OPEN SPACE:
New Canadian Fantastic Fiction
edited by
Claude
Lalumière
a trade paperback anthology
of all-new fiction
published by
Red
Deer Press
publication date
August 2003
CONTENTS
Introduction -- Cory Doctorow
Growing Up Sam --
Melissa Yuan-Innes
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection
Leavings of Shroud House: An Inventory
-- Richard Gavin
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
The Traumatized Generation
-- Murray Leeder
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
Hold Back the Night
-- Colleen Anderson
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection
The Banshee of Cholera Bay
-- Jes Sugrue
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
March on the New Gomorrah
-- Mark Anthony Brennan
Postcards from Atlantis
-- Catherine MacLeod
--listed in AndyHat's "2003
Consolidated Recommended Reading List"
The Image Breakers
-- John Park
Of Wings -- Shane
Michael Arbuthnott
The Woman Who Danced on the Prairie
-- Steve Vernon
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
The Curse of the Science-Fiction Writer
-- Ahmed A. Khan
A Gift of Power
-- Janet Marie Rogers
Appetite -- Nicholas
Knight
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
--preliminary ballot, 2003 Stoker
Awards
--listed in AndyHat's "2003
Consolidated Recommended Reading List"
La Rivière Noire
-- Leslie Brown
Chimère --
Marcelle Dubé
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection
Help -- Matthew
Costaris
Feast of the Gods
-- Drew Karpyshyn
The New Paranoia Album
-- Aaron V. Humphrey
Eye of the Storm
-- Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Ragnarok
--Vincent W. Sakowski
More Painful than the Dreams of Other Boys
-- Derryl Murphy
--Honorable Mention, The Year's
Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection
Afterword -- John Rose |
21 all-new stories of fantasy, horror,
and SF
from all over Canada
reviews
|
"There's enough good stuff in here
to keep you entertained for hours"
Broken Pencil
|
|
"Worth checking out."
Challenging Destiny
|
"Extend your imaginative frontiers."
FFWD
|
"Great new voices from the Great
White North [...] a fine volume [...] intelligently varied [...] a classy
effort [...] Upon closing the covers of this volume, the reader will feel
amply rewarded, not only by the individual stories but by the sense that
the future of fantastical literature in North America is in good hands."
Paul Di Filippo, Science
Fiction Weekly
|
"A successful anthology [...] demonstrating
that there is more to Canadian SF than initially meets the eye."
SF
Site
|
"A diverse collection of speculative,
and often dark, fiction from a number of daring and distinctive voices."
The
McGill Daily
|
"What's most striking is the great
diversity of cultures and contexts. Virtually every Canadian region is
represented, as well as numerous different cultures"
Jean-Louis Trudel, Cultures
des futurs
|
|
"New Canadian Fantastic Fiction,
it says on the cover. Damn right it is. Claude has done an excellent job
of finding fresh voices for this collection of stories with a loosely multi-cultural
edge to them [...] great fiction to be proud of." SFRevue
|
In Open Space I quite liked Derryl
Murphy's novelette "More Painful Than the Dreams of Other Boys", which
has a killer premise -- there is a region called Templetown (after Shirley)
in which most children do not age, but older people who enter there age
very rapidly (decades in a couple of hours). The story concerns a murder
that has to be investigated by one of the former Templetown children who
had to leave when he began to age. Vincent W. Sakowski's "It's Beginning
to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok" is also a pretty good novelette, a satirical
story about a vain and vicious couple as the end of the world approaches.
Catherine MacLeod's "Postcard from Atlantis" is a very mordantly amusing
set of very short pieces. Melissa Yuan-Innes in "Growing Up Sam" tells
an affecting story of a genetically engineered human/bonobo mix."
Rich
Horton
|
"Interesting and insightful tales
[...] quality science fiction, fantasy and horror."
Steven
H. Silver
|
|