Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
Page 31
Max wheeled himself over to the exit door. He braced the wheels with his hands and opened the door with his foot.
“Is this a plan?” Jerry asked hopefully. “Because we could sure use a survival plan right now, Jim.”
Rain hit him in a sheet. Max squinted through it, at the raging Atlantica outside. The ocean had indeed come up to the doorstep — if it were clearer outside, he would no doubt be able to see to a flat watery horizon, interrupted by nothing but the tops of a few buildings, and perhaps the semi-circle of a radar dish, poking above the waves.
Behind him, Jerry Wylde shouted something, but it could have been a dog barking at his heel; the roar and thunder of Atlantica was all.
Afterword
They say it’s not the length that counts, it’s how good you are with what you’ve got — regardless, this time around, Tesseracts went for the long ones.
Seven long ones, to be exact — offering a variety of shapes, tastes, textures, colours, and thrills.
Long stories, too short to be called novels but lengthier than a short story … novellas. Now, there’s some disagreement as to the exact length of a novella. Some people have invented subdivisions to further confuse matters: novelettes for the shorter novellas, short novels for the longer ones … whatever. At one point, it all becomes too jargony to matter.
Some novellas are long enough to be a book all on their own, so we went for the shorter end of the spectrum, in order to showcase a diversity of stories and writers, in keeping with the spirit of the Tesseracts anthologies. When we sent out the call for submissions, we asked for stories that fell between ten and twenty thousand words: short enough to be able to include a lively selection, but long enough to let writers really inhabit and explore the worlds of their creation … and long enough for readers to come along for the ride and be armchair travellers on these fantastic voyages.
Canadian, global, mythological … fantasy, fable, science fiction … humour, drama, adventure … superheroes, monsters, lovers … past, present, future. Seven worlds of entertainment and wonder; seven fantastic visions by authors with distinctive voices and startling imaginations.
We received close to two hundred submissions — and, among those, more than enough to fill at least three books with top-notch novellas of speculative fiction from Canadian writers.
These seven stories are the very best of the fiction that was sent to us — state-of-the-art 21st-century Canadian speculative fiction.
True to the Tesseracts tradition, the authors here strike a balance between established writers on the Canadian SF scene and new storytellers whose bold, striking voices are only starting to be heard; between veterans of the Tesseracts anthologies and authors appearing in this series for the first time.
Canadian writers have few venues for novellas, and readers of Canadian fiction few opportunities to enjoy them.
Who knows? Maybe the idea behind this Tesseracts volume will catch on, and we’ll soon get to read more Canadian novellas of the fantastic.
Claude Lalumière
Montreal, March 2008
Details
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
Copyright © 2008
Individual contributions copyright by their respective authors
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada
Edited by Claude Lalumière
Cover Illustration by Michael Oswald
e Book ISBN: 978-1-894063-86-9
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