Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

In the 1990s, Canadian speculative-fiction writers took their place on
the world stage. Such internationally recognized authors as Guy Gavriel
Kay, Charles De Lint, Sean Stewart, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Nalo
Hopkinson, to name just a few of them, garnered critical and popular
acclaim. That they have done so well leads other, often younger, readers
to conclude that they too can succeed in this field. Open Space is an
anthology of work by just such writers, and, on the whole, it’s a
winner.

One of the most exciting things about Open Space is its table of
contents, in which I recognized hardly any names (although people who
keep up with such Canadian magazines as On Spec will). This is the next
generation, and it’s good.

I especially enjoyed, for very different reasons, the stories by
Melissa Yuan-Innes, Colleen Anderson, Mark Anthony Brennan, Catherine
MacLeod, John Park, Janet Marie Rogers, Leslie Brown, Marcelle Dubé,
Aaron V. Hum-phrey, and Derryl Murphy, but there were very few I
didn’t enjoy on some level.

Open Space contains stories that traverse the whole range of the very
wide field that is fantastic fiction today: there are pure science
fiction entries, 21st-century ghost stories, odd horror tales, fantastic
encounters with old gods in new worlds, and some nifty examples of magic
realism. The stories also range widely in mood and tone, from
laugh-out-loud comedy to savage tragedy. Yes, there are a few weak
stories, but the quality is generally high, and the entertainment value
solid. Open Space belongs in public libraries, as well as in the
personal libraries of all fans of fantastic or speculative fiction.