Northern Stars Read online

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  For Ian and Toni Grant, my parents (one could not ask for better)

  —Glenn Grant

  To Alison and Geoff, my stars. And to ConCept, a small convention in Montreal with big ideas.

  —David G. Hartwell

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In selecting the stories for Northern Stars, David and I benefited greatly from the good judgment and hard work of many other editors and publishers. Gerry Truscott and Beach Holme Publishers (formerly Press Porcépic) of Victoria are the creative forces behind the excellent Tesseracts anthology series, brilliantly edited by Judith Merril, Phyllis Gotlieb, Douglas Barbour, Candas Jane Dorsey, Lorna Toolis, and Michael Skeet. This series was an important catalyst during the mid-eighties flowering of the Canadian SF field, especially through its many translations of the works of Francophone writers, which provided necessary windows onto the lively SF scene in Quebec. (The four stories originally written in French that appear in Northern Stars were all translated for the Tesseracts series.) In addition, Porcépic/Beach Holme publishes a strong line of original SF novels and single-author collections, including books by Andrew Weiner, Candas Jane Dorsey, Élisabeth Vonarburg, and Heather Spears. Outstanding anthologies and collections of English Canadian SF were also produced by Lesley Choyce of Pottersfield Press in Nova Scotia, particularly the spectacular Ark of Ice: Canadian Futurefiction. Meanwhile, the Copper Pig Writers’ Society of Edmonton has been making great strides in the magazine field, publishing On Spec, the first national journal of Canadian speculative writing in English. In Quebec the active Francophone SF scene is served by the magazines Solaris and imagine…, and by several hardworking book publishers, including (among others) Préambule, Québec/Amérique, and Ianus.

  David and I were assisted in our researches by the bilingual newsletters of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, Communiqué and Top Secret, produced by selflessly dedicated editors Jean-Louis Trudel, Aaron V. Humphrey, and Dale Sproule (with help from many other capable hands). For information on membership, or nonmember subscriptions to Communiqué, contact: SF Canada, 10523, 100th Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, T5J 0A8 (E-mail: [email protected]).

  Many thanks to everyone who so graciously provided their valuable time, suggestions, books, magazines, and references; in particular, we wish to thank Jean-Louis Trudel, Robert Sawyer, David Ketterer, Mark Shainblum, Dennis Mullen, Karl Shroeder, Donald Kingsbury, Edo Van Belkom, William Barrett, Joy Jones, Claude Lalumière, the friendly staff of the Merril Collection of the Toronto Public Library, and the organizers of Montreal’s ConCept ’93 convention.

  Special thanks to Kathryn Cramer, Emru Townsend, and James Bailie for graciously providing E-mail services.

  INTRODUCTION

  Glenn Grant

  Ever seen the movie Blade Runner? Great film; one of the very few that can be considered to be true science fiction (as opposed to some fool-headed Hollywood simulacrum of the genre). Unfortunately, the Denver test audiences didn’t care for its unresolved closure, so the brainless producers chose to meddle with Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, tacking on a silly happy ending. In the original director’s cut, we last see Decker and the replicant, Rachel, as they board an elevator, then the doors shut. The End. Maybe they live happily ever after; probably not. But in the producer’s cut, we see them smiling in Decker’s sunlit car as they fly away, over an incongruously pristine mountain landscape.

  Where, in their depleted, toxified world, could a retired Blade Runner and his rogue android lover go to find safety and freedom? Earlier in the film, Rachel suggested that she might try to escape by flying north. Of course: to the north, away from the urbanized and desertified wastelands of California, north to primeval Canada. That nice aerial footage of majestic, forested mountains? I’m told that’s an outtake from the title sequence of The Shining, shot by Stanley Kubrick in Alberta.

  Where else would one go to escape the hyperurban hell of the American future, but across the world’s longest undefended border, into the vast, uncharted and untouched wilderness that is Canada. Out of the Future, into the Past. Sure. Everyone knows there’s nothing up here but a few billion pine trees, some caribou, a quaint village or two, and the odd snowbound igloo. Everyone knows that the future will never come to Canada, if in fact the present should ever arrive.…

  Poor Rachel and Decker. They’re in for the shock of their lives.

  Flying up the West Coast and crossing the 49th parallel, they come under the influence of the Northern Stars. Heads full of all those Hollywood misconceptions—smiling Mounties, roving Eskimo, unbroken expanses of driven snow—they suddenly find themselves immersed in the homegrown Canadian visions collected here in this book.…

  First, Decker’s air-car settles down among the close-crowded spires of “Couverville,” the twenty-first-century Vancouver of William Gibson’s “The Winter Market,” cleaner perhaps but in some ways too disturbingly similar to the megalopolitan Los Angeles they’ve left behind. So they veer east, into the forested interior of British Columbia, only to find endless clearcuts and the hotly contested ecological war zone of Claude-Michel Prévost’s “Happy Days in Old Chernobyl.” Barely escaping with their lives, they cross the Rockies and traverse the Great Midwestern Dustbowl, perhaps flying over the technomadic instant city of my own story, “Memetic Drift.” Robert Charles Wilson’s western roadhouse, in “Ballads in 3/4 Time” seems as if it should offer our travelers some sanctuary, but artificial people such as Rachel are not yet emancipated here.

  They continue on, then, and come to the postindustrial cities of Ontario, including the Toronto of Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex.” Too corporate-dominated for comfort; perhaps Ottawa or Montreal will be different? According to Jean-Louis Trudel’s “Remember, the Dead Say,” these cities are different indeed, maddened by war, and caught in the harsh political pincers of an unexpectedly violent future. Dodging a few missiles, our refugees fly on, east to the Maritime Provinces. Here, like the narrator of Spider Robinson’s “User Friendly,” they face some unpleasant truths about the arrogance of alien invaders. Farther east, Garfield Reeves-Stevens offers them similar cautions in the icebound waters of his “Outport.”

  But there are many worlds under these Northern Stars, so perhaps our Blade Runner and replicant will climb aboard an outbound colony ship, to discover the diverse alien worlds envisioned by Lesley Choyce, Terence Green, Yves Meynard, Donald Kingsbury, and others collected here. I know that somewhere among these stars they will find solace. Certainly they will never be bored.

  * * *

  As coeditors of Northern Stars, David Har
twell and I are confident that you, too, will be thrilled and enthralled by what you find in this anthology of the best contemporary Canadian science fiction. Of course, no single book could possibly contain all of the best stories in print, but we have striven for a representative cross section of the excellent work being done by Canadian SF authors. (Our definition of “Canadian authors,” by the way, is: Canadian citizens who write here, or those that have only recently moved abroad, or landed immigrants writing in Canada.)

  We were motivated to do this book by the prospect of an imminent Canadian-hosted World Science Fiction Convention, Conadian, to be held in Winnipeg in September of 1994. Only the third Worldcon to be hosted by this country, it seemed a perfect opportunity to expose the work of Canadian SF writers to new and larger audiences. Northern Stars is the first anthology of contemporary Canadian science fiction to be published in hardcover—although we must not forget to mention John Robert Colombo’s pioneering anthology, Other Canadas (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), an important historical overview of Canadian fantastic literature. Compendious as it was, that book did not contain much science fiction, and little contemporary writing.

  We chose to limit ourselves to contemporary stories (written within the last twenty years) because we wanted to show the world what’s going on in Canada today, to let everybody know that a vibrant SF scene has been bubbling along here for quite some time, and which, in the last ten years, has really started to put on steam. To this end we’ve gathered together the work of twenty-eight of Canada’s best SF authors: twenty-five short stories—five of them translated from the French and two by Francophones writing in English—and two novel excerpts (one of them a work-in-progress), as well as two essays on the history and present condition of Canadian speculative literature. In addition, we’ve included a useful reference list of all the winners of the major Canadian SF and fantasy awards—which we compiled when we realized that such a listing had never been published.

  Add it all up and we think you’ll find that the result is a solid book, full of high-quality fiction. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Canada is now producing such a wide array of top-notch science fiction writers—many more than David and I could possibly squeeze into this book. What seems strange to me is that it has taken so long to happen. As Judith Merril explains in her essay, this talented Canadian wave is a recent phenomenon; prior to the late 1970’s, there probably weren’t enough SF writers working in Canada to fill a book such as this one.

  Thus, as I grew up, nearly all of the science fiction I read was written by American and British authors. It eventually began to bother me that the futures they envisioned never seemed to include Canada, as if Canada simply did not exist in the future. Indeed, if this country was mentioned at all, it was usually assumed to have broken up (always due to the secession of Quebec), or it was seen to have become part of the United States. The worldwide perception seems to be that it is the common desire of every Canadian to cease to be a Canadian.

  True, the breakup of Canada is a real possibility, but hardly a foregone conclusion, or even the most likely scenario. (Note that, among all the stories in this volume, only one mentions an independent Quebec.) And the idea that we are all destined to become Americans is merely a long-standing pipe dream among our friendly neighbors to the south.

  Exploring the possible futures open to us is one of science fiction’s most important functions, and it’s not a good idea to leave the job entirely to someone else. Thus it is heartening to see that Canadian SF has finally found its voice—or voices, I should say. For while I believe that our SF writing does share certain common characteristics that distinguish it from American and British SF, these commonalities are obscured by distinctive regional differences. Variations in geography, climate, and urban density have an even greater impact on the style and tenor of our writing than that other major factor, the languages in which we write.

  As for those distinctive national qualities I mentioned: Douglas Barbour says (in Tesseracts2) that our best writers often “challenge certain assumptions and conventions of the traditional (read: American) paradigm” and that, “especially in the case of some women writers … the cast of the narrative, the weave of the story, resists the siren call of plot for something more subtle and finally more rewarding.” In a similar vein, Candas Jane Dorsey tells me that Canadian SF “has more to do with progress toward understanding than with conflict resolution.” We have a penchant for “mood pieces” that some conflict-obsessed American editors have been known to reject as “nonstories” in which “nothing happens.”

  Since Northern Stars is a science fiction anthology (and David and I have clear ideas about what constitutes a science fiction story), this book does not display quite as broad a range of styles as most previous Canadian SF anthologies. In Canada, even more than in Britain, “SF” more often means “speculative fiction” than “science fiction,” and the former is a much wider catchall than the latter, including as it does magic realism, surrealism, and most other forms of the fantastic. The term “speculative fiction” does not recognize any academically imposed distinction between SF and “real literature,” and thus many Canadian writers, even some of our Big Names, are quite comfortable to drift between the mainstream and the various genres. We are happy to be surfers of the Slipstream.

  While hardworking small presses such as Beach Holme and Pottersfield have been busy publishing Canadian SF, unfortunately our major publishing houses have shown little enthusiasm for this aspect of our culture. The fact that this anthology is being produced by an American publisher speaks for itself.

  Canadians should be natural SF writers, I think, because this country has been shaped, from its inception, by the kind of utopian dreams one encounters only in the most visionary scientific romances. Consider the Hudson’s Bay Company, a megacorporation that once virtually owned a vast swath of North America. Consider the national railroad that stitched together this obviously impossible confederation; the huge locks and canals of the St. Lawrence Seaway; the Fuller domes of the Distant Early Warning radar web; the insanely oversized James Bay hydroelectric projects in northern Quebec; the very expensive exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands and Newfoundland’s Hibernia offshore oil fields; the ludicrously endless shopping-and-amusement complex known as the West Edmonton Mall …

  In short, Canada itself is a continent-spanning megaproject on a truly science-fictional scale. Perhaps Canada is a work of science fiction.

  WE HAVE MET THE ALIEN (AND IT IS US)

  Judith Merril

  Judith Merril is one of the central figures in the science fiction field. Both as a writer from the 1940’s to the 1970’s of such classic stories as “That Only a Mother” (1948), and as a leading reviewer of the 1950’s and 1960’s, she had a major impact. But it was as perhaps the most important anthologist of the 1950’s and 1960’s that she most influenced the development of modern science fiction, particularly the ten annual volumes of Best SF (1950–1960), which established the currency of the term “speculative fiction” as a broader (and more literary) umbrella than “science fiction.” During the years in which those anthologies were published, she was perhaps the most influential arbiter of taste in the science-fiction world. And this is not to belittle the impact of her greatest single anthology, England Swings SF (1968), the book that introduced the British “new wave” to America.

  At or near the height of her popularity and influence in the late 1960’s, she “dropped out.” She moved to Toronto and withdrew from activity in U.S. SF circles. Never a prolific writer, her output of SF nearly ceased as she moved on to another life, in broadcasting and in Canadian literary circles. The rest is chronicled in her distinguished afterword to the first major anthology of Canadian SF, Tesseracts (1985). This fine anthology hit Canadian SF with such force that it might be said to have been a major cause of the contemporary renaissance of Canadian SF. The writers were there. The fans were there. All that was missing was a publication to serve as a market for
writers, a market that identified them as a group with unique characteristics and a unique history within the greater body of world SF. So Judy edited another anthology and gave Canadian SF a local habitation and the beginnings of an identity crisis.

  * * *

  Now, how could I have told you up front that what this book is about is critical alienation? I mean, and still have you read it?

  Actually, I couldn’t tell you, because I didn’t know.

  Had I but known—well, at the very least, I’d have tried to balance things out more.

  And that would have been a mistake.

  In any event, after all the readings and re-readings, separately and in sequence, I knew everything about this book except what its overall theme had turned out to be. I found out from someone who had never seen the book at all.

  * * *

  I was thinking about what I wanted to say back here, and I started asking people—everyone, anyone—to tell me why they thought SF (science fiction, speculative fabulation, sometimes surreal futures) is so popular now. What social value does the genre have, now, here?

  I got a lot of familiar replies, about rehearsing future options, opening one’s mind to alternative realities, using exotic sets and lights to focus on familiar problems, generally practising thinking the unthinkable.

  True. It was science fiction, future fiction, SF, that taught us how to think about death and despoliation by radiation, chemical waste devastation, Big Brother, Star Wars and Nuclear Winter. So what’s “unthinkable” now?

  My daughter, appropriately, gave me the answer that curled my toes and shivered my neurons and made me see the whole book for the first time:

  It’s the only place you can do any useful thinking about the idea that there might not be a future: the terminal fear that proliferates abortions and suicides, mass murders, mad leaders, terrorists and technical errors; the ultimate anxiety that makes people sorry they had children, and children not want to grow up.