“Walking through your fear makes you stronger. It makes you able to walk through other fears. It gives you courage. It gives you faith that there are bigger powers in the world than you fear. When you walk through fear, you… become a bigger power than the fear. It is its own medicine in the end.”
-Richard Wagamese – Him Standing (Raven Books, 2013)
“”These days, I can quantify my remaining decades. I can measure them out in life-events. I can gauge my value as a man by who I’ve loved, who has loved me, and by the ones I didn’t love nearly enough.”
-Michael Rowe, “Ghosts” (Postscripts to Darkness, http://pstdarkness.com/2014/08/08/ghosts-by-michael-rowe/ )
A review of the Heroes of the North webseries produced by Christian Veil (http://www.heroesofthenorth.com/index.php )
By Derek Newman-Stille
Heroes of the North Logo courtesy of the producers.
There has been an increase in Canadian speculative fiction shows lately with programmes like Lost Girl, Sanctuary, and Orphan Black, and they have been fantastic… but I have found myself searching for a really good Canadian superhero show. Although only a webseries at the moment, running on a shoestring budget, I have been excited about the work that has been put into the Heroes of the North series. Rather than creating the typical Canadian superhero group bound together already, Heroes of the North begins with individual tales of superheroes, each showcasing bits and pieces of their personality.
Unlike most Canadian superhero stories, Heroes of the North is a series that explores the violence of crime fighting and the idea that sometimes the line between superhero and supervillain is thin and it is only by calling them “heroes” that we keep them fighting against villains rather than the public.
Dressed in pleather and spattered in blood, these heroes challenge traditional assumptions about the Canadian superhero – the hero that says “please”, “thank you”, and “excuse me”, while politely bringing criminals to justice. However, this team, incorporating a particularly Canadian aesthetic, brings together Francophone and Anglophone team members and incorporates Canadians across the country into its roster… as well as former criminals. From The Canadian, based in Ottawa with super strength, stamina and an electrostatic shield to 8-Ball, the Montreal-based martial artist/ weapons expert, to Fleur de Lys, the Quebec City-based martial artist with Electricity-generating gauntlets, to Nordik, from Fermont Wall, possessing immunity to cold and bracelets that freeze enemies, to Black Terror, the drug-addicted, nanotechnology enhanced super-strong Griffintowner, to Pacifica, the super-speedster from Victoria, BC, to Acadia, the Moncton-based invisible woman with carbon-fiber blades this is a team that is diverse in ability, origin story, and locale… and they are all willing to go to extreme ends to facilitate their vision of justice. These are morally ambiguous heroes.
Heroes of the North photo courtesy of the producers
Sometimes it takes the morally ambiguous when you have to go up against a pharmaceutical/ weapons manufacturer who is interested in worldwide conquest.
Blending the comic and the macabre, this series questions the superhero genre at the same time as it presents some canon features of the genre. This is kink meets heroic… complete with latex and pleather outfits.
You can discover more about Heroes of the North and watch the webbisodes at http://www.heroesofthenorth.com/index.php .
Here is a link to their indigogo campaign to fund season 2 of the shot https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/heroes-of-the-north-season-2–2 .
Heroes of the North DVD cover photo courtesy of the producers
“That they should envision themselves greater than nature, that they believe they can control eventualities with their industries both amazes and amuses you, the latter in a grim way. You survey the skyline of London, blotted with inky smoke from their factories, fumes that choke the air, and you wonder: are they insane? They cannot breathe. They die of illnesses brought about by their own wicked habits, and yet they place such childish faith in science”
-Nancy Kilpatrick – Berserker (in Vampyric Variations)
Well the summer radio season is over, so Speculating Canada on Trent Radio will be on a brief break so now is a great time to catch up on any episodes that you missed.
I have heard from a few of you that you would like to download episodes of the programme so that you can listen to them when out for a walk, run, drive, bike ride etc. Here is how to download them:
Right Click (or Control Click if you are on a Mac) on the link for the file – the “click to listen” icon.
Then select “Save Link As” from the drop down menu. It should give you the option of saving as an MP3.
You can then move the MP3 file into itunes or your other media player. You can do this by right click on the saved MP3 file and then select “Open with iTunes”.
In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, Dr. Leif Einarson and I discuss the works of Ian Rogers and Sandra Kasturi. We play audio files of author readings by Ian Rogers and Sandra Kasturi and then follow up with a discussion of these works.
Dr. Einarson researches medieval literature, Norse literature, and Canadian literature.
Ian Rogers is the award-winning Peterborough author of Every House is Haunted and SuperNOIRtural Tales. His work “The House on Ashley Avenue” has recently been optioned for television.
Sandra Kasturi is the award-winning poet, writer, editor, and co-publisher of ChiZine Publications. Her poetry collections The Animal Bridegroom and Come Late to the Love of Birds combine the poetic with the speculative.
Listen to these wonderful author readings and hear the nuances of the authors’ voices and then enjoy discussions of their work and insights into some of the ideas evoked by their work.
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. I would also like to thank Dwayne Collins for his consistent tech support and help with the intricacies of creating audio files.
Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.
A review of Northguard Book One: Manifest Destiny by Mark Shainblum and Garbriel Morrissette (Caliber Press, 1989)
Image of New Triumph #1 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northguard#mediaviewer/File:New_Triumph1.jpg
Comic books are often treated as a lower form of culture and considered to be pure pleasure reading without intellectual interest, but comic books, like any other form of text, offer a vision of the world around us and the speculative nature of the format offers us a series of questions to ask about normalcy. The superhero genre, in particular, evokes questions about what constitutes heroism, what makes someone special or different, and comments on the way we look at ideas of justice and moral rightness, which are entirely subjective.
Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette’s Northguard is a figure that offers a critical lens to the superhero genre. He is not the moral guardian who is sure of his rightness and always saving the day, but rather is insecure, uncertain, and cautious in his approach. He does not seek to impose his idea of rightness, but rather dwells in a space of moral question, critiquing himself and his choices. All of this contrasts nicely with the key enemy in the collection Northguard Book One: Manifest Destiny, the organizsation ManDes, an American religious fundamentalist group who sees Canada as an embodiment of weakness to the North, too passive, too diverse, and sinful in our allowance of diversity. ManDes is a group that embodies patriarchal misogyny, religious intolerance, capitalist monopolism, and white supremacy.
P.A.C.T. (Progressive Allied Canadian Technologies) has formed in Montreal to stop organizations like ManDes from imposing their corporate control over people and doing social harm. They form a system to keep multinationals in check. In their attempt to provide a set of balances against other corporate powers, they created a device called the uniband, which has the power to reverse the laws of thermodynamics and operate beyond the restrictions of physics… and it can be integrated into the human body. When the person who has originally worked with the uniband and attuned it to his biorhythms is killed, P.A.C.T. ends up finding an unlikely candidate to wear this personal arsenal: Philip Wise, a comic book fan. Philip only asks for one thing: that he be allowed to design his own suit to operate the machine, one modeled after his own superhero fantasies and featuring the prominence of the Canadian flag.
Philip’s uneasy relationship with the flag represents a microcosm of the Canadian uncertainty around embodying ourselves in a patriotic symbol. Unlike American figures like Captain America, that easily wear the flag and represent a certain brand of American patriotism, Canadians on the whole have been a little less certain about a figure that wears his or her patriotism on the outside and Northguard is the perfect character to embody that uncertainty. Before he decides to model his costume after the maple leaf and dress in red and white, he throws the flag down on the ground yelling at it “mean something”, bringing to his own experience of uncertainty to his garb as well as his conflicting need to have the flag mean something for him. In this simple act, Northguard is able to take up an aspect of Canadian identity: the perpetual search for what Canadian identity can mean.
His own interaction with Canadianness also embodies a particular Canadian notion of dualistic identity and the potential for a multicultural reading. Philip is a Jewish Canadian living in Montreal – his identity is powerfully shaped by his ability to simultaneously represent Canadianness and Jewishness, and living in a city that is bilingual and multicultural. The power of his duality is marked nicely in the comic when the maple leaf on Northguard’s mask and chest are both overlaid by the Star of David, allowing the costume to simultaneously speak to Canadian identity and how that identity is made up of a multiplicity of cultures and cultural symbols.
Yet, ManDes sees Canada as weak because of this multiplicity and attempts to play into the perceived insecurity caused by a collective of cultural interests by purposely trying to play Francophone and Anglophone Canadians against each other, perpetrating violence and attributing it to one language group or the other. Northguard resists these attempts both by foiling these plots by also by trying to become bilingual himself, creating a French name for himself “Le Protecteur” and working with a French Canadian superhero named Fleur de Lys, who wears the symbols of Quebecois identity.
Northguard is able to embody the potential of the superhero to be a figure who evokes questions, both in his own morality and in the way Canadians see ourselves. Shainblum and Morrissette turn the Canadian question about “who are we?” into a suit of red and white, featuring a maple leaf that asks readers to keep questioning and to recognise the superpower that exists in the act of constantly questioning our identity and what we can and do represent.
Unfortunately, this collection is hard to come by and I hope that Shainblum and Morrissette are able to revive Northguard in the future.
To find out more about Mark Shainblum, visit his website at http://www.shainblum.com/
Thursday September 18th at 8:00 PM, ChiSeries Peterborough will be having a reading by LGBTQ2 Speculative Fiction authors Tanya Huff, Michael Rowe, and Don Bassingthwaite hosted by Peterborough’s Derek Newman-Stille at Sadleir House, 751 George Street North in Peterborough.
Author photo of Tanya Huff
Author photo of Michael Rowe
Author photo of Don Bassingthwaite
Derek Newman-Stille with the Prix Aurora Award, October 6, 2013. Photo credit Dwayne Collins.
A review of Marie Bilodeau’s Destiny’s Blood (Dragon Moon Press, 2010)
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover for Marie Bilodeau’s Destiny’s Blood courtesy of http://mariebilodeau.blogspot.ca/p/destinys-blood.html
The motivation to find home, to create a sense of belonging shapes much of our experiences. We are tied to ideas of family, place, and community. Marie Bilodeau’s Destiny’s Blood is an exploration of home from the perspective of loss, need, warring desires, and conflict. Even when venturing through the dark depths of space… we still keep getting called home, returning to a place of memories and we are always searching for a selfhood that is attached to the notion of connection.
Layela and her twin sister Yoma have been on the streets since youth, surviving through theft and constant movement to avoid any legal troubles, but after Layela was assaulted by a Kilita who ripped into her thoughts to see her visions, Layela’s life has been shaped by trauma. Seeing the future in her visions, she is nonetheless constantly mentally returning to the past, to that moment of pain and horror that has shaped her. Seeking to create a future for herself that is calm, that contrasts with the horrors she sees in her visions at night, she decides to create a flower shop, to settle down amid the relaxing scent of vegetation and create a sense of belonging, a place to be home.
But the future persists and Layela is ripped again from the calm she attempts to forge around her pained heart when her sister disappears, she is arrested without warrant, and the police destroy the home she tried to create for herself. She is uprooted, pulled from the planet that she hoped to turn into her home and is once again tossed into the abyss of space and a future that is not as uncertain as it should be.
Destiny’s Blood asks whether home can be a place one has no memory of, whether a distant star can call to one’s blood and stir up a restlessness that can’t find a home no matter how much one tries to create one. Layela is being called by the star around which she was born, a star that is linked to myth… and more personally to her own origins and sense of belonging and it is a star that feeds the universe with ether, a substance that several alien races depend on and that has dwindled in recent years, leaving many of them all but extinct.
Marie Bilodeau’s space fantasy maps out ideas of destiny and the longing for home that shapes people, propels them into the void, searching for something constantly and unable to settle. She charts the way that that need to belong lets people react with extremes: willing to sacrifice the present for a past that lingers, willing to kill to create home. Longing is like pain, like the emptiness of space waiting to be filled by a sense of the familiar, a place of belonging. Her characters are motivated by a persistent sense of loss, and yet they experience it in unique and nuanced ways, illustrating the complexity of loss: urged toward a desire to escape, to forget, to hold on to anything possible, to protect, or even to hate, to delve into the seemingly endless pit of vengeance that the persistence of loss can create.
Destiny’s Blood conveys a transient aesthetic, a constant searching that would be evoked by being tossed out across a cosmic void.
To find out more about Marie Bilodeau’s work, visit her website at http://mariebilodeau.blogspot.ca/ .
To discover more about Destiny’s Blood and other books in the destiny series, visit http://mariebilodeau.blogspot.ca/p/destinys-blood.html .
If you want to hear Marie Bilodeau do a short reading from the Destiny series, visit her author reading at https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/speculating-canada-on-trent-radio-episode-9-a-mythic-night-an-author-reading-by-marie-bilodeau-and-karen-dudley/
Marie Bilodeau and Derek Newman-Stille at Sadleir House for the author reading A Mythic Night
A review of Suzanne Church’s Elements: A Collection of Speculative Fiction (Edge, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover photo of Suzanne Church’s “Elements” courtesy of http://edgewebsite.com/
In her short story collection Elements: A Collection of Speculative Fiction Suzanne Church treks across stars, across time, beyond the human experience, into the magical, the mystical, the dark, infusing pages with otherworldly imagination that invite us to be fellow travellers into the unknown. She crosses genre boundaries, infusing each with new life brought trough experiences submerging in the others. Her work touches the barriers between horror, science fiction, and fantasy, playing with reader expectations and expanding the scope of the reader’s imagination.
Elements IS fundamentally elemental, not just because some of her characters play with weather (the elements) and with the elements of fire and water, or even because some of her androids are named after elements from the Periodic Table, but because there is something both incredibly large and incredibly intimate about her work because whether it be about aliens, androids, sentient coffee cups, future warriors, or magic users, her work fundamentally explores RELATIONSHIPS, those strange, impossible, and yet oh so familiar things – and relationships are things that we share, whether they be romantic, familial, friendly, or interspecies. Suzanne builds bridges across species, planets, dimensions, and states of being in order to capture that moment when Others touch, when a sharing of experience occurs, and a fuzziness develops between the Self and the Other.
Not all of the relationships in Elements is positive, because relationships hurt, relationships can damage us. This is, by far, not a romantic collection, but is rather about the interactions between people, the ways in which we understand and relate to each other… and not all of the ways we relate to each other is positive. Her stories deal with issues like domestic violence, sexual abuse, war, imbalances of power, abandonment, and situations where the only safe relationship can be created after an escape from home… but they also forge improbable connections, friendships between unlikely allies, allegiances between seeming enemies, a push beyond fear to allow for connections between people who fundamentally see each other as opposites.
Relationships are part of how we understand the world, how we interpret it, creating understanding and interpretation through dialogue, through the experience of sharing ideas with each other, but they are also painful, sharpened by feelings of abandonment, differences in viewpoints, codependency, contexts of pain, confusion, misinterpretations, and an Us against Them mentality. Suzanne Church explores all of these, pushing the extents of human relationships to the edge, and perhaps even peaking beyond the human, displacing our centrality in our view of the world.
To explore reviews of some of the individual stories in this collection, visit:
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/evangelical-science/
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/predator-and-prey-relationships/
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/body-of-war/
and for a discussion of this collection with Suzanne Church, visit our interview at https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/speculating-canada-on-trent-radio-episode-14-an-interview-with-suzanne-church/
To find out more about Elements and other Edge books, visit their website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/ .
To discover more about Suzanne Church, visit her website at http://suzannechurch.com/wordpress/ .
Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 
