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Alison Sinclair

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Alison Sinclair

Alison Sinclair Alison Sinclair lives in Victoria, Canada.

The question "Where do you come from?" tends to elicit an itinerary: I was born in Colchester, England, raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Victoria, B.C. I graduated from the University of Victoria with a B.Sc. Honors 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 Center 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 and am now working as the Editorial Fellow at the Canadian Medical Association Journal in Ottawa, until June 2001.

     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. My fourth solo novel, OPAL, dealing with the trials and tribulations of a shamanistic practitioner on a poorly terraformed planet, has started to make the rounds of publishers and I am easing into my fifth, working title WAIORA.

     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 color 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 WAIORA. 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 variety of large choruses, most recently the Leeds Philharmonic Chorus and the Calgary Festival Chorus. I read voraciously and omnivorously, swim, and dabble in website building.

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Books by Alison Sinclair:

1. Legacies / Alison Sinclair.
       -London : Orion, 1995.
       -New York : HarperPrism, 1997.
2. Blueheart / Alison Sinclair.
       -London : Orion, 1996.
       -New York : HarperPrism, 1998.
3. Cavalcade / Alison Sinclair.
       -London : Orion, 1998.
   
4. Throne Price / Lynda Williams and Alison Sinclair.
       -Calgary : Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2002.

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