The doctor who wanted to
write science fiction

Even a PhD in biochemistry and a medical degree from
U of C couldn't quell the flame

By Mary-Ev Anderson

"I'm still fascinated by medicine," says Dr Alison Sinclair of Victoria, BC, traces of the Scottish burr from her childhood in Edinburgh creeping in. "But it was obviously going to be a struggle to keep up my interest in writing as a practising physician."

The writing won out. A year after qualifying as a doctor, Dr Sinclair traded in her white coat for a word processor and never looked back. Five years later she's the author of four published science fiction novels, one of which has been nominated for England's prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award. Medicine remains an important part of her life and her fiction. "There is still plenty to speculate about in medicine," says the pixieish Dr Sinclair, "and there is the humanistic side of things. People will be people, and there will always be ethical debates."

A VERY BRITISH EDUCATION
Dr Sinclair was born in Colchester, England where her father was based with the British Army. The family later moved back to their native Scotland. "I had a rich, very 19th-century Arts education between the ages of 12 and nearly 16 in Edinburgh," she says. Though she wrote her first book at age eight -- an homage to Daniel Defoe she called Shipwrecked on an Island -- she didn't "get" literature until she was a teen and was forced to read Julius Caesar in school. Up till then Shakespeare was as irrelevant to her as pop idols Marc Bolan and Sweet, whose posters her classmates were plastering all over their walls. She moved to Canada in her late teens and while on vacation in Edmonton she came across a John Wyndham (author of Day of the Triffids) book and went on to devour everything he wrote. From then on sci-fi was in her blood.

The road to medicine was hardly direct. She did a BSc in chemistry and physics at the University of Victoria and went on to complete a PhD in biochemistry at McMaster University in 1986. She celebrated that milestone by taking a six-week writing workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she quickly discovered that her passion for writing was as strong as ever. She immediately set about working on her first novel. Ever the realist, though, she knew that unless you're a William Gibson (Neuromancer) or an Isaac Asimov, science fiction just doesn't pay the bills. So she got postdoc research jobs in molecular biology and neuroscience in Boston and Leeds. When research money dried up in the early 90s, it was time for another change. "I'd thought of medicine on and off, and it was now or never," she says.

Dr Sinclair bit the bullet and entered med school at the University of Calgary in 1995. That same year her first novel, Legacies, was published. Her loyalty to medicine was immediately tested: her publisher wanted to send her to a world science fiction convention in Glasgow. Instead, she went to med school orientation and then finished Blueheart, her second novel, later that year. Not surprisingly, the hectic schedule was a drain, so next time the urge came to birth a book she decided to take a year off. She completed her third and most successful book, Cavalcade (1998) between second and third year. Her investment was rewarded with the Arthur C Clarke nomination.

After graduating in 1999, Dr Sinclair stayed on in Calgary to do a residency in anatomic pathology but the strong yen to write just wouldn't leave her alone. A year later, she found the perfect compromise: she was offered a position as editorial fellow with the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) in Ottawa. "At the CMAJ, I so enjoyed writing and editing that I started looking into how to combine medicine with writing," she says. The solution has stuck -- her day job is writing up clinical study reports for a contract research group in Victoria.

SCIENCE IN THE MIX
Though she ended up deciding that a life of patients and rounds wasn't for her, Dr Sinclair's medical and biochemistry training was hardly in vain. She regularly calls on her studies to add touches of realism to otherwise fantastical plots. In Blueheart, for instance, humans are adapted for living in the ocean by having foreign DNA implanted into their cell nuclei in the womb or in infancy. The process is called transfection, the basis of gene therapy, something she worked on in her research days.

"I enjoy world-building and all the research that goes into it," she says. "I play with the environment, physiology and plot, and adjust one to the other as I go along." Being a woman of science, though, "I do try to obey the laws of physics and biology," she adds.

She also obeys the laws of literature as perfected by some of the world's finer writers. An early internet blogger, she wrote to long-time friend and collaborator Lynda Williams in November 2001: "Something dawned upon me about my writing a few days ago. I have my sense of drama from a love of drama. And I don't mean film, I mean drama: Shakespeare, Shaw, Bolt, Osborne, Synge, Miller, Williams ... those guys. And from opera. I find argument inherently dramatic. Storytelling is suspenseful. I like speeches and arias.... If I didn't love the world building, the thought experiments and the opportunity to write about politics, morality and creative passion on a large scale, I'd give up SF...."

Throne Price (2003), her fourth novel, co-authored with Ms Williams, is the least medical of her books because its bio-engineered characters have a profound cultural distrust of medicine -- "Largely because their creators have tried various nasty things on them over the centuries," says Dr Sinclair. The forthcoming Crisis Point: Nereis is a medical return to form in which a medical team tracks the origins of a plague throughout the universe. She and Ms Williams have worked on other net-based projects, including the Okal Rel Universe (www.okalrel.org), a science fiction site which acts as a portal into a world of female sci-fi writers and their writings. Dr Sinclair's own site, Alison Sinclair: Science, Medicine and Science Fiction (www.sff.net/people/asinclair/) offers a fascinating glimpse into the woman, her books, her reading and her world view.

ONWARD AND UPWARD
When she's not writing sci-fi or clinical articles, Dr Sinclair, likes to sing with a local choir. This is no trifling hobby: in the past she's sung with the Leeds Philharmonic Chorus and the Calgary Festival Chorus.

Other interests ebb and flow, but sci-fi remains her true vocation. "Oh, it's a habit," says Dr Sinclair, laughing. "Even though I sometimes think, 'It's not going to make me a living' -- and I don't get any respect!"