And now for final piece of That Woman, part 13.
Synopsis:
Drew and Jason wake up only to find themselves trussed up in test suits with minds of their own, suits that are carrying them toward the worst kind of trouble. A. J. has Marsha exactly where he wants her. Or so it seems. Find out who does what and to whom in the final episode of That Woman.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman part 12...
Synopsis:
Marsha Cooper comes home to confront her ghosts: at first Marta Kulyk runs the show, but when Marsha Cooper takes over, confrontation turns into something much worse. Drew and Jason finally read the McAskill documents. Before they can sort out what they mean, find themselves in mortal danger.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, Part 11...
Synopsis:
Synopsis: In That Woman Part 11, we learn how Marsha turned herself into
the leading journalist of her day, and what it did to her. Though she
always worried that Andy Sokol would pop back into her life and spoil
everything, he never did--until now. She's up for the fight. But as far
as Drew and Jason are concerned, she's going to mess up everything,
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, Part 10...
Synopsis:
In Part 10, Drew is introduced to Jason's very surprising family.
Grandad's sudden appearance in their guest bedroom should warn her of
danger on the horizon, but she's too tired to pay attention. Meanwhile,
we learn where, why, and how Marta Blume became Marsha Cooper, the best
journalist of her generation. But is she still under Dr. Sokol's
control?
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, Part 9...
Synopsis:
In That Woman Part 9,
Marta finds herself in the worst kind of trouble, brought to her by her
worst enemy, at the instigation of a man who is her worst nightmare.
With her Mom screaming Don't you! in her ear, she has to find the
courage to stand up for herself, and then to stand alone.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 8...
Synopsis:
In That Woman, Part 8, Marta suddenly hears from Andy, of all people. Partly to make Dr.
Blume have a hairy fit, partly to satisfy her own curiosity, and
possibly for other reasons she does not comprehend, she goes out with
him. At Fourth House, her life changes forever. Meanwhile, Drew is hot
on the trail of the those who sicced Baby to spy on her, and Jason is in
full pursuit of Drew. Together, they discover there are many more
strange beasts (plant, animal, mineral, all of the above?) where Baby
came from.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 7...
Synopsis:
In
Part 7 Marta has been placed under Dr. Sokol's care by the court. Dr.
Sokol has been turning Marta into his prize patient, but what is his
goal? What is he trying to make of her and for whom? Meanwhile, Drew
and Jason must find out exactly what kind of smart machine Baby is,
where it came from, and why.
The past will meet present as these stories collide on the Warman Road.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 5...
Synopsis:
In
That Woman part 5, Drew Pepper takes possession of everything Bruce
McAskill thinks he knows, which might be helpful, or might just sink her
for good. Marta meanwhile struggles with all the complications of her
origin versus present realities. Things come full circle, which for
Marta means the worst kind of trouble.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 4...
Synopsis:
Drew, by sheer luck, runs across a company that may be very important for her story, because it was once very important to Marta Kulyk-- or is that Blume?- and Marta's friend Dwight. Dwight tries to lay the whole thing out for her, but his issues overwhelm him. Can Drew work it out herself?
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 3...
Synopsis of Part 3:
A dance at the beginning of summer....the air is sweet, the music calls to Marta and her mother and off they go to the Violette Pavilion, where there is such joy to be found. But this is Saskatchewan, and on any Saturday night in a small town, there will also be blood.
Drew thinks she's on to a great story, but discovers that someone else is on it too, because they're on her trail, and letting her know it. And what should she do about her boss, who never stops calling, never stops threatening to cut her off if she doesn't tell him what she knows?
When Grandad sticks his nose in, Drew knows she's in deep trouble.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
And now for That Woman, part 2...
Synopsis of Part 2:
Drew Pepper, hot on the trail of the Marsha Cooper story, meets a strange artist who seems to have the answers she is searching for. Meanwhile, Marta Kulyk makes her first trip to the big city. There, she triumphs, only to learn what small towns are really made of-- envy and vice and things not so nice.
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
Apologies to those who have returned to this space over the course of the summer expecting to see a new post each week. I have been working very hard on a tight deadline to finish a new non fiction book. I couldn't write good posts while also writing that larger story (fascinating characters, a business mystery unraveled, stay tuned!). Its title and publication date will be announced here soon.
In the meantime, let me share with you a novel called That Woman. I have been working on it for a long time. It's the sequel to my first novel, Drew Pepper. (Click here to read Drew Pepper for free). Drew Pepper had a science fiction theme, but as it turns out, what was fiction when I wrote it is about to become fact. Drew Pepper was confounded by chimeric mice with human-like intelligence, the result of experiments conducted by her basement tenant. Such experiments were not allowed in the US (they were doable in Canada, but probably not done). However, the NIH has decided to reconsider. So one day soon we may all be confounded by chimeric mice who behave in curiously familiar ways.
That Woman is about Drew's boss, Marsha Cooper, and how she became one of the most accomplished power brokers in the country. It's a Canadian story, steeped in Canadian history, Canadian ideas, Canadian politics, Canadian values, but not the kind you may be used to reading about. Marsha Cooper's Canada is not as sunny as Justin Trudeau's: it's much closer to Brazil with snow. Get set for robotic birds that speak, drones that spy, exoskeletons that can carry you away against your will, several love stories and business at its worst.
I shared Drew Pepper as a serial (free!) because it is a mystery story, and mystery stories are best savored over time.That Woman will be presented as a series too. Each week, starting today, and for many Fridays to follow, I will upload a new segment for you to download and read. It's free, no surprises when you click. If you wish, you can subscribe here so that you will get a weekly email
from me sharing the latest issue.
As always, I look forward to your comments: please share them here.
I hope you enjoy meeting That Woman!
Learn all about That Woman here and read all the parts.
There's a cover story in the April 2016 issue of Scientific American that raises again the very interesting question about what drove (and drives) the evolution of human intelligence. As the piece points out, about 70 years ago it was a given that only humans make tools and tool-making defines us. Now, sixty years after Goodall observed chimpanzees making them, it is a given that all kinds of animals -- and plants -- make and use tools of all sorts, from fashioning spears out of the right sort of twig to cooperating with other life forms for offense, defense and signalling. One of the leading exponents of the notion that social complexity drives the evolution of intelligence is Frans de Waal a professor at Emory University in the US. De Waal is famous for describing chimpanzee social behavior as Machiavellian. I have written about him and his work in SMARTS. The Scientific American story is by another group at Emory which has circled back to where this argument began.
These anthropologists, led by Dietrich Stout, study how the complex art of stone tool-making shapes the human brain. Their hypothesis is that the tripling of human brain size since the time of Lucy was caused at least in part by the difficulty of making good stone tools, which required the development of very fine motor skills and even language in order to pass those vital skills on. Step by step, debitage pile by debitage pile, brains got bigger to accommodate discovering and sharing how to knock off just the right bit of stone from exactly the right spot. This interactive process reshaped brain matter and organization: in other words, the shaping of tools reshaped the instrument of thought. The group at Emory has been using neuro-imaging techniques to follow what happens in students' brains as they learn to make stone tools. There is a lovely picture on the magazine's cover of a really beautiful stone spear point with a kind of shadow down the middle. The image suggests the convolutions and hemispheres of the human brain to imply that rock shaping re-made it.
Those who are fascinated by the evolution of ideas in anthropology will read this image in a special context. Anthropologists and archaeologists have consistently tried to find single causes for complex human migrations, cultural shifts, and physical developments. For many generations, they insisted that the first humans to arrive in the Americas must have walked over the Bering Strait land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska before it was covered by rising seas at the end of the Ice Age. As they told the story, the first Americans worked their way down from Alaska to the center of the continent and then all the way to South America in about a thousand years, tearing through a pristine landscape populated by giant Ice Age animals naive to how dangerous humans are. With nothing in their hands but wonderfully made stone points affixed to handles that they flung as spears from their atlatls, the first people in the Americas wiped out the big Ice Age mammals. How did anthropologists arrive at this conclusion? Well, some native Americans look similar to Asians, but more important, bones of extinct animals were found that had been penetrated by beautiful stone spear points. These bones were dated to about 12,000 years ago. The spear points, and the culture they represented, were named Clovis, after the town of Clovis, New Mexico where they were first discovered. Clovis points were soon found elsewhere across the US.
This basic story soon dominated anthropology classes though there was almost no other data to confirm it. You would expect, if the story was correct, that Clovis tools would be found in Siberia: no such finds were made. You would expect that if these people arrived before the end of the Ice Age, that they'd have had a serious problem finding their way south through the thousands of miles of glacier that covered the northern half of North America from east coast to west, and all the way down to New York. An ice free corridor was invented to deal with that issue, though no one bothered to search for evidence of same for about fifty years more, and when they did, the corridor notion was disproved. Facts interfered with a nice, simple story that is still taught in anthropology classes even now. That a few ice age animals were killed by humans proved that all ice age animals were killed by humans. It took something on the order of sixty years to get important archaeologists to look at new evidence and reconsider. I wrote a book about that called Bones: Discovering the First Americans.
Back to the folks at Emory. There is something very important about the idea that the brain is
shaped by interactions with the world and that this shape is passed down not simply by means of DNA from parents to children, but also by epigenetic means, the chemical record of the specific experience of a particular person which rearranges that person's brain. This sort of plasticity has been well
established by neurologists over the last twenty years. The Emory folks have discovered, apparently, that brain areas at work while learning to chip stone tools include Broca's Area, the section originally tagged as responsible for human language, now expanded to include roles in gesture and fine motor skills. However, there is nothing to indicate that stone tool making is responsible for the evolution of Broca's Area, nor could neuro-imaging ever demonstrate such a theory. So once again, anthropologists are walking down the road toward a single explanation, when they should be keeping their minds alive to complexity.
And that brings me to robots. The robots coming soon to your home, your department store, to doctors' offices and operating rooms, will be doing very complex tasks, very precise tasks. They will not be programmed to do these things, they will be set up to learn to do things and to do them better as time goes by. As they learn to do things for us, we will cease to learn to do them for ourselves because we will no longer need that knowledge. Once upon a time, teaching children how to shape stone tools was a vital skill for any human community. When was the last time anyone bothered to teach stone tool making to their child? So here is a question to consider. What happens to our fine motor skills when we no longer have to call upon them for tasks that matter, when we have wired homes and handy robots to take care of these things?
How will that reshape us?
PART X of my new novel Drew Pepper is ready to read for free.
PART X Synopsis:
In these
penultimate chapters, all the threads knot together. Drew and Jason
publish their story which is so much less than Drew wanted to tell, yet
it provokes what Marsha wryly calls a non linear response. The mice
turn out to be much more interesting and strange than anyone, even Drew,
ever imagined. And Rachel, clever Rachel, finds a way.
Read Part X of Drew Pepper for free.
*Need to catch up on my new novel? Click here to read a synopsis of the novel. I'm currently releasing the new novel on this blog in parts -- one part each week.
Click here to read: part I
Click here to read: part II
Click here to read: part III
Click here to read: part IV
Click here to read: part V
Click here to read: part VI
Click here to read: part VII
Click here to read: part VIII
Click here to read: part IX
Click here to read: part X
PART IX of my new novel Drew Pepper is ready to read for free.
PART IX Synopsis:
Drew has to
work with Jason if she wants to tell her story but it turns out that
none of the facts, not even causes of death, are as they seem. This
makes writing it with Jason the next best thing to impossible.
Meanwhile, Rachel learns a hard lesson: while success swings by on light
and pretty footsteps, disaster has a cadence all its own.
Read Part IX of Drew Pepper for free.
*Need to catch up on my new novel? Click here to read a synopsis of the novel. I'm currently releasing the new novel on this blog in parts -- one part each week.
Click here to read: part I
Click here to read: part II
Click here to read: part III
Click here to read: part IV
Click here to read: part V
Click here to read: part VI
Click here to read: part VII
Click here to read: part VIII
Click here to read: part IX
At a certain point in the unfolding of any fictional story having to do with science, people start to wonder: is it based on something that is true? Or is it just science fiction?
Drew Pepper is based on truth. So let's call it a science faction.
About ten years ago, Canada developed legislation to regulate any biomedical experiments employing human embryonic stem cells. Though the law was passed, the government failed for years to set up and fund the Agency the legislation called for. So there was a law, but it wasn't an effective law, leaving scientists with big questions as to what they could do, or could not do, legally. As in Drew Pepper, the government also failed to properly define a chimera, leaving human-animal combinations outside its new rules.
In the US, regulation of this science by governments followed different paths. The federal government, under President George W. Bush, decided that human embryonic stem cell experiments should not be funded by the National Institutes of Health. Yet after a ballot initiative, the state of California created its own agency to fund the study of human embryonic stem cells.
If you want to better understand the facts, theories, politics and business of stem cell, chimera, and cloning science, try my non fiction book, The Second Tree: of Clones, Chimeras and Quests for Immortality published by Random House of Canada in 2004.
As a recent MIT Review of Technology story by Antonio Regalado makes clear, now various research groups in the US, mainly in California, are doing the kinds of experiments Rachel, Jerczy and Esty embark on in Drew Pepper.
The point of these experiments is to grow humanized organs in animals for later transplant into specific human patients. Which sounds like a terrific idea. However, as NIH ethicist David Resnick explained to Regalado, there is the possibility that the addition of human stem cells (embryonic cells or tweaked adult stem cells) to an early stage animal embryo could also change another organ-- the animal's brain-- sufficiently to end up with lab animals having higher intelligence.
“The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people,” said Resnick, sounding just a tad like Drew Pepper.
Read Part VIII of Drew Pepper for free.
*Need to catch up on my new novel? Click here to read a synopsis of the novel. I'm currently releasing the new novel on this blog in parts -- one part each week.
Click here to read: part I
Click here to read: part II
Click here to read: part III
Click here to read: part IV
Click here to read: part V
Click here to read: part VI
Click here to read: part VII
Click here to read: part VIII
PART VII of my new novel Drew Pepper is ready to read for free.
PART VII Synopsis:
What happens after somebody dies?
There's a funeral. At this funeral, things get radical.
Esty confronts a dark angel. Rachel discovers the true value of her religious education.
The mice make their way into the world.
Jason gets his hands on Drew's story, even as Drew figures out what she has to do to save it.
And Hines and Ortiz make their move.
Read Part VII of Drew Pepper for free.
*Need to catch up on my new novel? Click here to read a synopsis of the novel. I'm currently releasing the new novel on this blog in parts -- one part each week.
Click here to read: part I
Click here to read: part II
Click here to read: part III
Click here to read: part IV
Click here to read: part V
Click here to read: part VI
Click here to read: part VII
PART VI of my new novel Drew Pepper is ready to read for free.
PART VI Synopsis:
The discovery
of the body changes everything. Enter the police, in particular
Inspectors Hines and Ortiz. Drew thinks she finally understands her
story, but does she?
Rachel is discovered: Jennifer McBride is thrilled, the other side not so much, and Sol discovers his inner animal.
Brin is lost and found again, but nobody listens to what she has to say.
And Grandad lays down the law.
Read Part VI of Drew Pepper for free.
*Need to catch up on my new novel? Click here to read a synopsis of the novel. I'm currently releasing the new novel on this blog in parts -- one part each week.
Click here to read: part I
Click here to read: part II
Click here to read: part III
Click here to read: part IV
Click here to read: part V
Click here to read: part VI
After her accident scrambles her brains, and Jason moves in to her house to defend her, Drew finds herself removed from writing and sidelined to special projects, none defined. Why? She has her suspicions and she doesn't let that stop her. Instead, she buckles down to do the research she should have done in the first place. She meets Gordon Beitz in an unlikely place, and falls in love with Esty's mice, especially Brin. Her dead grandfather makes his first appearance. Her parents demand her appearance at a Sunday dinner.
Is Drew off the deep end or on the money?
Rachel gives her Prize Lecture, all the while trying to figure out how much she can afford to say about Esty's mice.
Mayhem ensues.
Murder to follow?
Find out. Read Part IV of Drew Pepper for free.
*Need to catch up on my new novel? Click here to read a synopsis of the novel. I'm currently releasing the new novel on this blog in parts -- one part each week.
Click here to read: part I
Click here to read: part II
Click here to read: part III
Click here to read: part IV
