Tesseracts 7

Susan McKnight is an administrator with the Ontario government.

The first Tesseracts anthology was published in 1985. Now appearing
annually, these anthologies bring together the year’s best Canadian
speculative fiction. The contributors range from established authors to
new voices. The story characters include vampires, Shakespeare-inspired
robots, space travelers, and stereotypical private detectives. Most of
the stories present a rather frightening view of the future—a future
of uncertainty and dog-eat-dog survival.

An innovative technique used in both anthologies is the inclusion of
poetry between the stories. Each poem loosely corresponds to the
preceding or following story. Tesseracts 7 also includes a group of
short “Altered Statements” that lend a touch of dark humor to the
collection.

Both anthologies contain stories by English- and French-Canadian
writers; the two groups exhibit a surprisingly similar mindset.
Tesseracts 7 also includes a story by Eduardo Frank, translated from
Spanish by Jean-Louis Trudel. A short biography of each
author/contributor appears in a section at the end of each volume.