“He liked to read the ones that nobody came for; he didn’t understand all of what they said, but he read them just in case. He liked the way they made the world tilt different ways in his vision.”
-Leah Bobet – Above (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2012)
Monthly Archives: February 2015
“To minds that crave binary order, and the simplicity of the male-female dichotomy, the study of gender can lead to despair. They say that women with Y chromosomes and men with two X’s are abnormal. But normal is just a word that gets thrown around when we try to make sense of biology.”
-Scott Fotheringham – The Rest is Silence (Goose Lane Editions, 2012)
Quote – Normal just a word
“I made no distinction between history of mythology. Troy and Gilgamesh, for example, cross-references to both historical and mythological entries. Bored and restless and wanting to believe anything that would stimulate me, I was more than happy to accept that these often contradictory readings of the past were all equally true, that reality was not flat and linear, but complex and multidimensional, allowing for many versions of the same events to exist simultaneously. For many pasts to lead to the same present.”
-Claude Lalumiere – The Door to Lost Pages (ChiZine Publications, 2011)
Quote – Past Exists in Many Versions
“’Ragnarok.’ Even ignorant of the word’s meaning, it held weight, inevitability.”
-Chadwick Ginther –Thunder Road (RavenStone, 2012).
Quote – “Ragnarok” as a word has weight
Rediscovery
A review of Liz Strange’s “Erased” (Dark Continents Publishing, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover photo for Erased courtesy of the author
Liz Strange’s “Erased” is an intersection of stories of loss and secrecy. Set in the future in a world with the capacity to erase a person’s memory with one needle stroke, “Erased” opens with character Grey Singer who has woken uncertain of her identity, her selfhood, or any markers of the person she once was. She finds identification hidden in the seams of her clothing, but it is the identification of several different people, all with her face, further complicating the question of her identity.
Singer is able to discover that she was part of covert activities, and her search for her own memory is complicated by the secrecy that she shaped around her life. This intertwining of uncertainties is made more complicated by the fact that the act of recovering her memories itself comes with a price – the potential that trying to push herself to discover more can cause a repeat of the memory loss and put her in the position of having to re-discover herself from scratch once again. Singer is in a state of perpetual discovery of her identity and perpetual loss… but the new her is someone who she may be more comfortable with anyway. The new her doesn’t have all of the barriers that are raised by trying to block herself from caring, and the new her is capable of letting down her barriers enough to love.
The only problem is that because of the secrecy her previous job required, she is now left uncertain who to trust since neither her own memories nor her records hold any keys about which people around her are safe for her to become comfortable around
Lis Strange puts readers into the position of questioning their notions of loss and considering the idea that memories may not make up everything about a person. She invites readers to explore their own engagement with the notion of memory and our social fear of the loss of memory. She plays with ideas of uncertainty, and, particularly uncertainties around identity in order to put her reader into a position of mystery, shaping the overall spy-fi story around a general feeling of curiosity.
You can discover more about the work of Liz Strange on her website at http://www.lizstrange.com
Quote – Life Doesn’t End Like Stories
“Disappointed, are you? No proper end to a story? Well, maybe not. But life don’t end like stories.”
-Nancy Baker – A Terrible Beauty (Penguin Books, 1996)
Inverted Worlds
A Review of Jeff Lemire’s Trillium (Vertigo, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover photo of Trillium courtesy of http://jefflemire.wix.com/jefflemire#!graphic-novels/ckiy
1921 Earth and 3797, two worlds separated and connected by timelines, lives, temples, and trilliums. Jeff Lemire’s graphic style pulls together two narratives, linking two lives together. William, a man traumatized by war and Nika, a scientist in the future are strung together through circumstance and through their connection both of their worlds are inverted. By literally inverting one set of panels under another, portraying one story reversed, Lemire’s graphic style invites readers to see the interconnection between worlds and yet their ability to run in contrast to each other.
Lemire’s “Trillium” is a science fiction comic about cross-cultural and cross-temporal communication and the intersection of lives. Lemire’s protagonists Nika and William oppose the war-driven societies they came from that were willing to infringe on the lives of others to secure their own goals whether it be a cure from a plague that is sweeping across human intergalactic civilisations or a quest for the riches of history without regard for indigenous inhabitants. Both time periods are intimately self-interested and it is only through a willingness to bridge the gap between peoples that new knowledge and experience can be gained. “Trillium” is a tale about questioning what we believe to be true, all of the assumptions and ideas that shape our experience of the world and being willing to learn from our questioning mindset, challenging established patterns of knowledge.
Like the trillium itself, which in this graphic novel serves to facilitate a connection between those who ingest it, Lemire’s work serves to open up the idea that communication is multifaceted, multi-sensory, and requires complex ways of listening.
To read more about Jeff Lemire and his work, visit his website at http://jefflemire.wix.com/jefflemire
Quote – Feeling the Universe Spinning Loose
“Secretly, late at night, I would feel the universe spinning loose around me: boundless, nameless, a vortex of darkness within which my life became less than a speck of dust. The night sky would tilt toward me, yawning. And I would lie there breathless, waiting for the roof to peel away, waiting to lose my grip. To rise and rise forever into that great, inescapable Nothing, to drift until I disappeared – not only as though I no longer was, but as though I had never been.”
-Gemma Files, “The Narrow World” in Queer Fear II
Dreamy Horror
A Review of Emily Carroll’s “Through The Woods” (Margaret K. McElderry Books, Toronto).
By Derek Newman-Stille
Cover Photo of Through The Woods courtesy of http://books.simonandschuster.ca/Through-the-Woods/Emily-Carroll/9781442465954
“Through the Woods” is a modern day Grimm’s collection of horror tales, and it is wonderfully grim. Beautifully illustrated in an iconic fairy tale style, Through the Woods creates a sense of discomfort about the environments that we generally consider safe. From tales of sisters being led out of their home by a deadly stranger, to a wife moving into her husband’s home to discover pieces of his former wife spread throughout the home, to a tale of brother killing brother, to a best friend possessed, to family members filled with horrors, . The invasions in this book are bodily, spiritual, and violations of homes. The type of darkness the tales evoke is one that is close to home.
The graphic medium of these stories provides texture to them, a sense of closeness that makes the threat feel all the more real. Emily Carroll illustrates Through the Woods with a smoky quality that lets her stories bleed from the world of dreams into the mists that dwell at the edges of our vision. Words blur across the page, not generally confined to simple word bubbles or simple narration boxes, which are too confining for her style, but rather smeared across the page in a way that makes them part of pushing the action of the story forward. In some cases, dialogue is veiled in blood, part of a streak across multiple panels, tying the narrative together and breaking the simple borders of panels. There is a haunting, ethereal quality to these images which evokes the idea presented in the tales that horror lurks around us, insubstantial, but still hyper-present.
To discover more about the work of Emily Carroll, visit her website at http://www.emcarroll.com/ .
To find out more about Through the Woods, visit Simon and Schuster Canada’s website at http://books.simonandschuster.ca/Through-the-Woods/Emily-Carroll/9781442465954 .
Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 28: Myth and Canadian SF
In this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio, I talk about the way that myths and legends have influenced Canadian Speculative Fiction, focusing on the variety of different myths that have been brought to Canada. Myths have a power to inspire us, and to evoke thought and a sense of wonder about the world around us. In this episode, we examine Larissa Lai’s “When Fox is a Thousand”, Hiromi Goto’s “Kappa Child”, Marie Bilodeau’s “The Kevlar Canoe”, and Chadwick Ginther’s “Thunder Road” and “Tombstone Blues”. This episode examines how myths from China, Japan, French Canadian settlers, and the Norse have inspired our speculative fiction authors.
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.
Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 