Tag: Canadian Identity

July 8, 2025

An Interview with Clifford Samuels

Today, Speculating Canada takes an in-depth look at the Aurora Awards, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) and the CAFFA Hall of Fame with Clifford Samuels. Clifford gives insights on Canadian Speculative Fiction fandom, conventions, and some key authors in Canadian genre fiction. You can find out more about CSFFA at https://www.csffa.ca/ Convention organizer, reader and avid collector, are...

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August 29, 2020

An Interview with Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay

By Derek Newman-Stille Today, I chat with CanLit scholar Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay about some trends in Canadian literature, ideas of belonging and the Canadian Nation State, and Canadian music. Thank you to Sebastian for joining us here and sharing his insights. Spec Can: To begin our interview, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay: Absolutely, I’m currently...

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September 18, 2017

Golden Age Girls of Canadian Comics

A review of Kalman Andrasofszky and Blake Northcott’s Agents of PACT # 1 (Chapterhouse, 2017) By Derek Newman-Stille Many of the new Chapterhouse comics seem to be focussed on the narratives of men, so it is exciting to see that Agents of PACT is focussed on women. As a fan of the original Northguard comics by Mark Shainblum, I was...

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July 1, 2017

Canada Day Complexities and Questioning the 150

By Derek Newman-Stille Like many marginalized Canadians, Canada Day can evoke some complicated feelings. We are often very aware of the oppressions that have been carried out in the name of “Canada”: residential schools for aboriginal people, asylums that perpetuated the torture of people with disabilities, the Pink scare, bathhouse raids, and other attacks on queer Canadians, the razing of...

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January 3, 2015

A Mosaic of Stories

A review of Steve Vernon and Colleen Anderson’s Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast (Edge 2013) By Derek Newman-Stille It is very exciting to see one of the prestigious Tesseracts books sharing a name with this website. I was quite honoured to see that they had chosen a name that matched the name I created for...

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August 16, 2014

Superheroic Questions

A review of Northguard Book One: Manifest Destiny by Mark Shainblum and Garbriel Morrissette (Caliber Press, 1989) 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...

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July 10, 2014

Resurrecting a Goddess

A review of Adrian Dingle’s Nelvana of the Northern Lights (reprinted by Rachel Richey and Hope Nicholson, CGA Comics, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille Resurrecting a goddess is hard work, particularly when she is the demi-goddess first Canadian national superheroine, pre-dating the invention of Wonder Woman… but this is precisely what Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey did this year. Through a...

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March 20, 2014

Escaping North – Zombified Canada

A review of Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Exile Editions, 2013) By Derek Newman-Stille In American zombie movies, Canada is a place of escape, a place to run to in the event of a zombie apocalypse to escape from the ravening hoards. I am not certain what sort of magical barrier our country’s border has, or...

Categories Fiction Book Reviews Comments: 2

January 24, 2014

All The World is a Stage

A Review of Welwyn Wilton Katz’s Come Like Shadows (Coteau Books, 1993) By Derek Newman-Stille As someone who has done stage acting, Welwyn Wilton Katz’ Come Like Shadows spoke to my experience of the stage, and added a little bit of magic in addition to the already potent magic of the theatre itself. Set at the Stratford Festival during a...

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April 12, 2013

Interview with Robert J. Sawyer

An Interview with Robert J. Sawyer By Derek Newman-Stille I recently had the opportunity to meet Robert J. Sawyer at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. We only had time for a short chat since both of us had a great deal of events on our plates, so I wanted to have the chance to do a...

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