From the charming and whimsical to the haunting and deeply Wyrd, this anthology is a tribute/continuation of Canada’s long-running speculative fiction magazine, OnSpec, that recently ceased publication.
Many stalwarts of the Canadian science fiction scene are represented in these pages, as well as some relative newcomers, which makes for a conundrum: when I'm acquainted personally and/or professionally with half the authors in an anthology, having wined and dined with some, paneled and presented with others, and twisted many of their arms to sit on juries or moderate programs for my various writerly organizations, can I write an unbiased review?
Let's not pretend I can, or will. But I will forebear from special mention of every story by every author I know and just mention the overall theme and striking features.
Longest acquaintance award goes to Edmonton’s Candas Jane Dorsey, who I first met at a nerd-vention of some description in Regina, Saskatchewan sometime in the 1990s. She was already a storyteller of note while I had exactly 2 short story sales to my name, neither of which were SF or indeed F. We had a spirited conversation nonetheless, and I have followed her career with interest in the intervening decades, including collaborating with her on panels and presentations in the crime writing field, where I have since left my modest mark. So it is fitting for me, particularly, that her story involves an unsolved death, and a journey where the destination is unknown and the road toward it shrouded from sight.
Destination unknown. That's as fair a description of the entire anthology as it is of Candas' story. We are not in Kansas anymore, and sometimes not anywhere recognizable as part of this humdrum contemporary world. Instead we traverse landscapes of the mind, the body the spirit, the stars. Our guideposts appear in first person, third person, sometimes second person narration like a choose-your-own-adventure.
At When Words Collide in Calgary last summer, I asked the publisher, Edward Willett of Shadowpaw Press (Regina) if he'd had a theme in mind when selecting stories from among all those that might have previously appeared in the pages of OnSpec the magazine. He said no, just whatever appealed most to him. And yet this anthology has a theme, and it's journeys. From the first story to the last everyone is traveling somewhere, some-when, some-how.
In a quiet B&B cottage or a post-apocalyptic desert town where the fossils of past civilizations are a valuable currency. On a generation ship, fleeing a deathly past towards an unknown future, if you can survive the increasingly desperate present. From space cowboys on a spree to delicate disarmament in a hostile planetary jungle. Each story takes us somewhere new, or sends us deep into philosophical streams from which there is no obvious off-ramp nor reason to seek one. Which is what makes speculative fiction such an intriguing genre to read: every story is a journey to and through a landscape, a society, recognizably not the normal world as we understand it. How can that not be intriguing to a curious mind?
This might be the only anthology or there might be a further one. A time of writing, the publisher isn't committing. The future life of OnSpec is somewhere on the mist-shrouded road ahead. Or not. I'd grab this one if you can. Such a fine and representative collection from Canada's early-2000s speculative fiction community may never come around again.
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