Home-grown author finds international success

By Cecilia Nasmith

One of Cobourg's home-grown writers has just published his second book and is about to head to China, where he has a devoted fan base – and not for the first time either.

They don't come more home-grown than Derek Kunsken.

Kunsken was born at the old Cobourg District General Hospital on Chapel Street, attended Thomas Gillbard and C.R. Gummow elementary schools, and went on to CDCI East before going off to McMaster University to study molecular biology.

But during those years, the science fiction he loved to read was taking root and inspiring him to create his own.

And you can read the results for yourself. Solaris Books published The Quantum Magician in 2018, and last month followed it up with The Quantum Garden.

“The publisher already asked me for a third in the Quantum series – I just signed the contract for that in October,” Kunsken said in a telephone interview from his home in Gatineau, Que.

They are about to announce a new book set in the same universe (but in a different century) due out in 2020 – and they've already bought the sequel to that as well.

In effect, Kunsken said, he's on the hook for three more books.

His popularity in China predated The Quantum Magician. He had a loyal following there from the short stories he'd written that had been translated for those readers, and they began asking about a novel. In the end, The Quantum Magician was published in Mandarin even before it came out in English.

It is due to be published in France in March, Japan just bought it and are publishing it this month, and he has just inked the deal to have it published in Russia.

“People seem to be responding really well,” he said.

His first book has already garnered a list of award nominations that includes the British Science Fictions Association Award, the juried Canadian Sunburst Award, the national Canadian science-fiction Aurora Award, the US Locus Award and the Chinese Nebula Award.

Kunsken has been successfully marketing his science-fiction writing since 2008, when he began selling short stories to the big magazines in the US.

“I think Russia was my first foreign sale, and I have been translated into Czech, Polish, French, and into Chinese a lot,” he said.

The interview took place amid preparations for his seventh trip to China in 24 months. This time, the purpose is to be a special guest at a science fiction festival – his seventh trip to China in 24 months as an author.

“It has been amazing, the reception I have gotten there. I have two publishers over there – both of them have brought me over, and I have been a guest at three conferences.”

He has also had the honour of being asked to do foresight-futurist work, a field that began in 2012 when Microsoft brought 12 sci-fi writers to their headquarters, showed them all the tech they were working on and commissioned stories from them that – given that input – would help them imagine what the future will be like and what the implications might be. In that way, the tech influenced the writers who, in turn, were given the potential scope to influence the tech.

Kunsken had this experience in 2017, when he and several other writers were brought to Hangzhou to the equivalent of China's own Silicon Valley.

“We toured one of the high-tech companies there and did the same thing. We were commissioned to write stories inspired by what we saw there,” he said.

“The following year, they flew me and three Western authors and six Chinese authors to a big poverty-relief effort in rural China. We toured what they were doing, and were told the same thing – observe, and tell us what you see going into the future.”

Kunsken was also called upon to teach a course on science-fiction writing to about 50 Chinese writers, which he recalls as a fascinating experience.

Kunsken is both delighted and bemused by his success on the other side of the planet.

“This is one of those lightning-strike things there is no way to predict or expect – pure luck. You happen to write something somebody likes,” he said.

“There are hundreds of writers writing in hundreds of different subgenres of sci-fi, maybe thousands, and it so happens the particular flavour of sci-fi I write just resonated with what the publishers in China were looking for.”

The title of The Quantum Magician comes from the species homo quantus, of which his protagonist Belasarius is a member. Through a genetic flaw, he ends up becoming one of the galaxy's greatest con men – great in the sense that he pulls it off so easily that boredom threatens. Then he leaps at one of the biggest and most dangerous challenges of his career, when a client offers untold wealth to move a squadron of secret warships across an enemy wormhole.

The publisher calls the Quantum books the Quantum Evolution series. The second series set in the same universe at a different time is as yet unnamed.

Solaris said yes to The Quantum Magician in 2016 and made it a two-book deal. Then, when sales were encouraging, they decided on a third. Kunsken finds it gratifying to think they had enough confidence in his work to invest that much time and treasure into it.

“They seem to think I am starting to build a fan base,” he said.

His own favourite authors that he has enjoyed for years include Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Iain Banks and Ann Leckie, “all four writers who are writing what's called space opera – a particular genre I write.”

British authors seem to include a fair amount of politics and social issues into their space opera work, he has found, while American authors have a heavier military element. But as popular as space opera is, Kunsken said, it was originally a derogatory term, much as the term soap opera once was a put-down of televised daytime drama.

“They had writers working for a penny a word, and some of the stories were awful,” he said.

“Writers looking to make coin would take a Western plot and put it on Mars – a space opera.

“In the '80s, British writers were producing some spectacular new stuff and they said, 'It's space opera, but it's not the old space opera.'”

Kunsken remembers making the decision that he wanted to be a writer – he was 11 years old at the time. When he told his parents Wolfgang and Jocelyne of his decision, “they said, 'You can, but you need to get a real job too.' They were supportive and pragmatic.

“I have had jobs since then to finance my writing.”

Through years of jobs that took him from working with street kids in Central America to being a Federal employee in Colombia, he said, “I have always, always, always tried to write. I've been failing at it for two decades. I am a 30-year overnight success.

“Everybody wants to be a best-selling writer by the time they are 25, but at least I made my first professional sale at 35.”

This latest success comes at an opportune time, when he has taken a leave from his current job to spend more time with his 14-year-old son Joshua - who loves movies, comics, sports and friends, but has so far expressed no literary ambitions.

If you're interested in keeping up with Kunsken – which promises to be an interesting exercise – his website is www.derekkunsken.com and his Twitter handle is @derekkunsken.