Collecting Canada

A review of Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Fiction Edited by Sandra Kasturi and Samantha Beiko (ChiZine Publications, 2013).
By Derek Newman-Stille

Imaginarium 2013 was even better than Imaginarium 2012. With more diversity of authors, I found myself introduced to a large number of authors I had never encountered before. The collection had a wider scope and included a wide number of works with varying styles and thematic foci. This collection included works of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and various blends and warpings and re-imaginings of those genres.

Varying between poetry and short stories, this collection captured an essential essence of Canadian speculative fiction – the Canadian comfort with grey areas both in plot and character morality, a willingness to explore things that are generally left ignored by the general population, the desire to not just represent oppressed people, but to revel in that outsider dialogue.

This collection brings together works that evoke questions, challenge the reader to expand their consciousness and think outside of the easy answers that society tries to provide and instead calls upon readers to interrogate these easy answers and find out the implicit complications in them.

Reading this volume will provide you with a whole range of new authors to read and explore.

To find out more about Imaginarium 2013, visit the ChiZine Publications website at http://chizinepub.com/books/imaginarium/imaginarium_2013.php

To read reviews of individual stories from this volume, visit:

http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/instead-of-lets-pretend-lets-become

http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/cold-war-superheroes-frozen-in-suffering

http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/perfect-bodies

http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/protagonist-problems/