Monthly Archives: May 2014

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Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 5: Disability in Canadian SF

How many spaceships are wheelchair accessible? Do office buildings create light shielding for the undead who might be singed by solar exposure? Can my guide dog be a werewolf? Does one need to simply WALK into Mordor… or can one wheel in instead? SF has an interest in the body, whether it is the augmented body of sci fi, the body horror of the gothic, or the magically altered body of fantasy, and it is worth looking at the way disabilities are portrayed in Canadian SF.

Speculative fiction often explores the figure of the outsider, particularly the body that differs from the norm, and people with disabilities are often the subject of interest by SF authors. SF readings of the disabled body often speak to the way that disabled people are ‘read’ in our world and our time. This episode examines the interest in bodily difference and in treatments of the disabled body that can be either empowering or intensely problematic.

Among the positive portrayals of disability in Canadian SF that are discussed, we take a look at

Tanya Huff’s Blood Books

James Alan Gardner’s Expendable

Leah Bobet’s Above

Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn Trilogy

and

Sparkle Hayter’s Naked Brunch

Click on the icon below to hear the full radio programme.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

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Why Do Schools Keep Making Zombies Out of People?

A review of James Marshall’s Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies (ChiZine Publications, 2012)ninja_2
By Derek Newman-Stille

In his Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies, James Marshall tells us something that every one of us who attended public school and high school already know – schools are Hell trying to make zombies of us all! Unfortunately, the only one who sees this is Guy Boy Man, a young adult who killed his parents after he discovered that they were zombies and were planning on eating him once he failed the ZAT (the Zombie Acceptance Test). They were certain he wouldn’t pass the ZAT – he was too much of an outsider, a rebel, someone who just didn’t fit in and abide by the “normal” rules of zombie society. Zombies are close-minded, worried about how things “seem” to others, and strongly interested in maintaining the status quo of ‘normalcy’. The zombie teachers are literally muzzled (to keep them from snacking on students before they write the ZAT) and chained to their classrooms with chains. After all, schools hunger for brains.

Guy Boy Man is able to see things that others aren’t. He can see that the world is populated by the supernatural, that the world is well into the zombie apocalypse and most people are zombies… and if they aren’t, they are food. He sees more than everyone else, but he is an unforgiveable jerk – treating women as disposable, engaging in homophobic, ableist, and racist comments, comfortable destroying art… but, the reader can take incredible pleasure in Guy Boy Man’s offensiveness because he is consistently blunt about the underlying offensiveness of our culture and of schools in particular. Rather than covering up the way that disabled bodies are treated as disposable, he brings attention to it. Rather than trying to politely ignore the racism and homophobia in schools, he make it blatant, often in his attempts to NOT be homophobic and racist. He treats women as objects because women are consistently objectified by our school. He is offensive because he is part of an offensive world and his casual destruction embodies the hopeless nihilism of a world that believes it can’t change anything – a zombie world that believes that nothing will really change and will continue in undead monotony.

Guy Boy Man is the openly offensive jerk that our society tries to mask itself from being through polite avoidance of the issues of society. Marshall uses Guy Boy Man to take the “subtle” fatphobia, ableism, sexism, racism, and homophobia of our school system and over-perform it, taking it into a place of self-mocking auto-parody.

Marshall’s zombies are stiff because their lives are rigid. Zombies have absolute control over our society and in order to maintain their control, they eat anyone who is rebellious. Marshall uses the figure of the zombie to bring critical attention to the way that our society maintains the status quo, unquestioningly repeating the same patterns of the past. He reminds us that much of our education system is focused on the memorization and regurgitation of information rather than on asking critical changes and thinking outside the box.

You can find out more about James Marshall’s work at http://www.howtoendhumansuffering.com/ .

To explore this and other ChiZine Publications books, visit their website at http://chizinepub.com/ .

 

 

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Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 4: An Interview with Kate Story

Local Peterborough author and native Newfoundlander Kate Story was able to visit Speculating Canada on Trent Radio to talk about Newfoundland’s fairy tale tradition and how she incorporated it into her novel Blasted as well as exploring her own experiences as a Newfoundlander growing up surrounded by these tales and traditions. In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, Kate discusses the relationship between place and notions of home in Canadian literature, the interaction of people with their landscape, and the interplay between rural and urban spaces in her novels. As a performance artist, she was able to also comment on the wider arts community and her engagement with multiple artistic media.

Click on the icon below to hear the full radio programme.

 

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

 

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

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Life Drained by Residential Schools

A review of David Jon Fuller’s “Sin A Squay” in Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast (Edge, 2013)

Cover Photo for Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast courtesy of http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

Cover Photo for Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast courtesy of http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

By Derek Newman-Stille

Residential schools were a real life horror for indigenous Canadians. Taken from their homes, punished for speaking their own language, forced to abandon their own culture and lifestyle, subject to abuse and starvation, Canadian aboriginals from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s endured victimization by very real monsters.

David Jon Fuller’s short story “Sin A Squay” takes the very real horror of residential schools and overlays it with modern mythical monsters. Jenny and Marion were both subject to torture at a residential school – beaten, starved, cut off from their family and their heritage they had their lives drained from them… literally. While at the MacDonald Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, the girls were subject to both psychological and physical draining by the vampiric Miss Harrow.

Trained through violence to submit to others, Marion lost the empowerment that her werewolfism brought to her, her alpha status, and it is only through her confrontation with the person who subjected her to violence, Miss Harrow, that she is able to discover herself and her own power.

David Jon Fuller brings attention to the historical issues around the treatment of aboriginal people in Canada, particularly aboriginal women. He highlights the violence of the residential school system by showing two women drained of their lifeforce by a vampiric other, here representing a system that sought to drain aboriginal people of their heritage (their blood). Using the figure of the werewolf, Fuller brings attention to the way that the residential school system claimed that its role was to “tame” aboriginal Canadians and force them to submit to a white domestic culture in which they were treated as pets. Marion’s werewolf side has suppressed its role as an alpha to others because of this depriving of independence and freedom of thought.

He highlights the continued and very pressing concern about the disappearance of aboriginal women in Canadian history and its continuity today. When Miss Harrow is feeding on children and killing them, stashing them in the basement, they are ignored by the police who believe that any white woman working for the residential school system would be above reproach.

You can explore David Jon Fuller’s work at http://www.davidjonfuller.com/ .

Read more about the collection Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast on Edge’s website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html .

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Haunting Disability

A review of Mark Leslie’s “Hereinafter Referred to as the Ghost” in Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast (Edge, 2013)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover Photo for Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast courtesy of http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

Cover Photo for Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast courtesy of http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

With our youth-obsessed culture, actors generally only have a very short period in which to be celebrated for their acting career before they are viewed as “old”, “tired”, and they begin to be passed over for roles…. So, what happens when a ghost known for his great performances as other ghosts and haunting phenomena in the past starts to lose his power to change forms, his power to create a chill in the air, and his ability to fade in and out of mortal sight?

Mark Leslie’s “Hereinafter Referred to as the Ghost” explores the UNlife of Patrick Collins, a ghost who has stretched his abilities to the limit and now is experiencing his decline as one of the great haunting actors of the past. Ghosts take on a diversity of haunting roles, performing the expectations of human beings about famous historical locations, inspiring hope and imagination in human witnesses about the greater extent of reality. Patrick had been hired to perform multiple haunting roles in the past: the Flying Dutchman, Anne Boleyn, the Countess of Salisbury, taking roles as all of the great ghosts of history and adding to their mythology. But lately he has been feeling his age and losing his abilities. It hurts to transform into the shapes of other ghosts and leaves him with a massive headache, when he tries to take on female forms he ends up still looking like a man. The pain and loss of ability reminds him of the arthritis he developed late in his human life, but he persists in trying to take on big acts, wanting to maintain his reputation as one of the great ghost actors.

Patrick is losing contracts with Ghostlife Experiences, passed over for younger specters with less experience and his reputation is declining as he isn’t able to take on the roles that he used to. What is a ghost to do when the world calls for big, showy performances that his body can no longer handle?

Mark Leslie takes a critical look at changes in ability and the accommodations that accompany them. Abstracting this experience of aging and changes in ability over time onto the figure of the ghost, he invites us to look at the notion that glory is fleeting, changeable, and that as we age, we are in a continual process of mourning what we once saw ourselves as capable of doing.

You can explore Mark Leslie’s work at http://markleslie.ca/ .

Read more about the collection Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast on Edge’s website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

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Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 3: An Interview with Greg Bechtel

As part of the Ontario leg of his tour for the collection Boundary Problems (Freehand Books), Edmonton author Greg Bechtel was able to swing by the Trent Radio studio to discuss his own work and some overall trends in Canadian Speculative Fiction.

In our interview we postulate that reality is a set of social conventions, a creation and that therefore speculative fiction is partaking in an overall realm of fictive subjects. We discuss the way that good realist fiction, like good SF, should complicate notions of reality and estrange us from taken for granted assumptions about “the way things are”.

Bechtel’s work blends and mixes the speculative and the realist in his collection Boundary Problems and this contributes to his overall sense that reality is a blend of experience and fiction.

Greg Bechtel brings attention to the short story as a focus of interest, not as a stepping stone to the novel. He discusses the potential of the short story as a place for experimentation since readers are more willing to take short ventures into experimental media.

Bechtel is interested in stories and letting stories tell themselves. He reminds listeners that the world and the self are both collections of stories. We discuss memories as stories –  flexible, changeable, and suspect. In our overall discussion of memory as it appears in his stories, Bechtel brings attention to the notion of trauma and the idea that trauma is a place where stories can be pulled into a black hole, a place from which nothing escapes. But, telling these stories of trauma, sharing them,  means that they are no longer black holes because the story escapes and proves that things can escape.

In our conversation, Greg Bechtel directly faces a challenge many authors who are also academics have – analyzing his own work.

Check out our radio interview by clicking on the link below.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

 

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

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Slippery Landscapes

A review of Kate Storey’s Blasted (Killick Press, 2008).
By Derek Newman-Stille

Steeped in the rich fairy lore of Newfoundland and a sense of longing for home, Kate Story’s Blasted is a novel about dislocation. Story’s stream of consciousness style of writing beautifully enhances the sense of temporal and special dislocation represented by movement through and slippage into fairy realms. Her poetic use of language adds to the depth of the landscape, it’s history, and the people upon it, reveling in the simultaneous beauty and terror embedded in the land.

Cover photo from Kate Story's "Blasted" courtesy of http://www.katestory.com/

Cover photo from Kate Story’s “Blasted” courtesy of http://www.katestory.com/

Newfoundland, as an island landscape of harsh extremes, fog, snow, unclear edges… it is a perfect location for fairy stories and a tradition of wandering into the fairy lands and being lost. As a place that experiences a great deal of emigration – the loss of population to other locations out of the belief that there will be better economic opportunities elsewhere – it has become a place of loss, a place of inconsistencies of population, a shifting populace where people ARE lost. Story combines this narrative of loss and the feeling of diaspora, of being separated from home, among Newfoundlanders who have left the island, with the losses into the fairy landscape – a place where people disappear, where people are led and lured into another place and pulled from home.

Ruby is a character who is enmeshed in both types of loss and dislocation – economy-led to Toronto with the belief that there are better economic opportunities, and fairy-led into Fairy from a difference in her blood, a family disposition to wander into fairy. Her sense of home is disrupted, discontinuous, yet no less strong.

Ruby’s family history has been kept secret, Othering her in her own home. Fairies in Newfoundland are considered to be beings that it is best not to speak about, and suffering in Ruby’s family is believed to be increased by being discussed. But this secrecy, carried out through the belief that it will keep Ruby safe, leaves her unprepared for the realities of her family and its interactions with “Them”, the fairies, the strangers who are also intimately close – in the landscape, in her home, and within her blood.

You can discover more about Kate Story on her website at http://www.katestory.com/

To find out more about Blasted and other Killick Press books, visit their website at http://www.creativebookpublishing.ca/en/index.cfm?main=groupdescription&poid=278

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Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 2: An Interview with Chadwick Ginther and Discussion of his Work

In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, check out an interview with Winnipeg author Chadwick Ginther where he discusses his Thunder Road trilogy. In our interview we talk about notions of heroism and villainy, moral ambiguities, the interplay of Canadian legends and Norse myths, the landscape, urban fantasy and horror.

After our interview, I get a chance to talk about his novels Thunder Road and Tombstone Blues.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.