Drawn from those memories, the striking landscape in his latest novel, Commitment Hour, forms the backdrop for the twenty-fifth century story of Tober Cove -- a community that is technologically simple except in one way. Each year at the same time almost all the children of Tober Cove switch sexes. They do this until they are 20, at which point they "commit" to one sex for the rest of their lives. The hero, a talented traveling violinist and songwriter, is on the eve of his Commitment when the story begins.
Although Gardner has taken on the topic of gender for the first time in Commitment Hour, the subject has long held fascination for him. "I had the idea of a town where people alternate genders throughout my childhood. It's been rattling around for a long time, and seemed too interesting not to explore. Maybe I'll go back to Tober Cove again sometime," he laughs, "and see what's happened since."
Gardner, who now lives in Kitchener, Ontario, has lived within an hour of Toronto almost all his life. And though he studied math -- he received a masters degree in mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario with a thesis on black holes -- he's been writing since age five. Indeed, while at Waterloo, he also wrote for the University's annual musical comedy and subsequently went on to graduate from Clarion West Fiction Writers Workshop, which he calls "a great boot camp for science fiction writers."
Much of his fiction, meanwhile, takes place in the same twenty-fifth century Earth as Commitment Hour. "The Children of Creche," the short story that won grand prize in the 1989 Writers of the Future contest, inhabits the Commitment universe,"although you wouldn't know it," he says. "It's about an art critic." (Part of the material for that story, he notes, came from his artist-wife.)
And his previous novel, Expendable, follows an inhabitant who went off into space. "Many of the people in space are extremely pampered," Gardner says. "But the explorer corps sent out to explore new planets frequently die. And frankly, the rest of society isn't used to young healthy people dying, so those who end up being conscripted are those whom others won't miss very much -- the ones who are unattractive or unlikable in some way. The hero has a big smeary birth mark on her face. And while twenty-fifth century medicine could easily get rid of it, she's more valuable if kept that way. She's bitter, but actually fun."
Devoted to construction of the Commitment universe, Gardner is also finishing a novel with the working title Vigilant, to be published late in 1998. The lead character in Expendable is a secondary character in Vigilant, he says. "The story takes place at the same time as Commitment Hour, but on a planet whose government is subject to the whims of an official, constitutionally entrenched group of watchdogs called 'The Vigil.' They poke into official matters, commandeer secret documents, and of course, watch for corruption. The hero is a new member of The Vigil who gets caught up in strange goings on."
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