Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

February 27, 2017

Split Apart for New Perspectives

A review of Brent Nichols’ “Inquisitor” in Lazarus Risen (Bundoran Press, 2016) By Derek Newman-Stille In “Inquisitor”, Brent Nichols creates a future in which people can send copies of themselves to new planets, allowing one copy to begin life on a new planet while the original lives out their life on the first. Each copy lives their life out at...

Fiction Book Reviews Comment: 1

February 20, 2017

Psychiatric Survivor Superhero

A review of Jeff Lemire’s Moon Knight Vol 1: Lunatic (Marvel, 2016) By Derek Newman-Stille Writing about mental illness tends to be challenging and most authors tend to reify disempowering tropes of mental illness, projecting people with psychiatric disabilities as villainous, problematic, dangerous, and incompetent. Jeff Lemire’s 2016 rewrite of Moon Knight challenges some of the assumptions about mental...

Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

February 1, 2017

Detective Drama with Bite

A review of Melissa Yi’s Wolf Ice (Olo Books, 2015). By Derek Newman-Stille Every crime scene is unique and every investigation of a crime scene has its challenges, but those challenges are magnified when the victim is a werewolf and she disappears under suspicious circumstances around other werewolves. When Elena dies, everyone is uncertain how to proceed. Human police can’t be...

Uncategorized Comment: 1

December 6, 2016

Speculating Fantasy

Speculating FantasyBy Derek Newman-Stille Fantasy fiction is frequently viewed as an escapist form of fiction, one whose sole purpose is to provide a retreat from reality. Even people who advocate for the importance of fantasy tend to treat it as being important solely for its ability to provide an escape from reality. However, fantasy, like any genre fiction, is produced...

Editorials Comments: 0

November 4, 2016

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 72: An Interview with A.C. Wise

On this episode of Speculating Canada, I Interview the fabulous A.C. Wise about The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves The World Again. We discuss trans narratives, femininity and femme identity, Lovecraftian fiction, monstrosity, unspeakable horrors, weird literature, horror literature, resistant texts, diversity, representation in literature, making our fiction match the diversity of our own world, memory, the power of speculative...

Interviews Comments: 0

November 2, 2016

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 71: An Interview of Regina Hansen

On this episode of Speculating Canada, I interview the brilliant Regina Hansen to talk about the interrelationship between academia and speculative writing, on the ideas of haunting, and on notions of place and identity. You can listen to this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio at the link below This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and...

Interviews Comments: 0

October 25, 2016

No Longer Worn Down.

No Longer Worn Down A review of Amal El-Mohtar’s”Seasons of Glass and Iron” in The Starlit Wood (ed. Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien, Saga, 2016). By Derek Newman-Stille Amal El-Mohtar interweaves two tales of disempowered women, one forced to perpetually walk to save an abusive husband, and one forced to remain perpetually still to avoid being placed under the power...

Fiction Book Reviews Comment: 1

October 23, 2016

Stigma is Sticky

Stigma is StickyA review of Nalo Hopkinson’s The Chaos (Margaret McElderry Books, 2012) By Derek Newman-Stille As she frequently does, Nalo Hopkinson uses her novel The Chaos to disrupt hegemonic ideas of normalcy, questioning what is ‘normal’ and using the supernatural and magical to point out the way that the norms we create are equally strange. The Chaos takes elements...

Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

October 7, 2016

Growing Some Backbone

Growing Some BackboneA review of Marie Bilodeau’s “Hellmaw: Eye of Glass.” (The Ed Greenwood Group Inc., 2016) By Derek Newman-Stille There’s nothing quite so monstrous as finding a detached human head and spine in a back alley. Only something truly monstrous could do that kind of harm to a human being… but what if the detached head and spine ARE...

Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 0

October 7, 2016

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 70: An Interview of Derek Kunsken

On this episode of Speculating Canada, I interview Science Fiction and Space Opera author Derek Kunsken. Today we discuss fandom, fan conventions, the power of short fiction, science, and the power of space opera. We discuss the use of biological sciences in particular in science fiction writing to explore the figure of the alien and the power to imagine other...

On Air Comments: 0