Monthly Archive: May, 2013

May 30, 2013

Final Voting for Speculating Canada for the Prix Aurora Awards

Dear Readers, As many of you know, Speculating Canada made it to the short list for the Prix Aurora Awards. This is a huge accomplishment that is largely due to the work of fans and readers of the site and the brilliant authors that I have had the incredible opportunity to interview. I have been honoured to be able to...

Categories Editorials/News Comment: 1

May 29, 2013

Illustrating Speculative Fiction

An Editorial By Derek Newman-Stille As an artist, I have always been fascinated with the art that accompanies Speculative Fiction novels. So many readers focus on the cover art when making their decision about which books to read, and often the author has little or no say about which art is attached to their book. The art of a book is...

Categories Editorials Comments: 2

May 28, 2013

Quote – Art About Opening Lines of Communication and Resisting Uncritical Media

‘That’s what art’s all about too… they’re all lines of communication. But they’re harder to keep open now because it’s so much easier for most people to relate to a TV set than it is to another person. They get all this data fed into them, but they don’t know what to do with it anymore. When they talk to...

Categories Quotes Comments: 0

May 27, 2013

Nostalgia for the Stars

A review of Steven Appleby’s The Captain Star Omnibus (Sybertooth, Inc., 2008). By Derek Newman-Stille Society tends to disregard humour as less significant than other forms of social discourse, but humour contains within it a mechanism for piercing status quo barriers and interrogating issues that people may prefer not to look at critically. Humour pushes boundaries, breaks down walls, and...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

May 26, 2013

Quote – Mature People Need to Take a Break From Being Mature Sometimes

“Festivals and holidays were intended to be days when mature people could have a break and stop being mature for a little while. If someone doesn’t need to take some time off, maybe they aren’t really being all that mature during the rest of the year.” -Shen Braun – Costumes (Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales)

Categories Quotes Comments: 0

May 25, 2013

Quote – Becoming What You Are Studying

“Getting too tangled up in his own quest for understanding. Delving too deeply into the calendering trees that he lost track of where he left his body, until one day he looked around to find that he’d become what he was studying” -Charles de Lint – Merlin Dreams in the Mondream Wood In The Very Best of Charles de Lint.

Categories Quotes Comments: 0

May 24, 2013

Meme Zombies

A Review of Tony Burgess and Bruce McDonald’s film Pontypool (Maple Pictures, 2009) By Derek Newman-Stille As many of you know, I tend to focus Speculating Canada primarily on literature. This is not meant to ignore other types of texts and media, but has been an area that fascinates me.  I have recently been drawn to the film Pontypool through...

Categories Other Reviews Comments: 5

May 23, 2013

Quote – Writers Expose Their Innermost Emotions To The World

“To wear your heart upon your sleeve is to expose your innermost emotions to the world. Writers do that. They expose their most private feelings to total strangers. Not once, not by accident, but deliberately and, to all extents and purposes, permanently.” -Julia Czerneda – Introduction to Douglas Smith’s Chimerascope

Categories Quotes Comments: 0

May 21, 2013

Creating Community in Isolation

A Review of Julie Czerneda’s Riders of the Storm (Daw, 2008) By Derek Newman-Stille  Displacement is a factor that is prevalent in the lives of many people who have had to leave home for whatever reason. The finding of “home” is a nebulous, complex, and constantly changeable phenomena. Julie Czerneda explores the search for home in a foreign and confusing...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

May 19, 2013

Quote – Horror in Fact that it is Reality, not Myth

“This is no myth – no minotaur or Pan. This is a reality. And therein lies its horror, its fascination.” -Terence M. Green – The Woman Who Is The Midnight Wind  (In Tesseracts)

Categories Quotes Comments: 0