Tag: myth

February 22, 2021

Primordial Futures

A review of Amanda Leduc’s The Centaur’s Wife By Derek Newman-Stille Heather and Tasha are both storytellers. Both weave tales for their own needs. When meteors fall and humanity is left starving and disoriented, Heather carries on her father’s tradition of telling fairy tales to create a more magical life while Tasha keeps telling others the bigger fairy tale –...

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July 19, 2020

What Big Teeth You Have

A review of Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild (Random House, 2019) By Derek Newman-Stille A fascinating blend of Red Ridinghood, werewolf fiction, Greek myth, and Rogarou legends of Metis people from the Georgian Bay area, Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild weaves together monstrous wolves into a book that is partially horror story and partially a call for social change. Like...

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October 11, 2017

Slavic Myths and Human Monsters

A review of David Demchuk’s The Bone Mother (ChiZine, 2017) By Derek Newman-Stille David Demchuk’s The Bone Mother brings together snippets of strange lives into a tale that hints at connections between these individual stories and provides shadows of a larger narrative tying them together. Each of Demchuk’s tales ties in with a snapshot shown at the beginning of the...

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September 9, 2017

Godly Love Story

A review of Jerome Stueart’s “Brazos” in The Angels of Our Better Beasts (ChiZine, 2016). By Derek Newman-Stille Mythology is filled with love stories between a human being and a god. These stories are generally told from the perspective of the beloved of the god… and generally they don’t turn out well for the human being with mortals transformed into...

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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...

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February 12, 2016

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 60: An Interview with Caitlin Sweet

This year at SF Contario I had the opportunity to meet with Caitlin Sweet. She was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule to be interviewed for Speculating Canada. In this episode, Caitlin Sweet and I discuss the Aegean Bronze Age (particularly talking about the Minoan people), mytho-historic fiction, magic, YA fiction, and mythology. You can listen...

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August 14, 2015

Bronze Age Magic

Bronze Age MagicA review of Caitlin Sweet’s The Door in the Mountain (ChiZine Publications, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille Caitlin Sweet’s The Door in the Mountain is a mytho-archaeological story of wonder, blending the mythology of the Ancient Greek world with archaeological settings from the even earlier society of Minoan Crete and populating this world with deep, complex characters. Sweet follows...

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May 28, 2015

Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 37: Fairy Tales in Canada

Canada is often viewed as too young of a country to have fairy tales, but in this episode, we explore the Newfoundland Fairy Tale tradition as well as some recent re-writings of fairy tale narratives to explore new themes and ideas. These narratives are explored for their ability to shift and change over time to explore new ideas, new geographies,...

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May 12, 2015

A Skeptic’s Guide to Science Fictional Religions

A review of Jerome Stueart and Liana Kerzner’s Tesseracts Eighteen: Wrestling with Gods (Edge, 2015) By Derek Newman-Stille I have to admit to a little bit of hesitancy when picking up Tesseracts Eighteen. While I have loved the Tesseracts series since I first discovered it and feel that Canadian Spec Fic owes a lot to this long-standing staple of Canadian...

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May 8, 2015

Cuttlefishy Myths

A review of James Bambury’s “Chromatophoric Histories of the Sepiidae” in Tesseracts Eighteen: Wrestling with Gods (Edge, 2015) By Derek Newman-Stille Human arrogance assumes that only humanity has the ability to develop beliefs in deities, and it is exciting to see that James Bambury’s “Chromatophoric Histories of the Sepiidae” is included in a collection on religious beliefs because unlike most...

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