Steve Stanton's Blog - Posts Tagged "speculative-fiction"

Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction
The widely acclaimed Tesseracts anthology series has run for thirty years in Canada, since first launched by Judith Merril in Toronto in 1985, but Tesseracts Nine stands out as the first anthology published after Hades Publishing purchased Tesseracts Books in 2003 to publish under the EDGE imprint from Calgary. Two international award-winning editors assembled this collection of “New Canadian Speculative Fiction” in 2005, Geoff Ryman and Nalo Hopkinson, and their chosen cover design was a beacon for gender fluidity at the time. The list of 27 contributors reads like a who’s-who of publishers, editors, authors, translators and academics in the genre: including the Chair of the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Allan Weiss, respected publishers Candas Jane Dorsey and Sandra Kasturi, anthology specialists Claude Lalumière and Nancy Kilpatrick, career novelists Élisabeth Vonarburg, Steve Stanton and Peter Watts, along with major Quebec authors Yves Meynard, Sylvie Bérard, Rene Beaulieu and Daniel Sernine. As they used to say, holy smokes!

Tesseracts Nine won an Aurora Award in 2006 from the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association as determined by popular vote among the membership. The material is difficult to categorize, straining the bounds of possibility from far-out fantasy to hard science fiction. Two of the stories feature talking animals, for example, one in the literary absurdist sense and one surgically manifested, and another uses talking crows as metaphors for thought and memory. Although the authors are all Canadian, the topics are international in scope, including a sacred festival in Mexico, burial rites in ancient Egypt, street orphans in Haiti and vampires in downtown Toronto. Other highlights include the poignant aftermath of a crash landing on a distant planet, a curlicue story of interdimensional transport across space and time, an exobiological analysis of an alien in amber, and Timothy J. Anderson’s delightful rendition of an end-of-life experience. Death is a pervasive theme in this collection and many stories are serious in tone, but there is more hope than horror in this anthology, and a keen sense of the wonder and mystery of existence.

The early success of Tesseracts Nine helped to launch EDGE Publishing on a trajectory to become the largest dedicated publisher of science fiction and fantasy in Canada, now with 116 titles under three imprints and a pipeline of 8-10 new titles per year. With all due respect and admiration, I’ll leave the last word to EDGE publisher Brian Hades on this tenth anniversary: “Working with Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman certainly made the transition to publishing the series on an annual basis easy. I’m blessed to have had such amazing editors for Tesseracts Nine, and have been fortunate to have both great editors and writers for subsequent books in the series. The forthcoming Tesseracts (number eighteen) tackles the trending topics of religion and diversity in science fiction and fantasy. It comes in peace, with the intent of looking at some of the world’s six major, living, international religions, and a few made up ones too!”