“The innumerable spirits of creation – from the leaf-headed standing people and the lichen-spotted stone people, to the furred four-leggeds and the feathered ones who danced on wind and breeze – were woven together in this world, and they belonged to the land as much as the land belonged to them.”
-Daniel Heath Justice – Kynship: The Way of Thorn and Thunder (Kegedonce Press, 2005)
“You might not get everything I say. But that doesn’t mean the story’s not there to understand. Can you listen before you hear?”
-Hiromi Goto – Chorus of Mushrooms (NeWest Press, 1994)
“The way through the forest
is walked by shapeshifters
and wolves who suffer from indigestion,
having eaten too many grandmothers.”
-Sandra Kasturi – Chaos Theory (in The Animal Bridegroom)
“Inevitable? In hindsight tragedy always appears so. Somehow the concept of unavoidable destiny offers comfort to uniformed readers, those to whom tragedy is nothing more than oderly columns of black type.”
-J.R. Campbell “To One Table” in Professor Challenger: New Worlds. Lost Places (Edge, 2015).
“I’m not sure, to be honest. I think the tales we grew up on served to both warn us of bad faeries, but also prepare us to accept their magic and wonder, in case we ever wandered to their land. Or were kidnapped.”
-Marie Bilodeau, Nigh Book 3
“Every shell is a life journal, made out if the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought. Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.”
– Nalo Hopkinson, Message in a Bottle
“Life haunts us, us ghosts. It hovers just out of reach, taunting.”
-Nalo Hopkinson, Old Habits (in Falling in Love with Hominids: Tacyon Publications, Forthcoming 2015)
“I see the ways in which science fiction is too often used to confirm people’s complacency, to reassure them that it’s okay for them not to act, because they are not the lone superhero who will fix the world’s ills”
-Nalo Hopkinson – Forward to Falling in Love With Hominids
“Story doesn’t mean fiction – it just indicates form. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has tension and struggle and resolution. Stories have quests and they answer questions. They can be historically true, and they can be allegorically true. Stories are easier to share. You can pass on a story to a child…. They leave impressions on us”
-Jerome Stueart- “The Disappearing Lion Trick” in Tesseracts Eighteen: Wrestling with the Gods (Edge, 2015).
“But nothing is ever really fixed. Michael’s father once told him about entropy and he never forgot. Something that depressing is hard to forget. Everything is eroding; people slow it down by fixing their cars and fixing their love lives and fixing their bodies, but in the end, it all falls apart anyway.”
-Brett Savory – In and Down (Brindle & Glass, 2007)
Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 