Both Sides. NOW! is the fourth novel I have written. Because I don’t write traditional heroic narratives, one of the things I find is that each work has a structure suited to the story I want to tell.

For example, Both Sides. NOW!, which is about what happens when everybody in the world changes sex, contains five chapters, each timed to the event. The first takes place the day of the change, then one week, one month, one year and, finally, one century later. The first chapter was meant to show how disruptive the change was; the second to fourth chapters were meant to show how people slowly adapted to the change, and; the final chapter, which takes place much later, was meant to show how traditional sex roles began to reassert themselves when most of the people who had lived through the change had died.

The structure of the novel is more complicated than that, though: each of the first four chapters is divided into ten sections. Each section within a chapter contains a different set of characters in a different place (to help unify the novel, some of the characters and motifs appear in more than one chapter). There were a couple of reasons for choosing this structure. The obvious one is that I wanted to capture as many different responses to the change as I could (since there would be as many responses as there are people living on the planet). Even so, I feel I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating subject.

The other reason has to do with a failing that I have found in some science fiction. Have you ever noticed that stories that deal with worldwide phenomena tend to focus almost entirely on North American or European characters and settings? The fact that people from other cultures would likely have different reactions to SF premises seems quite interesting to me, but we rarely see that in fiction written by western authors. The complex structure of Both Sides. NOW! allowed me to set parts of the story in places like Japan, China, India and Israel, in addition to a wide array of North American and European countries.

I think of Both Sides. NOW! as a kaleidoscopic novel, one that reflects this way or that depending upon which facet you’re reading at the time. It’s an odd structure, but one that I believe results in a very rich reading experience.

SATURDAY SHORTS

Here’s a bit of frippery from the latest Les Pages aux Folles (http://www.lespagesauxfolles.ca) update:

Hamlet's soliloquy from the nunnery scene, as rewritten for Benedict Cumberbatch:

To beep or not to beep, that is the question;

Whether 'tis Nobler in the wings to suffer

The Pings and Sharings of outrageous Fanboys,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of handhelds,

And by opposing end them.

'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be - oh, would you please shut it!

I write a lot of social and political satire, primarily on my Web site, but it does find its way into some of my short stories and novels. You can’t talk about embodied identity, as I do in Both Sides. NOW! for instance, with acknowledging that it has a political dimension (beyond the fact that the President of the United States is a character). Just so we know what we’re talking about: satire is a specific form of humour which holds bad public behaviour up to ridicule; once the reader has stopped laughing, she is invited to think about the object of the ridicule.

 Obviously, people who are held up to ridicule and their supporters could be offended by one’s satire. Does this bother me? There are a couple of glib ways of dealing with this question. The first is that as long as people whose public actions offend me are the ones who are offended by what I write, I’m good. Another is that just about any work of art has the potential to offend somebody (as witness conservative efforts to ban certain children’s books from schools); that’s just a risk anybody who does something as public as writing has to take.

 My more considered answer comes out of experience I had years ago.

 In the 1990s, I was part of two radio sketch comedy groups: Earth Two and Dead Air. With Earth Two, we actually got into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s offices and recorded half an hour of material; it still tickles me to think that somewhere in the bowels of CBC headquarters is a DAT tape with my voice on it. Dead Air ran for six half hour episodes on community radio; we released a 100 minute collection of our best sketches, most of which hold up to this day, if I do say so myself.

 Being around funny people was great because, of course, we talked comedy all the time. And, one of the things that I remember from those conversations is that a comedian should always be “on the side of the angels.” What does that mean? For me, it means you should always be able to articulate why you make the artistic choices you do; with satire specifically, it means that you must know what the object of your attack is and be able to justify it. I have sometimes been know to do outrageous things in my writing, but it’s usually not out of a desire merely to be outrageous; I usually have a deeper purpose that I can explain if called upon to do so.

 I’m sorry if innocent people are offended by what I do, but I hope that they’ll come to trust that I know what I’m doing.