.”

Robert Dawson teaches mathematics at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His SF stories have appeared in AE, Imaginaire, the anthology Dandelions of Mars, and elsewhere; and he has had poems published in magazines such as Rampike, Parody, and Dalhousie Review. His other interests include cycling, fencing, hiking, and music. He is married to Bridget Thomas, a meteorologist; they have one son in Grade 12 and one in university.

Website:  http://cs.smu.ca/~dawson/Writing/

 

Metastasis is available at:

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