| Don Bassie is me! I was born in Newmarket Ontario in the
same hospital as Jim Carrey (about 3
months after him) and now live in Orillia (across town from Julie
Czerneda). I am married and have 5 kids that range in age from 19 to
26.
My first taste of Science Fiction was in high school. I had to read The
Chrysalids by John Wyndam for an English assignment. I think it was
the first assigned book that I actually finished. After that I
started actively looking for Science Fiction to read and have been
enjoying it ever since.
About 10 years ago I was trying to find new SF authors to
read by making my way through the Hugo and Nebula winners. I found a
Nebula winning novel called The Terminal
Experiment and was intrigued to find it was written by a
Canadian. As luck would have it, Robert
J. Sawyer was touring for his new novel called Illegal
Alien and was coming to my local Chapters store. To make a long
story short. I read the book, met the author and thought "there
must be more Canadian Science Fiction."
At about the same time as the events above, I bought a computer and
was spending time online. I decided to try making a web page that
featured many of the things I enjoy in the world of SF. It had a Babylon
5 page, a Michael
Whelan page, a general
SF page and a Canadian SF page with 8 entries. Two of which were
Canadian authors (Rob Sawyer and William
Gibson). I later added a Lexx
page.
I started getting a little deeper into researching Canadian SF. I
went to my local Library and found Northern
Dreamers, Northern Suns
and a few Tesseracts books. I also
spent hours using search engines online looking for anything that had to
do with Canadian SF. The more I looked, the more I found.
This site is the culmination of all my research. Made In Canada
has accumulated over 600,000 hits (combined total) 345 pages, 248 entries,
420,000 words, 1000 images 7700 external
links, eight Prix Aurora Award nominations,
three of which won Aurora Awards. I have
had the great pleasure of personally meeting 75 (so far) of the people
with entries in Made In Canada including Isaac
Szpindel, Julie
Czerneda, Rob Sawyer, Spider
and Jeannie Robinson, James Alan Gardner, Peter Watts, Cory
Doctorow, Robert Charles Wilson,
Edo van Belkom, Dale
Sproule, Julian Grant, Ed
Greenwood and Guy Gavriel Kay, just to name a
few. Plus I've been in email contact with many of the
people listed in MiC. I have also had the honour of meeting C.J. Cherryh,
David Brin, Eugene Roddenberry, Connie Willis, David G. Hartwell, Pat York, Anne Bishop and
a few other U.S. science fiction personalities. MiC has been featured in
Parsec, Realms, and Science
Fiction Weekly.
My goal is to make Made In Canada the most comprehensive guide to
Canadian SF on the internet. With the help of so many contributors in
the SF community, it is definitely getting there! |
