Tesseracts

Tesseracts Anthology #1

by Judith Merril (Editor), Spider Robinson, William Gibson

Each year Tesseract Books chooses a team of editors from among the best of Canada's writers, publishers and critics to select innovative and futuristic fiction and poetry from the leaders and emerging voices in Canadian speculative fiction. This is the anthology that started it all! Featuring fiction by Elisabeth Vonarburg and Hugo and Nebula award winning authors Spider Robinson, and William Gibson.

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Short Stories, Canada

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Josephine Juliet Grossman

aka Cyril Judd (with C.M. Kornbluth)

Judith Josephine Grossman (Boston, Massachusetts, January 21, 1923 - Toronto, Ontario, September 12, 1997), who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist.

Although Judith Merril's first paid writing was in other genres, in her first few years of writing published science fiction she wrote her three novels (all but the first in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth) and some stories. Her roughly four decades in that genre also included writing 26 published short stories, and editing a similar number of anthologies.

Reviews

[Kalin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the inaugural volume of the long-running Tesseracts anthology which features contemporary Canadian SFF, and was edited by the legendary anthologist Judith Merril. It was also surprisingly good (one of only two other reviews of the book 1-stars it with some off-putting criticism; having read the stories I can't say I agree at all). Like any anthology there are some misses, but there were more involving stories here than I expected to find. About half of them were original publications, while the other half were reprints. Special shoutout to "Hinterlands" by William Gibson, "The Woman Who is the Midnight Wind" by Terence M. Green, "Cee" by Gerry Truscott, and "God is an Iron" by Spider Robinson for being solid stories.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

I always find myself liking stuff i read more than i should but in this case with this so call contemporary Sci-fi collection i break the trend, other than a couple of the stories like The Train, C and Hinterland the other contributions were banal,self involved, pretentious and boring, some of the so called stories being so contrived in themes especially with the moral or twist in the end i was fed up. Some of the contributions only being paragraphs and so called poetry where also very poor, i was glad to finish this book. In the afterword the editor says that most of the stories where rejected by other publishers and i can see why. Hopefully the subsequent anthologies are a better read, they can't be any worse.

[Brian Gaston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first in a long running Canadian SF series. The stories are average but it gets 4 starts by being the first and starting a tradition.