Out of This World: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

This volume comprises 25 essays on every conceivable aspect of the
subject announced by its title; there are, for example, discussions of
“The Science Fiction Novel for Young People in Quebec,” “The
Female Utopia in Canada,” and “Canadian Urban Horror.”
Collectively, they document the existence of a surprisingly large body
of work. Their tone varies from scholarly to personal, but most of these
essays reveal an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable sameness; whatever
the specific topic, there will probably be lists, chronologies, and,
especially, a lot of plot summary. Nevertheless, the book represents a
useful baseline for further study.

There is a carefully calculated Quebec/rest-of-Canada balance (15
anglo- and 10 francophone essays), but the Quebec contributions appear
in English. An amusing resonance between the two solitudes is unearthed:
for anglophone writers, a novel describing the separation of Quebec
qualifies as an example of a “catastrophe scenario,” for francophone
writers, as Jean-Louis Trudel notes, “a disaster only occurs if Quebec
fails to separate successfully.”

In general, the Quebec literary community (depicted here as intense and
factionalized but sure of itself) has a clearly defined collective
history; the more diffuse anglophone community appears, by contrast, to
be more like an anthology of individual careers, the only common
denominator being an anxiety about (guess what!) seeming too American.
There are scattered generalizations of the sort that mainstream literary
scholars like to invent (e.g., John Clute’s “Canadian SF ... [is] a
genre which translates the fable of survival so central to the Canadian
psyche into a fable of lonely transcendence”), but in the end, it is
the diversity of the material that impresses most of these essayists.