Partly in an effort to escape the genre “ghetto” and partly to reach out beyond the formula of the space opera, science fiction has reinvented itself to encompass more and more types of speculative writing — to the point where even “speculative fiction” is no longer able to act as a definitive umbrella. In Tesseracts Twelve, the latest in a venerable line of Canadian SF and fantasy anthologies, Montreal-based editor Claude Lalumière takes it one step further by calling the collection “fantastic fiction.”
In fact, in keeping with this expansion of the genre definition, of the seven novellas in the book, only one has anything in it that might be said to resemble science fiction, Heinlein “hard” or Lem “soft.” This is David Nickle’s “Wylde’s Kingdom”, a free-flowing dystopian tale that sports some imaginative technological wonders amid an end-of-the-world reality TV setting.
The rest of the stories definitely fantasize more than they speculate. This is especially true of Michael Skeet and Jill Snider Lum’s “Beneath The Skin,” about trickster spirit demons who try to fool a Japanese samurai lord into rebelling against the leadership of his brother. Or Randy McCharles’ transporting of Druid mythologies to the prairies in “Ringing the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta” as an allegory for small town politics, complete with childish meanness and pure love bursting forth. In “The Story of the Woman and Her Dog,” E.L. Chen evokes a strangely enchanted Toronto with elements of meta-fiction and a tale-within-the-tale structure. Here, there is a touch of Lem but also of Márquez as Natasha tries to hang onto her husband, first by turning him into a dog and then by telling him never-ending stories, a là Thousand and One Nights, including one “about a stubborn woman and her enchanted dog.”
Set in an unabashedly undisguised Montreal, Grace Seybold’s “Intersections” is an elemental tale that combines love and death — literally. The two heroines, Nadia and Wren, are cursed/blessed with the unwanted and uncontrollable ability to “tweak … the threads of fate.” They bring together total strangers and give them a psychic push towards love, but there is a price to pay. At the core of the story is the love between Nadia and Wren, with its own inevitable twisting of fate. A powerful and powerfully-written story.
Weakest of the novellas are Derryl Murphy’s “Ancients of the Earth” and Gord Sellar’s “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang.” The former starts with a fine concept: cave people make an appearance in late 19th-century Dawson City and stalk our hero Samuel. But it loses focus and flutters to an ending that uses the present tense in a story set in the past. As for Sellar, much of the story, a spoof of superheroes set in Korea, seems a little arbitrary and superficial, even if it is supposed to be an allegory for the region’s political intrigues. I just didn’t care about the characters all that much.
But five out of seven ain’t bad. Overall, Lalumière does a good job of presenting a set of stories that represent various aspects of what has come to be called “fantastic fiction.” Perhaps not to the taste of those who prefer a clearer strain of SF, but definitely a way to break open the ghetto.
Calling himself a Montreal-Toronto corridor writer, Michael Mirolla’ has published a novel Berlin, boasting more than a few elements of the fantastic.
