What If...?: Amazing Stories

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

The author of more than 30 juvenile titles, most of them science fiction
or fantasy, Monica Hughes turns her hand to editing. In the foreword,
she states that the collection’s “amazing” pieces were “more of
fantasy than ‘hard’ science fiction, almost all of them, in one way
or another, touching base right here on Earth.”

Accessible poems open and close the collection. While stories by Tim
Wynne-Jones, Alison Baird, Edo van Belkom, and Lesley Choyce are
previously unpublished, the remaining 10 stories first appeared in print
at some point between 1981 and 1998; Joan Clark’s “The Mask” is an
extract from her 1985 novel Wild Man of the Woods. Well-read adolescents
may have already encountered Sarah Ellis’s “The Tunnel” in Back of
Beyond and Patricia Galloway’s “The Good Mother” in Truly Grim
Tales. Edo van Belkom, James Alan Gardner, and Charles de Lint are
relatively new voices. Each story is introduced by a “What if...?”
question. For example, Jean-Louis Trudel’s “Lukas 19” is prefaced
by the query “What if famous people were cloned over and over
again?”

The collection concludes with an “About the Contributors” section.
The authors are all Canadians, although Edmontonian Jason Kapalka now
lives in California. Ranging in length from 5 to 23 pages, the
collection’s stories provide adolescents with an interesting
introduction to speculative fiction. Recommended.