Steven Mills

BURNING STONES:  a science fiction novel by Steven Mills.  In a world already desolated by an avian influenza, paramedic Alex Gauthier's 21-year-old daughter, Gemma, afflicted by the so-called Lucy virus, is devolving--turning into a proto human--while forest fires besiege the valley where they live.  When Gemma asks Alex to kill her--perform a mercy killing--when she is no longer human, he finds himself making a promise he doesn't want to keep.  At the other end of the valley, Veronica "Ronnie" Sapriken, the only remaining RCMP officer, is struggling to keep the peace in a disintegrating town while the rest of the world is falling apart, only to discover that someone has been trafficking in devolving kids.  Locked away in a FEMA camp outside Spokane, Sage Van Peldt, whose husband and children were among the first to be infected with the strange virus, plans escape back to the valley of her childhood, not knowing whether she will survive the trip, or what she will find once she gets there.    BURNING STONES is the harrowing story of devolution, and of making choices no one wants to make.

 

Biography

Photo Credit: Andrew Mills PhotographyI live in the Joe Rich Valley just outside  Kelowna, BC, ( having recently moved from Nelson, BC) with my partner, the brilliant and very funny Christine Leman, and two cats and two dogs.  I make my living as the Regional Training Coordinator at the Justice Institute's Paramedic Academy here in Kelowna.

I was born in Ontario in 1959.  My parents immigrated from Ontario to BC in 1967 with three kids, the youngest in diapers and my mother pregnant with number four, and eventually landed in Prince George on Halloween night of 1968.  I graduated from Prince George Senior Secondary in 1977, attended university in Victoria and then Toronto, returning to BC in 1989. Over the years I've worked as a pizza maker, house painter, parks ranger, construction worker, city transit clerk, tow truck dispatcher, Presbyterian Church minister, hobby farmer, gas jockey, flagger, and first aid attendant.  

Although I've been writing stories on and off since I was 8 years old, I began writing seriously in 1995.  I took a variety of workshops led by local writers, attended the first-ever Victoria School of Writing, and enrolled in the writing program at the Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson.  My first short story sale was in August 1997 to On Spec, a Canadian speculative fiction magazine.  

I'm a member of SF Canada and the Federation of BC Writers.  In 2002 I was chosen as a delegate to the BC Festival of the Arts with my mainstream story "The Postmodern Man" (published in subTerrain #39, Spring 2004)  My SF story, "Chasing Goodbye," won an Honorable Mention in the first quarter of the 2001 Writers of the Future Contest and was published in On Spec (Summer 2003).  My first novel, Burning Stones, is now available.  Click here for more information about Burning Stones.

 

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"By now you must have guessed:  I come from another planet.  But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders....Instead I will say, take me to your trees.  Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns.  Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.  These are worth it.  These are what I have come for."  from "Homelanding" by Margaret Atwood.