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From Fastball to Fiction Writing

  • Writer: Lisa
    Lisa
  • 11 minutes ago
  • 9 min read

by Lisa Timpf

Author Lisa Timpf, 2025
Author Lisa Timpf, 2025

Things About Governance (2026) - 11

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"Things About Governance" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces in the series run from Jan-June 2026. Query us about contributing for $25 CAD a post at https://facebook.com/relskim  or by email at info@realityskimming.com

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One of my earliest experiences with governance came when I was around seven years old. My older brothers had been playing catch in the back yard when the softball they were tossing went through the neighbours’ basement window. My parents made my brothers repair the window, putty, glass panes, and all. The message was clear: If you break something, you take accountability.


According to the Canadian Audit and Accountability Foundation’s website, accountability is one of the “basic principles of good governance,” with the others being “leadership, integrity, stewardship, and transparency.” Though all five elements are important, for the purposes of this post, it’s accountability and integrity that I’d like to focus on.


Besides experiences like the one described above, my time in Brownies and Girl Guides probably helped to reinforce the importance of accountability and integrity. Many of my earliest sports coaches also instilled the value of fair play, a subset of integrity. When I went to university, philosophy courses, including courses on ethics, were among my electives. In my final year of undergraduate studies, I did an independent study that revolved around perceptions of fair play among intercollegiate athletes and coaches in women’s sport. So when I ended up in the workplace, perhaps it was only to be expected that I ended up for a time in a role that involved writing policies and procedures and, eventually, in a role that put me in charge of compliance and ethics, including corporate governance.


Some of the issues that seemed clear to me in terms of what “should” be done from a human resources perspective got pushback from the production floor and from those whose focus was on the bottom line. “Ideal world” doesn’t always fly in the corporate setting, and sometimes you need to compromise. On the other hand, you need to at least know what you are striving for, what your intentions are, what you’re trying to do.


When I started to write speculative fiction, my interest in governance, particularly ethical issues, was a sub-theme in many of my stories. One of my earliest published stories was “Roxy,” about an AI-enhanced police dog. “Roxy” and its sequel “Roxy’s Legacy” revolved around the degree to which we take accountability for what we create.


During the 1990s, Lisa Timpf fulfilled her long-time dream of playing hockey when she joined the Barrie Women’s Hockey League. Lisa’s interest in sports and ethical issues often finds its way into her fiction.
During the 1990s, Lisa Timpf fulfilled her long-time dream of playing hockey when she joined the Barrie Women’s Hockey League. Lisa’s interest in sports and ethical issues often finds its way into her fiction.

Although I enjoyed a variety of athletic endeavours, including field hockey, ice hockey, and fastball, back before my knee packed it in, physical activity these days consists of walking the dog. I’m still a sports fan, though, and my lifelong interest in sports and fair play also insists on cropping up in many of my stories and poems. Ethical issues are often an underlying feature of the plot.


For example, in “Breakaway,” first published in Nomadic Delirium’s Mundanities, the protagonist’s parents had secretly arranged for in-vitro gene editing to give him a better chance to excel as an athlete. Without knowing about the genetic meddling, protagonist Mike Lawlor becomes a standout ice hockey player. Small clues like snide comments from teammates make Mike suspect that his physical prowess may not have come naturally. The notion that his achievements are tainted take the joy out of playing hockey, but there may be bigger issues at stake as Mike suspects those behind the genetic meddling scheme might start to clean house to hide the evidence.


“It’s All Good,” published in TAANSTAAFL Press’s Enter the Rebirth anthology puts a female softball player in a dilemma. With the world having just gotten over a pandemic (this story was written before Covid, inspired by some of the potential scenarios discussed during SARS), it’s not possible to hold the Olympics live. Instead, they are conducted in a blend of live action and holograms, using a system called the Simultron. But as protagonist Melissa Mourningdove discovers, the governments are using the resumption of the Olympics to assure people things are “all good” when that isn’t quite true. She needs to decide whether to participate in a planned athlete action to reveal the issue, or live out her Olympic dream by pretending nothing is going on.


Sometimes, news stories create “what if” questions for me, and many of these revolve around ethics. A news piece on television about robots programmed to play soccer was intended, perhaps, to be humorous. Instead, it raised some questions about what will happen to humans’ aspirations in the long term if the technology advances to the point where franchise owners decide robot players are more economical and easier to deal with than flesh-and-blood athletes.


In my flash fiction story “Centerfield,” which was published on Havok Publishing’s site, technology has advanced to enable upload of human memory into android bodies (I don’t pretend this is a unique idea; the concept appears, for example, in Robert Sawyer’s Red Planet Blues). When the story’s protagonist, a center fielder with a robotic body, sees a kid in the stands, he remembers his own aspirations to play in the big leagues. He realizes that athletes in android bodies, with their increased longevity, are stunting the dreams for future generations, who see no place for themselves.


“The Price of Fame,” published in The Lorelei Signal in 2023, was based on some reading I’d done about future innovations in sport. In the story, female professional athletes are “enhanced” with brain implants and heads-up displays that speed up their reaction time. The protagonist is poised for a record-breaking season, but the new tech is literally giving her a headache. In this story, I explore the conflict between the desire to excel and recognition of the physical ramifications of the technology. And it’s not just an issue for the current players. What they accept and agree to, and what safeguards they insist on, will also set the expectation for the young girls in the stands who might one day follow in their footsteps.


A number of my stories, like this one, have had at their base the idea that we shouldn’t just accept technology on its face value. Rather than saying “we have the technical capability to do this, so let’s go ahead and do it,” we should ask (and be given space to ask) is this what we want? Is this how we want the future to be shaped? Is this the right thing to do, or is it being done just because somebody wants to make money, or has some other ulterior motive?


In an ideal world, corporations would implement technology responsibly and governments would institute regulations that protect the public and the planet. But as Maude Barlow points out in Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet, those assumptions are naïve. Some powerful multinational corporations have a higher valuation than entire countries, and often they fight legislation geared at placing controls on their ability to make a profit, regardless of the social and environmental damage done by their products or actions.


In Revolutionary Science: The Struggle for Agroecology in the Americas by Bruce H. Jennings gives an example of a petrochemical company whose own research warned about the impact of climate change, but instead of doing something about it, they buried the information and spent enormous amounts of money debunking climate science. And, if we need other examples, the eye-watering pace at which AI data centres are being installed, often without a great deal of transparency about the resource demands and quality-of-life impacts, should offer enough of a cautionary tale about high-powered companies’ degree of accountability for the social and environmental impact of their actions.


Getting back to sport, awhile ago I ran across articles about the so-called “Enhanced Games.” According to a New York Times “The Athletic” article by Jacob Whitehead, organizers of the “Enhanced Games” are pushing for an annual event “where entrants in five sports—track and field, swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, and combat sports—will be allowed to dope in training and competition.”

While many, including the International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency object, this initiative is attracting wealthy investors. But is the group really interested in sport performance, or something else? Many of the investors, according to Whitehead, are connected with a “biohacking movement.” They’re really “more interested in setting ageing records than athletics records,” which suggests that athletes will be exploited for the gain of others. Whitehead’s article goes on to chronicle some of the adverse health effects suffered in the past by athletes who engaged in doping. One example given is a bodybuilder who died in 2017, whose “heart and liver weighed twice the average amount after heavy steroid use.”


You’d think that would be enough to put people off the notion, but some of those behind the Enhanced Games movement are trying to re-shape public thinking about what constitutes fair and ethical sport. According to Whitehead’s article, “The Enhanced Games’ website terms the phrases ‘doping’ and ‘cheated’ in the context of sporting records as ‘discriminatory language.’ They are campaigning to scrub Wikipedia of such terminology.”


If an event like the Enhanced Games goes ahead, what will this do for fans’ appetite to see more and more extreme feats of performance? Will this spill over into other sports and activities, leading to pressure on athletes to take performance enhancing drugs just to keep up? And if so, what will be the toll taken on athletes’ bodies? What message is sent to the next generation of athletes about the merits of “clean” play in the face of temptation to try to be a star, albeit one that might quickly burn out?


What we, as fans, demand and support will influence the future of sport. If we ask for more, someone will happily try to find a way to provide it. If, on the other hand, we insist on, and offer our attention to, sport that honours athletes’ striving toward excellence unenhanced, through the dint of talent and hard work, perhaps we have a hope of preserving the right to compete on fair and equal footing, minimizing the physical risk—for the sake of today’s athletes, and those looking up to them as role models.


Governance isn’t just an abstract, something that happens in board rooms. Questions of governance are, or should be, important for all of us—at least, those of us concerned about the kind of world we live in, and the kind of world we want to leave for future generations. While I was working on this post, one of the questions on Jeopardy! related to Don Quixote. Some days, in this era of “alternative truths” and corporations foisting new technology like AI on us whether we want it or not, it feels as though raising and discussing governance-related issues is like tilting at windmills. But for our own sakes, we must believe that resistance is not futile. Algorithms and deliberate tsunamis of mistruth may try to shake our belief in our own convictions, but it’s important to hold tight to what we know to be true.


I still trust in the lessons from childhood. That accountability matters. That we’re responsible for the outcomes of our actions, and, by extension, our inactions. Speculative fiction has proven to be a good venue for exploring ethical questions and the potential consequences of taking certain paths. And so, despite the sometimes-discouraging news cycle, I will continue to write stories that explore governance issues, and will continue to read what others have written about sustainability and leadership and similar themes. After all, if we don’t raise challenges to the status quo, there’s a greater chance our worse fears just might come true.


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Lisa Timpf is a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. A graduate of McMaster University’s Physical Education program, Lisa played a variety of sports in her younger years, and continues to follow a number of teams as a sports fan. Reflecting her interest in athletic endeavours, Lisa, along with Paula Johanson and Colleen Anderson, will be co-editing a speculative sports anthology to be published by Tyche Publishing. Lisa’s speculative poetry collections Cats and Dogs in Space (2025) and In Days to Come (2022) are available from Hiraeth Publishing in print and electronic formats. Lisa is a member of SF Canada and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. You can find out more about her writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/. Lisa is also on Bluesky, @lisatimpf.bsky.social


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