Tag: Toronto

February 4, 2024

An Interview with Douglas Smith About The Dream Rider Saga

Douglas Smith returns to the Speculating Canada studio to talk about his latest book series The Dream Rider Saga. We explore ideas of mental health and disability, poverty and homelessness, the role of the city, urban fantasy, the superhero, and how to write powerful characters Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning author described by Library Journal as “one of Canada’s most...

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December 3, 2015

Grey Areas

A review of Tanya Huff’s ” Gate of Darkness, Cirlce of Light” (DAW, 1989) By Derek Newman-Stille Tanya Huff’s Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light is a rare novel in that it features a type of protagonist that is rarely displayed in literature, and particularly urban fantasy literature. Rebecca is a woman with an ID (intellectual disability, sometimes called a...

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May 15, 2015

On The Familial Lives of Lizard Superheroes

A review of Jason Loo’s The Pitiful Human Lizard #3 (2015) By Derek Newman-Stille In The Pitiful Human Lizard # 3, author And illustrator Jason Loo finally gives us a glimpse at some of the supporting characters in the comic. We get our first real look at the life of the top tier Toronto superhero Mother Wonder, and a chance...

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September 9, 2014

Definitely Not A Chameleon.

A Review of Jason Loo’s The Pitiful Human-Lizard Issue 1 (May, 2014) By Derek Newman-Stille Few superheroes call themselves “pitiful”. Most tend to hypermasculinize themselves to try to make themselves seem beyond the human, more powerful, further beyond moral critique, but Jason Loo’s The Pitiful Human-Lizard plays with the superhero genre and opens it to critique, question, and, yes, pity....

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June 14, 2013

Voudoun Visions of Toronto

A Review of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in The Ring (Grand Central Publishing, 1998) By Derek Newman-Stille In Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson blends urban fantasy and near-future science fiction together in a Toronto environment. She creates a Toronto that has been cut off from the rest of Canada, ghettoised and locked off from the rest of the...

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June 1, 2013

Abstract – Speculating Diversity: Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl In The Ring and the Use of Speculative Fiction to Disrupt Singular Interpretations of Place

A few readers have expressed some interest in my academic work researching Canadian Speculative Fiction. I have sent out versions of my abstracts for upcoming conferences to people directly, but I thought it may be worthwhile for me to post them on Speculating Canada so that people can see them. For those of you who are not from academic backgrounds,...

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January 1, 2013

Year in Review: What is Canadian Speculative Fiction – from the authors

People are often asking if there is such a thing as “Canadian identity”, something that differentiates Canada from other nations. I thought I would ask authors if they thought that there was something distinctly Canadian about Canadian Speculative Fiction or how much they felt that their Canadian identity influenced their writing. I have provided links to the full interviews below...

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October 20, 2012

Patient Zero and the Post-Human

A review of Nina Munteanu’s Darwin’s Paradox (Dragon Moon Press, 2007) By Derek Newman-Stille In Darwin’s Paradox Nina Munteanu displays her awareness of scientific discourse: focussing on areas like chaos theory, biological theories of co-evolution, symbiosis and virology, and ecological theories. Her protagonist, Julie, is patient zero in a spreading epidemic that has infected most of modern civilisation. Munteanu creates...

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October 6, 2012

Interview with Douglas Smith

An Interview with Douglas Smith By Derek Newman-Stille This week I had a great opportunity to chat with Toronto author Douglas Smith to discuss ideas about genre-crossing in SF, the ability of SF to challenge the status quo and propose new questions and ideas about how we can view our world, and the power of SF as a medium without...

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October 4, 2012

Upcoming Interview with Douglas Smith on Saturday, October 6, 2012

This week, I had the opportunity to interview Toronto author Douglas Smith. Smith’s work spans the speculative genres from horror to science fiction to fantasy, often blending and recombining speculative elements. You may have seen some of my review of Douglas Smith’s work on Speculating Canada, but if you have not, click on his name in the tags section to...

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