Northern Suns | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Edited by David Hartwell & Glenn Grant | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tor Books, 384 pages | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A review by Steven H Silver
One of the things which sets Canadian authors apart is the country's bilingualism. French
and English are both official languages of the country and Grant and Hartwell have taken
care to include fiction from both sides of the language divide. Interestingly, the three
stories translated from the French all show signs of either language divisions, such as
Charles Montpetit's absurd "Beyond the Barriers" or Jean Pierre April's "Rêve Canadien," or
other types of division, such as the historiosophy debate central to Alain Bergeron's
"The Eighth Register," one of the strongest stories in the anthology. Of the English
language stories, only Eric Choi's "Diversions," an alternate history story about the
negotiated secession of the province of Québec, examines the duality of Canadian society.
Many of the stories are set in less than affluent circumstances. Nalo Hopkinson looks
at Canada's welfare recipients in "A Waste of Time" while Ursula Pflug's "Bugtown" is
set in a seedy neighbourhood. Robert Boyczuk mixes despair with codependency
in "Doing Time," set in a Canadian prison. A few of the stories, most notably Derryl
Murphy's "The History of Photography," mix this sense of desolation with light-hearted
moments. Murphy's tale is of a photographer who must come to terms with the fact that
photographic film is no longer being manufactured. This event is balanced by Murphy
giving explanations of the history of photography in a concise and interesting manner.
Completely humorous moments are relatively rare in Northern Suns. Aside from
the light-hearted parts of Murphy's story, humour only really shows up in Robertson
Davies's "Offer of Immortality" and W.P. Kinsella's "Things Invisible to See," about
the first Japanese imports into Canada. Nancy Kilpatrick's "Farm Wife" seems to be
meant as horror, but the horror is dulled by a strange humour as she describes the
farmer's horrific disease.
Two of the stories look at the same phenomenon: using robots to ensure human
safety. The first of these is Jan Lars Jensen's "Domestic Slash and Thrust" about
an attempt to create an idiot-proof knife. The other is David Nickle's "The Dummy Ward"
about using more and more complex dummies to test auto crashes... and the
resulting damage to the automatons.
The two strongest stories in Northern Suns are Bergeron's "The Eighth Register,"
which uses alternate history to examine not only how history works, but also the theories
behind how history is studied, and Scott Mackay's "The Sages of Cassiopeia." Mackay
postulates a world in which the supernova of 1572 heightens the understanding and
intelligence of all the idiots in Denmark in a plot reminiscent of Daniel Keyes's
Flowers for Algernon. By setting his story at a time when science was only
making the most tentative steps towards breaking out from under the glare of the
Church, Mackay is able to examine the role of the Church in research.
While Hartwell and Glenn don't necessarily demonstrate that Canadian science fiction
is different from science fiction elsewhere, a claim which seems to apply more to
Francophone Canadian science fiction than to the Anglophone, they do show that Canadian
science fiction is alive and well and living north of the border.
Steven H. Silver is one of the founders and judges for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. He sits on concoms for Windycon, Chicon 2000, and Clavius in 2001, and is co-chair of Picnicon 1998. Steven will be serving as the Programming Chairman for Chicon 2000. In addition to maintaining several bibliographies and the Harry Turtledove website, Steven is trying to get his short stories published and has recently finished his first novel. He lives at home with his wife and 3200 books. He is available for convention panels. |
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