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 – that they can all survive. 

In The Centaur’s Wife, Amanda Leduc reveals the power of storytelling, necessary lies, and complicated truths. She reveals the human need to create stories and the transformative power of the tales we tell. Part apocalyptic fiction, part myth, and part collection of new fairy tales, The Centaur’s Wife demonstrates Leduc’s versatility and brilliance as a storyteller. 

The Centaur’s Wife is a tale of the liminal, the between, and not just because centaurs are half human and half horse. Leduc tells a story about outsiders, edgy Others who belong neither completely to one world or another. Leduc reveals the power of not belonging, of existing outside the order imposed by those in power. Her characters question easy categories and simple social structures, revelling in complexities. They disrupt norms and it is through this disruption that they invite in new possibilities.

To discover more about The Centaur’s Wife, visit https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/551899/the-centaurs-wife-by-amanda-leduc/9780735272859

To find out more about Amanda Leduc, visit https://amandaleduc.com

A review by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD (They/Them)

Why Star Wars is Important To Me As An Abuse Survivor

By Derek Newman-Stille

I am a child abuse survivor. My biological father beat me throughout my life until my mother, sister, and I were able to escape when I was 15. This may not seem to be related to Star Wars… but it is.

As a child, I read about abuse to try to understand what was happening to me. All of the work that I read suggested that there was a cycle of abuse and that I would inevitably become abusive, just like my biological father.

Star Wars deals with cycles. It is a story about cycles and about breaking cycles and resisting inevitability. This mattered to me as a child, as a youth, and still matters to me. Star Wars offered a glimpse at the potential to break a cycle. It offered a glimpse into possibilities of redemption and resistance. It showed an evil father figure who was able to be redeemed and resist hatred. It showed a son figure who was able to resist becoming what his father was, a son who was able to push back against anger and hatred and become his own person, become something good instead of succumbing to the inevitability of hatred.

Science fiction doesn’t just exist as entertainment and escape. It exists as a way of teaching us lessons through stories. When we think that a future is inevitable, science fiction offers the reminder that the future is a story being told, that it is flexible, and that it is changeable. Science Fiction offers the idea that there are multiple futures out there and that the future can be written, unwritten, and rewritten.

It’s why Sci Fi has been so important to me. It offered a way out. A possibility for a future that wasn’t inevitable, but instead could be changed. This is an important message for someone who is being abused, and an essential reminder for those who are continuing to deal with the repercussions of being abused.


Written by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD

Confusion

Confusion

A review of Karin Lowachee’s “Invasio”in Shades Within Us: Tales of Migration and Fractured Borders Edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law (Laksa Media Groups Inc., 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Telling a tale of mass migration after an apocalyptic invasion, Karin Lowachee’s “Invasio” explores the confusion associated with diaspora and the search for a new home. Although her narrator never describes details of the invasion, there are inferences of an alien invasion that has resulted in a scattered few escaping out of cities and major populated areas, relying on their survival skills to survive.

Lowachee explores the “I will do anything to survive” motif that is popular in a lot of survival stories, particularly apocalyptic ones, however, her narrator repeatedly questions whether she is the villain. Rather than telling herself she is a good person for putting her own survival first, the narrator relates her experiences and actions to the various science fiction and fantasy books she has read and realizes that she can’t justify the actions she has taken to survive and the impact that it has had on the lives around her.

This is not a straightforward tale, but rather it is stream of consciousness, illustrating the confusion of memory, current experience, and speculation that occurs when people are in situations of desperation. Her character is without a touchstone, without a connection to home or family that can keep her identity intact and instead experiences a slipperiness of identity and experience, an uncertainty that accompanies major lifestyle changes and loss of land. The narrator’s experiences are so unlike the privileged life she has led that she can only relate them to the fiction books and films she has experienced, understanding herself through speculation and imaginative works.

Lowachee creates a tale that dissociates the reader, makes the reader uncertain, uncomfortable, and evokes a need to pay attention deeper to the transformative actions the narrator is undergoing. This is a tale of profound loss and confusion. As much as it is a tale of aliens, it is also a tale of alienation.

To discover more about Shades Within Us, visit http://laksamedia.com/shades-within-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause/

To find out more about Karin Lowachee, visit http://www.karinlowachee.com

The End is Only The Beginning

A review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s collection Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse (Exile Editions, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover photo of Fractured courtesy of Exile Editions

Cover photo of Fractured courtesy of Exile Editions

Flooding, ghosts, spreading oil sinkholes, whitenoise, bio weapons, nuclear bombs, sudden population disappearances, a strange rotting of the landscape, persistent sleep, the drying of the world’s lakes, alien invasion, shadows, plague, constant rain, technological crashes, ruptures into the abyss, fires… the visions of the apocalypse are multifaceted and Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse imagines new nuances of each potential end. But ultimately, this is not a collection about the end, not about the apocalypse itself, but the experience of the end and the way that the end can be a beginning of a changed world, a world that envisions a separation from the past but is still haunted by its memory. Fractured imagines what characters in the post-Apocalypse are feeling, how they are making meaning out of their experiences, how they are coping with severe changes to their world, and ultimately, the loneliness that comes from facing the end. This is a volume of endings that embody beginnings.

The term apocalypse means revelation, the revealing of things and ultimately this volume reveals the nuanced experience of endings and focuses on people coping with the notion of the end, the thought about the idea of endings itself. It is a volume of change, memory, isolation, and desire.

Fractured looks that the connection between human and landscape and how each mirrors and is influenced by the other, illustrating hoe we are shaped by each other – place and people. It is a collection of scavenging from the past and collecting the detritus and rubbish of our civilisation as treasures, reminding us of our privilege to be living in a pre-apocalyptic world.

The post-apocalypse is as much about meaning as it is about survival.

To discover more about Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse, visit Exile Editions’ website at exileeditions.com

You can find a review of some of the short stories in this collection at

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2014/11/28/ectoplasmopocalypse/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2014/04/09/hollow-signals/

 

Ectoplasmopocalypse

A review of Orrin Grey’s “Persistence of Vision” in Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post Apocalypse (Exile Editions, 2014)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover photo of Fractured courtesy of Exile Editions

Cover photo of Fractured courtesy of Exile Editions

Shaped by movie imagery with comparisons of the events of the story to a Hollywood film, Orrin Grey’s Persistence of Vision uses the unreality of film to contribute to the notion of an apocalypse that no one believes in. The notion of the end is difficult for anyone to conceive of, but Grey’s characters are especially confused because their end comes from the spectral presences of the past. People begin dying under odd inexplicable circumstances – pursued by shadows, picked up by spectral hands, scared to death.

After a scientific experiment with an old computer that was discovered beneath an asylum, the undead return to the earth… but not the expected undead that we have seen in post-apocalyptic survival film after survival film… instead Grey brings us a return not of the body but of the essence, a return of ghosts to the mortal realm. The world becomes crowded with the haunted presences of our past, the dead returned to wreck spectral violence on the living.

Grey creates an undead apocalypse far more frightening than the zombie apocalypse because these undead beings aren’t corporeal, their bodies can’t be destroyed. They are lingering presences that demand our attention by bringing us into their world.

Rather than a story of triumphant survivors challenging the odds and making a new world, Grey asks readers what sort of person would want to live in a post-apocalyptic world, particularly one where all one can do is hide, wait, and just survive. Although ghosts have returned from the otherworld, it is the living human population who are in limbo. They are the ones who wait in a meaningless stretch of time.

To find out more about the work of Orrin Grey, visit http://orringrey.com/

To find out more about Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post Apocalypse, visit Exile Editions’ website at http://www.exileeditions.com/

Oracular Warnings

A Review of Joseph Macchiusi’s The Betelgeuse Oracle (2009)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Cover photo of The Betelgeuse Oracle courtesy of Joseph Macchiusi

Cover photo of The Betelgeuse Oracle courtesy of Joseph Macchiusi

Joseph Macchiusi’s The Betelgeuse Oracle straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy, presenting an apocalyptic present that is partially scientific and partially supernatural, challenging the firm boundaries that are often placed between them.

Macchiusi’s protagonist, James, is a security guard at York University who has always had a slight penchant for visions, but when the world is suddenly bombarded with neutrinos from the dying star Betelgeuse and all electrical systems are destroyed, the human population of the world goes into seizures and people begin to change. James ends up acquiring a new voice in his head, the voice of the Egyptian god Horus. In this apocalyptic world, where technology has been permanently disrupted, James is forced to re-assess the way he views the world, gathering together a group of people to ensure survival.

The disruption of technology and electrical systems allows Macchiusi to explore our own dependency on technology and the technological deserts we have created that are our cities. He critiques modernity’s need for technology by illustrating the terror and destruction wrought by a world that has been denied something that has become a staple of our existence. In addition to needing technology for basic survival, Macchiusi notes that we have become information junkies, addicted to telecommunication, and one of his characters brings his disabled cellular phone with him everywhere as a form of talisman for the world that he pines for.

With the changes in technology and the neuro disruption caused by the pulse from Betelgeuse, people start becoming wholly unlike themselves, experiencing challenges to their identity and their selfhood as they are forced to do things that are out of character in order to survive.

Our society has reduced community down to the basic nuclear family, and James, a family man, is forced to challenge and change his notion of community as his family is lost to him. In order to survive, new community units need to be formed, based on mutual sharing, and the willingness to sacrifice things for strangers to survive. Characters cement their bonds to each other not just through sharing nutrients, but through shared stories, the telling of tales to one another that draw members together, inviting them into the process of creating new, shared myths and tales.

Like many apocalyptic narratives, The Betelgeuse Oracle, asks readers to question their dependencies on things around them and the danger of continuing on the path we have created. Through the vision of cities as wastelands of abandoned technology, deserts of lifeless buildings and suffering humanity, Macchiusi calls on readers to look critically at the society we are creating and our separation from the natural world.

To discover more about Joseph Macchiusi and The Betelgeuse Oracle, visit his website at http://josephmacchiusi.com/ .

Interview with Noah Chinn

An Interview with Noah Chinn by Derek Newman-Stille

Noah Chinn is the author of Bleeding Heart Yard (about werewolves, witches, and

Author photo courtesy of Noah Chinn

Author photo courtesy of Noah Chinn

romantic curses) and Trooper # 4 (a post-apocalyptic adventure). Noah Chinn tends to play with ideas of comedy and humour while dealing with issues of disaster and destruction… and he brings some of that humour to this interview. I hope you enjoy laughing in the apocalypse with Noah Chinn as much as I did. If you have not already read my review of Bleeding Heart Yard, you can check it out at https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/bewitched-beloved-and-between-worlds/ 

Spec Can: To begin our interview, could you tell readers a little bit about yourself?

Noah Chinn: Hmmm… I could just give you a boring standard mini bio, or I could give you some interesting highlights that make me sound like a rock star. What to do, what to do?  Yeah, let’s go with the latter.

I’ve bicycled across Canada and eight other countries (including Japan, England, France and Germany). I’ve hiked a few mountains, including Fuji and Snowden, as well as a few in B.C.  I lived in Japan for three years teaching English, and England for five years running a bookstore. I proposed to my wife on the stage of the Lord of the Rings musical (with an Elvish ring no less). I had a long running comic strip online and in print, and now have two novels published with a third on the way.  I got caught up in the middle of a riot once.  Sometimes I babysit a ferret.

Spec Can: Your story Trooper # 4 is a post-apocalyptic narrative. What got you interested in writing about apocalyptic themes?

Noah Chinn: I wonder if the appeal of post-apocalypse is an urban-centric phenomenon.  How many people raised on prairie farms are fans of Mad Max?  Some of us daydream about how we could survive in such a world, while others just like being taken out of their comfort zone.  It’s not just the threat of death, after all. It’s all the things you take for granted being taken away.

They also say that there are only three types of stories: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus himself.  Facing a post apocalypse usually means dealing with all three.

But really my attraction to those stories is the personal challenge.  The idea that if you keep your wits about you and learn the rules, you can adapt and survive any imagined hell.  The real question is, do you keep your humanity in the process?

Spec Can: People often suggest that those who read apocalyptic narratives are negative in some way. What do you think are some of the characteristics of those who read and write apocalyptic narratives?

Noah Chinn: I’m not sure people who read apocalyptic narratives are necessarily negative. Granted there are a lot of stories where the prospect is bleak once the story ends.  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – holy hell.  Great book, but you don’t exactly expect the human race to survive long afterwards. We’re pretty much doomed.

But sometimes the stories are about overcoming, surviving, and the possibility of rebuilding.  And sometimes it’s about the world changing. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, is a good example.  Homo Sapiens might be at an end, but we’ve also become something else.

And then there’s World War Z by Max Brooks, probably my favorite of the Zombie genre.  In that case it’s not only about the end of the world, but fighting to take the world back, and dealing with the new reality in a rational way.  In that sense it’s quite positive.

Spec Can: What is the apocalyptic theme that fascinates you most and what is so interesting and exciting about it?

Noah Chinn: I think some people (especially in film) mistake fatalism and hopelessness with being exciting. To me it sucks the tension away.

Where’s the fun in being thrown into a hell you CAN’T possibly survive or fight back against?  Where the enemy is unstoppable and invincible?  That was always my problem with the War of the Worlds movies and films like Independence Day – they always had the aliens utterly invincible (baring a convenient fluke that allows us to learn more about them) until the germs get to them (or in Independence Day, a virus, heh).  If the story was aboutescaping, that could work, but it’s not.

What made HG Wells’ novel superior, in my opinion, was that the Martians were vastly superior to us, but NOT invincible.  The scene where the HMS Thunder Child destroys two Tripods makes you realize the Martians aren’t invulnerable, but we are still so vastly outmatched that the end result is still the same.

That tiny bit of hope adds to the hopelessness of the situation, which has far more tension than constant failure.  And it keeps the reader thinking about “but what if they try this” instead of just giving up and waiting for the characters to keep running away.  I think the movie Aliens succeeds in a similar way.  Sure, you can shoot them, but they can be anywhere, they’re smart, and there’s always more of them.

So to me what fascinates me most is trying to find the solution to the problem – whether it’s the survival of the species or just the main character.  If it’s just about counting down the minutes till you kiss your ass goodbye and praying for a deus ex machina type miracle, then it’s just not as interesting to me.

Spec Can: How can apocalyptic themed novels raise social awareness about current social issues? What can readers learn by reading apocalyptic narratives?

Noah Chinn: It depends on who is handling it and what kind of story they’re trying to tell.   Some stories are big into metaphors and symbolism, and sometimes have the fall of civilization tied in with various social elements.  Sometimes a story has the survivors represent different facets of humanity, and the story is a microcosm of society.

To bring up some of the books mentioned earlier, World War Z does a very good job of dealing with a lot of contemporary social, cultural, political, medical and even military ideas to explain not only how the end comes about, but how different countries cope with what’s next.  But it’s not doing it through symbolism.

I Am Legend essentially shows how the last man on earth ends up becoming the boogeyman of the next civilization.  In many ways the story reflects the nature of revolutions in the real world, and how the old regimes are vilified.

My own take on it in Trooper #4 is of a far more personal and internalized nature.  I’d rather not say more than that.  Spoilers, y’know.

Spec Can: What role does curiosity play in creating a better future?

Noah Chinn: Curiosity is one of the reasons we are who we are.  We ask ourselves questions and we try to find answers.  Sometimes we make things better, sometimes we make things worse – but even when we make things worse that same curiosity gives us the capacity to try and fix it.

The other reason we are who we are, I believe, is storytelling because we’re the only species that can imagine a different reality than what we’re in, and not only communicate it, but get others interested in it as well.  And at some point someone might try to make it happen. Nobody would have bothered going to the moon if nobody was curious about it, or told stories about how to get there or what we might find.

Spec Can: Trooper # 4 features a woman who has lost her memory. Why is memory loss such a popular topic in fiction at the moment? What fascinates us so much about losing one’s memory?

Noah Chinn: Is it?  I must have forgotten that….

On the one hand it’s an easy gimmick.  Few writers if any have their characters fleshed out before they start writing them.  The process of writing is in part the process of finding out who your characters are.  And if they have no memory then everything’s as much a surprise to them as it is to you.  It also conveniently locks away information that the character might otherwise have that you don’t want them to know until a later time.  But that’s me being half heartedly cynical about the writer’s stake in the game.

From the reader’s angle there is genuine curiosity about solving a puzzle.  Memory loss on its own isn’t that interesting except from a scientific standpoint.  But in a story the memory loss is almost always somehow connected to the story.  Why they lost their memory might be central to the plot, or what they forgot is key to unlocking a mystery or saving the day.  It also makes anyone and everyone involved in the story unreliable – especially the person who lost their memory.

Spec Can: Your novel Bleeding Heart Yard is partially about a man who discovers his “true love” but is cursed to be unable to communicate with her apart from swearing. Why are supernatural narratives such great places to explore ideas of love and relationships?

Noah Chinn: Probably because it gives the characters something unusual to overcome, and can be metaphors for something else entirely. Twilight is supposed to be about abstinence, for example.  And I think most people can relate to the idea of putting your foot in your mouth when trying to talk to a boy/girl you like, so a curse like this lets you ramp up that effect in every possible way.

Spec Can: Why is the theme of the curse popular? How does it speak to modern readers?

Cover photo of Bleeding Heart Yard, courtesy of the author

Cover photo of Bleeding Heart Yard, courtesy of the author

Noah Chinn: A curse is something imposed on you, something out of your control.  You can point a finger at who did it, but you can’t really do anything about it.  I think we all feel cursed now and then – bad stuff happens and we think “What did I do to deserve this?” as if we actually DID do something, instead of just the random nature of the universe.  It taps into our paranoia of someone or something that has it in for us. But it also gives us a target for our attention, rather than a vague sense of bad things happening, you have something specific and defined.  In an odd way, it brings order to that chaos, which means there’s a chance to do something about it, instead of just swinging at shadows.

Spec Can: What myths of the monstrous and magical do you draw on when you write?

Noah Chinn: Whatever is handy.  Whether you’re using something that’s existed for millennia or inventing something new, the truly important thing is consistency.  Monsters , magic, and myth all have to follow rules. They can be broad rules, but they need to be there so you know what the limits are and work within them (or, if you break them, come up with a reason explaining how and why).

Spec Can: What is different about Canadian stories of the supernatural from those of other nations?

Noah Chinn: I honestly can’t say. We apologize more?

Spec Can: What werewolf myths do you create and how are they different from the werewolves of other authors?

Noah Chinn: In Bleeding Heart Yard I wanted to have a creature that wasn’t exactly a werewolf, but something that werewolves could have been based on – as well as a number of other mythical creatures.  The species in the book has a couple of key powers and vulnerabilities that make it broadly applicable to everything from werewolves and vampires to rakshasa and wendigos. But in actuality they are simians that simply evolved along different lines from humans in a parallel world where magic is strong.

Cute little coincidence: the year after Bleeding Heart Yard came out Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter published The Long Earth, which has a similar idea (tying the creatures to elves and trolls instead) as well as the notion of parallel worlds one can jump to one at a time (which is also in BHY). In my case the ideas are simply touched upon, whereas in The Long Earth they are the full focus of the story.    

Spec Can: What can Speculative Fiction do that “realistic” fiction can’t?

Noah Chinn: Depends who you ask, but the most obvious answer is you’re not constrained by reality to get your message across. You could write a story about banning books in a realistic fiction story set in modern day, sure.  But what if you wanted to take it further to get your point across? It would be of hard to write something with the impact of Fahrenheit 451 without creating a society in which all books are banned.  You need to think not only of why, but what form that world would take, how people live their lives, the consequences of that culture on people’s behavior, and so on.  You need to create a world that doesn’t exist, but you can believe could – even if only for the duration of the story.

Spec Can: Are there any other ideas or thoughts that you would be interested in sharing with your readers?

Noah Chinn: Eat your Wheaties and drink your Ovaltine.  Don’t do drugs.

I want to thank Noah Chinn for this insightful and humourous interview. There is nothing quite like a talk about apocalyptic themes where you spend most of the time chuckling. 

Upcoming Interview with Noah Chinn On Wednesday, December 26th

Since Speculating Canada is currently doing an apocalyptic theme, I thought it would be interesting to interview an author who writes post-apocalyptic fiction. The fact that he also writes about werewolves and witches means that this interview was even more fun for me.

In this upcoming interview on Wednesday, December 26th, Noah Chinn explores whether apocalyptic themes are fundamentally urban, the role of the apocalyptic in feelings of loss, and the danger of losing one’s humanity when facing the idea of the end.  Noah Chinn takes a close look at how the theme of memory loss is used in literature, the role of curiosity to change the world, concepts of love and awkward relationships, curses and ideas of control, and the role of monsters and myth. Noah infuses his insights with humour and wit.

Here are some highlights from the interview:

Noah Chinn: “Some of us daydream about how we could survive in such a world, while others just like being taken out of their comfort zone.  It’s not just the threat of death, after all. It’s all the things you take for granted being taken away.”

Noah Chinn: “The real question is, do you keep your humanity in the process [of encountering the apocalypse]?”

Noah Chinn: “Sometimes the stories are about overcoming, surviving, and the possibility of rebuilding.  And sometimes it’s about the world changing.”

Noah Chinn: “I think some people (especially in film) mistake fatalism and hopelessness with being exciting. To me it sucks the tension away.”

Noah Chinn: “That tiny bit of hope adds to the hopelessness of the situation, which has far more tension than constant failure.  And it keeps the reader thinking about “but what if they try this” instead of just giving up and waiting for the characters to keep running away.”

Noah Chinn: “Curiosity is one of the reasons we are who we are.  We ask ourselves questions and we try to find answers.  Sometimes we make things better, sometimes we make things worse – but even when we make things worse that same curiosity gives us the capacity to try and fix it.”

Noah Chinn: “A curse is something imposed on you, something out of your control.  You can point a finger at who did it, but you can’t really do anything about it.  I think we all feel cursed now and then – bad stuff happens and we think “What did I do to deserve this?” as if we actually DID do something, instead of just the random nature of the universe.  It taps into our paranoia of someone or something that has it in for us. But it also gives us a target for our attention, rather than a vague sense of bad things happening, you have something specific and defined.  In an odd way, it brings order to that chaos, which means there’s a chance to do something about it, instead of just swinging at shadows.”

So, check out Speculating Canada on Wednesday, December 26th to read the interview and hopefully gain some insights about the apocalypse… before it is too late… or at least be able to laugh about it…