Tesseracts Nine [Paperback]

 

 

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Tesseracts is the premiere book-format showcase for Canadian speculative fiction, and it's been too long since Tesseracts Eight appeared. The current volume in this wonderful series demonstrates just how varied both SF and Canadian fiction can be.
Space doesn't permit for a review of each of the twenty-three stories and poems (there are very few poems), nor do I feel confident commenting on some of the less conventional stories. That is, some of these stories are so good, I have to wonder if the ones I dislike have more to do with me than the stories themselves.
(By "less conventional," I mean the type of story that seems plotless, and even pointless-or uses some unconventional writing style that, to my mind, detracts from the telling of the tale. I wonder, for example, how a story is better told if the quotation marks are left out of the dialogue, or if the narration switches from first person to second to third. I wonder why a narrator, speaking to a character, tells that character things s/he already knows. I wonder, in fact, to the point where it preoccupies me more than the plot and character do.)
To its credit, Tesseracts includes the work of French-Canadian writers-something we don't see enough of in English Canada. The translations are all superb. However, some of the Francophone writers chose to write in English, not always with complete success. A gentle editorial hand to correct awkwardnesses of phrasing wouldn't have been amiss in Yves Menard's "Principles of Animal Eugenetics," for instance.
Tesseracts Nine includes stories by many of Canada's leading lights of SF (Candace Jane Dorsey, Yves Menard, Nancy Kilpatrick, among others) and relative newcomers. The stories range from hard science fiction to ultra-modern fantasy-no mages or wizards here (and not that much by way of spaceships, either).
Among the shiniest of gems in this collection is Nancy Kilpatrick's "Our Lady of the Snows," a tale of an impoverished, elderly woman in Montreal who discovers an unexpected light in her life. Another is Alette J. Willis' "Thought and Memory" (Odin's birds who flew through the world and reported back all they'd seen and heard), which manages to be funny and poignant at the same time. René Beaulieu's "Mirrors" is disturbing the way a story should be: it has you accepting the unthinkable by making you feel what the characters are feeling.
Two of the most delightful and thought-provoking reads aren't stories at all, but the foreword and afterward by editors Geoff Ryman and Nalo Hopkinson, respectively. Their take on Canadian SF-and, ultimately, Canadian literature in general-almost makes up for the lack of a story by either of them.
It's taken twenty years and at least three publishers to reach Tesseracts Nine. The anthology's current house, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing (www.edgewebsite.com), is promising an annual volume. May they keep their promise for decades to come.

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