Tesseracts 3

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Since its launch in 1985, the Tesseracts series has been an important
showcase for current Canadian science fiction and fantasy. This third
volume maintains a good overall level of quality, and some of its
contents is outstanding. Especially valuable are the seven translations
from French, which include some of the book’s best writing.

Claude-Michel Prévost’s postmodern tale of ecological warfare,
“Happy Days in Old Chernobyl,” translated by John Greene, is my
favorite, but all deserve attention. Quite a number of these stories,
like Prévost’s, create disturbing situations and develop them into
powerful statements. Elizabeth Vonarburg’s “Cogito” is a teasing
science fiction fable about a child who turns off her artificial senses.
Cliff Burns’s “Invisible Boy” is a moving minimalist fantasy
focused on the psychological abuse of a child. Peter Watts’s “A
Niche” speculates on the way psychosis may be useful in conditions of
extreme stress. Dave Duncan’s “Under Another Moon” overturns the
sterotypes of heroic fantasy to show the heroism of the suffering
victim, and Ven Begamudré’s “Vishnu’s Navel” shows how such a
victim can be very funny. Only a few items are conventional, and even
they are skillfully done. As a whole, the collection is varied,
unpredictable, and almost never boring.

Most of these 34 stories and poems are published here for the first
time. Four have appeared recently in small-circulation magazines (On
Spec and Starline), one was on cbc Radio Regina’s Ambience, and two
are reprinted from U.S. science fiction magazines. Given this wealth of
material, I doubt that it was necessary to include the pieces by
Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page, and Eileen Kernaghan, all of which have been
published twice before. The most striking example of unnecessary
reprinting is Judith Merril’s much-anthologized “In the Land of
Unblind,” from 1974. It is fascinating, and Merril has worked wonders
for speculative writing in Canada, but it is hardly current. Still, this
is a small flaw, and it is piously motivated.

This book will repay the attention of anyone interested in Canadian
writing.