Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  And of course that’s what most of this book is about: the children finding ways to grow up, the parents trying to help them. I didn’t plan it that way; it’s just that those were the stories that seemed to work.

  * * *

  You must understand that I am really a most improbable anthologist. I’m a poor scholar, not much of a collector or compiler, not at all a historian. (Call me a generalist, maybe, disseminator—someone once said neophiliac.) Nevertheless, this volume is my twentieth SF anthology, and the first nineteen brought me just enough dribs and drabs of fame and fortune so that I can now say brazenly (like in the Modern Art Joke): I don’t know anything about literary criticism, but I know what I like.

  What I like is getting my head turned around. I get off on fresh perceptions, widening horizons, new thoughts, and I like them best when they occur as a process in my own mind, rather than an exposition at which I am a passive spectator/receiver. What I look for in SF is the story (or verse—occasionally film—sometimes even essay) conceived and written in such a way as to suggest alternatives that will cause me to exercise my own imagination to broaden my own vision. To “ask the next question.”

  A Martian with a mangled spear

  Is stuffing tarts in my left ear.

  If I turn off my hearing aid,

  Will I still taste the marmalade?

  This synaesthetic gem was probably the beginning of this anthology. It was handed to me in December 1968 in an unhallowed hall of Rochdale College by an idealistic young academic already highly respected as poet, publisher and editor, but not yet famous for Alligator Pies, Garbage Delights and other tasty (not non-) sense. It turned my head around. I put it aside for my next anthology, which was some time coming.

  * * *

  Twenty is a nice round number.

  The first SF anthology I edited, in 1951, was called Shot in the Dark, not so much for its interior surprises as to enable Bantam Books to pass it off on mystery readers if necessary. The saleability of SF was an unknown quantity at the time.

  The time, as it turned out, was right. In the next eighteen years I did eighteen more collections. The last two, SF 12 (Delacorte) and England Swings SF (Doubleday), were published almost back-to-back in 1968.

  That was the same year I arrived in Toronto, a newly-landed immigrant with a U-Haul full of books, papers, plastic milk crates and foam pads. My new job as resource person at Rochdale would pay only room and board. I expected to have to do more anthologies for car-fares and cigarette money, and I figured Dennis Lee’s verse to be my first Canadian inclusion for SF 13.

  Thirteen was the lucky number: I never got around to doing it. (SF 12 was the twelfth annual in the “Year’s Best” series, and twelve years of claiming to present the Best—of anything—was more than enough. Better iconoclast than inconescent.) But by the time I realized I was not going to do another SF annual, I had learned a couple of things about Canadian SF.

  In all the far reaches of Canada in 1968 there seemed to be only two people (well, make it 2¼) writing recognizable science fiction seriously: Phyllis Gotlieb and H. A. Hargreaves (and Chandler Davis very occasionally; adding my own output at the time, make it 2½). But in odd corners and coach houses (especially the Coach House Press) Canadians of rare talent and sensibility were writing truly-fabulous funny-serious social-commentary SF: Dave Godfrey, Ray Smith, D. M. Price, J. Michael Yates, Gwendolyn MacEwen, P. K. Page, Robert Zend, Christopher Dewdney and more, were stuffed in with the marmalade.

  The seventies: I was becoming a Canadian and a broadcaster, and not thinking about anthologies at all. But (yes, Dennis, you’d still taste it) every switchoff was another switch on. I gave my SF collection to the Toronto Public Library to start the Spaced Out Library, and so became an occasional consultant. I was putting a lot of energy into The Writers’ Union of Canada, so became involved with a schools-curriculum project outlining available Canadian science fiction. I wrote radio documentaries and magazine articles, and kept getting asked to do pieces on science fiction. No way I could miss out on what was happening in Canadian SF.

  A lot was happening. Here, as elsewhere through the seventies, the most visible events were in book publishing (and selling). But we’re talking Canada: the busiest and healthiest area was of course academic. And to me, inquisitive immigrant, the most intriguing phenomenon was half-hidden under the surface of the literary mainstream.

  As I read Canadian authors, and met them personally, I kept finding myself touching what I think of as “science fiction head space.” Sometimes it was overt SF imagery, or a certain way of thinking about environment, a casual mixture of magic-and-realism, or an oddly familiar structural tension in the work. Then, one by one, leading Canadian authors began telling me about the impact of science fiction on their development: Berton, Laurence, MacEwen, Acorn, Purdy, Engel. Finally, I began to catch up on Canadian criticism. CanLit, I was told, is about survival and, characteristically, the environment may become almost a character in the story!

  Of course! Just like SF. (Is this why Canadian mainstream authors, when they turn to SF, usually do a good job of it? U.S. and U.K. mainstreamers generally muck it up.)

  Another (used-to-be) Canadian Fact I was learning was the prevalence of “secondary materials.” You know—Canada was famous for documentaries, but never made feature films? That kind of thing.

  * * *

  In 1968, when the prestigious Modern Language Association officially declared the study of science fiction a suitable pursuit for scholars, Canadian critics and teachers were already doing it. Harry Campbell, then Chief Librarian in Toronto, must have followed a sure Canadian instinct when he offered to relieve me of my unwieldy collection and establish SOL (the Spaced Out Library) in 1970. By that time, Arthur Gibson and Peter Fitting were already organizing science fiction classes at the University of Toronto, Madge Aalto (the first SOL librarian) was teaching at York, Darko Suvin had a course at McGill and Tom Henighan was just about to start at Carleton.

  SOL provided a focus, and increasingly, a resource. In ’72, SOL and McGill co-sponsored SeCon, the Secondary Universe Conference which brought scholars, critics and teachers of SF together from all over Canada, along with their counterparts from other countries, and a scattering of SF writers. In 1973, a serious scholarly journal, Science Fiction Studies, began publishing in Montreal.

  By the mid-seventies, most major Canadian universities had SF courses, and colleges and high schools were rushing to catch up. Some of the best teachers were encouraging students to write original stories for their term papers. And there were at least five-and-a-half working SF writers across the country, because Spider Robinson had moved up to Nova Scotia from the States, and Britishers Michael Coney and Andrew Weiner had settled in Victoria and Toronto.

  (Actually, it was at least six-and-a-half, if you count the blessedly brief extrusion of Harlequin’s kid brother, Laser Books, into the field. Laser published a whole series of a single cloned novel—same plot, same characters, different names, titles and bylines—before they discovered SF readers don’t like predictable formulas. I won’t count them.)

  Other publishers were doing better, sometimes spectacularly so. True, most of them didn’t know they were publishing SF, and most of the authors didn’t know they were writing it, but at least twenty at-least-readable novels and one short-story collection of Canadian science fiction were published in Canada during the seventies, and some of them were very fine science fiction indeed: Ian Adams’ The Trudeau Papers, Christie Harris’ Sky Man on a Totem Pole, Blanche Howard’s The Immortal Soul of Edwin Carlysle, Bruce Powe’s The Last Days of the American Empire, and others of varying quality by John Ballem, Stephen Franklin, William Heine, Basil Jackson, Richard Rohmer, David Walker and Jim Willer. Monica Hughes, Suzanne Martell and Ruth Nichols, writing juveniles, were genre-identified; so was Marie Jacober, with a prize-winning adult novel in Alberta. H. A. Hargreaves’ short-story collection, North By 2000, in 1975, must have been the first book labelled
specifically as Canadian Science Fiction. Gotlieb, Coney and Robinson, of course, were publishing novels and short stories regularly under SF labels in the U.S. and U.K., and towards the end of the decade two new Canadian novelists were launched by U.S. genre publishers: Crawford Killian in 1978 and Edward Llewellyn in 1979. (Llewellyn’s The Douglas Convolution was the first of only five novels completed before his untimely death in 1984.)

  Actually in 1979, you might well have used up all your fingers and toes counting Canadian SF writers—if you could find them. One man did. No one, not even John Colombo, would seriously have tried to produce an anthology of contemporary Canadian science fiction at that point, but he did bring out a very different collection: Other Canadas.

  * * *

  John Robert Colombo is a good deal more than just another CanCult household name. I called myself an improbable anthologist; Colombo is the real thing: scholar, historian, careful compiler, indefatiguable researcher, voluminous reader, aggressive correspondent. The marvel is that an editor of these accomplishments should have had the imaginative flair to wish to use them in the service of a genre hardly anyone (except thee and me, John—and sometimes I wondered about me) believed existed—indigenous Canadian SF.

  Other Canadas used the broadest possible definitions of source, form and content. It brought together a discriminating collection of science fiction and fantasy written by Canadians and/or about Canada over a time-span of more than two hundred years, including short stories, poetry, novel excerpts and critical essays. The selections, enriched with Colombo’s informed and engaging notes, established once and for all the existence of the territory, and in effect proclaimed it open for exploration and settlement.

  * * *

  I am not a scholar. My files are famous for their gaps, and my notes for their irrelevance. It is time to apologize in passing to all the people unmentioned here (Susan Wood! How could I never have spoken of Susan Wood?) who were creating Canadian science fiction in the seventies, as I hasten to disclaim any ability to document the burgeoning productivity of the eighties.

  (I was straying into television, returning to work on a novel. Still—)

  Even the most casual reader had to be aware of the emergence of Eileen Kernaghan (choice science fantasy), William Gibson (all over Omni) and Donald Kingsbury (Hugo Award nominee for Courtship Rite). I knew that John Bell and Lesley Choyce brought out an anthology in 1981 similar in its premises to Colombo’s book, but more modestly limited to the Atlantic provinces. I knew that an annual Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award had been established. I was invited to Boréal, the Francophone SF conference, and realized that on the other side of the language barrier a positive ferment of activity was going on. And back in Anglophonia I kept hearing names I hadn’t heard before.

  So when Ellen Godfrey of Press Porcépic suggested a new anthology in 1984, I was only briefly surprised. Of course—the time was right (again). Canadian SF—a uniquely Canadian expression of perspectives on change and the future—had developed as inevitably as (say) Canadian feature films or Canadian Studies courses in foreign universities, from the same ongoing Canadian dynamic: a dialectic of international/immigrant influences and a growing awareness of a specifically Canadian cultural identity. Colombo did not invent the concept of Other Canadas; he located and described it.

  * * *

  The first big surprise then was realizing I really wanted to try to do the book.

  Twenty is a nice round number. I guess I’d been away from it long enough. (Like sex and bicycles, it seems to come right back when you start again.)

  The surprises kept coming. The next big one was not having to fight with my publishers (or educate them). Right from the beginning we were in agreement about the book we wanted to do: a sampling of some of the best contemporary Canadian SF—as described in the Foreword. (“We” were Godfrey, myself and Gerry Truscott, the Press Porcépic editor who did all the nitty-gritties: correspondence, contracts, copy-editing and consultation on selections.)

  Another early surprise was the size of the mailing list compiled with help from John Colombo, John Bell (Ottawa-based editor/author/archivist), Rob Sawyer (young author with wide SF-fandom connections) and Doris Mehegan of SOL. Announcements of the project went out initially to more than seventy authors. Some were novelists who just might do a short story; many were mainstream writers who had occasionally done a bit of SF; but almost half of them were actually published science-fiction writers!

  The numbers were great as growth-figures, but they were still small seen as a field to choose from; I think we were all astonished at how “contemporary” the book finally came to be. I certainly was.

  We started out hoping—trusting—we wouldn’t have to go back for material earlier than the seventies, but I was prepared to fall back on reprinting a few sixties classics from Other Canadas—Laurence’s “A Queen in Thebes,” Hood’s “After the Sirens,” Theriault’s “Akua Nuten.” And while we waited for the first submissions to come in, I speculated on the possibilities of excerpts from some of the novels (Adams, Howard, Kingsbury, Llewellyn, Powe …) and dug out the old marmalade file. There was Dennis Lee, Chandler Davis’ “Hexamnion,” and selections from Dave Godfrey’s Death Goes Better with Coca Cola, Ray Smith’s Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada, Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Noman, P. K. Page’s The Sun, the Moon, and Other Stories, J. Michael Yates’ The Man in the Glass Octopus.…

  We did not, as you know, use any of these; they kept getting bumped back into history because the really big, continuing surprise was the stuff that kept coming in the mail. Altogether, we received some 400 manuscripts from almost 140 authors, and (talk about surprises!) no more than half of them were first-reading rejects (for assorted reasons of literary inadequacy, banality, didacticism or because they fell outside the boundaries of our shared concept of “SF”). It’s worth mentioning—happily, from where I stand (upon my prejudices)—that very little of what we read seemed to have been spawned by the proliferation of so-called Sci-Fi in the visual media. (We SF elite pronounce it Skiffy and never never use the term to describe the right stuff.) We had hardly any UFO-riders, cutesie ghosts, space battles, Wild West conquests of alien terrain, killer robots, virgin knights of the space orbits or born-again mythology.

  We did have a handful of submissions—mostly fantasy—that fell outside our preconceptions, but persuasively enough to put them to the test: stories and poems from Mary Choo, Greg Hollingshead, Carlan LeGraff, Tom Marshall and Libby Scheier, and two dazzling, elegant pieces of writing from P. K. Page (“Birthday,” a short story) and Gwen MacEwen (an excerpt from her new novel, Noman’s Land). We agonized over these last two (which will both be in print elsewhere by the time this book is released; look for them), but in the end confirmed—surprise again!—that we were indeed in agreement on what did not fit within our otherwise amorphous definition. And of course we knew by then that we were getting more than enough quality work that fell well within our boundaries.

  * * *

  Of the thirty-two selections in this book, seventeen are published here for the first time (in the English language); only two were first published before 1980.

  Talk about embarrassments of riches.…

  By the time half the selections were fairly definite, I was still juggling about fifty more pieces of (very) roughly equivalent merits: a little flaw in logic here, a bit of battered syntax there. Toss a coin? Are some shortcomings more remediable than others? (We did, in fact, ask for and get two rewrites—but both were stories we had already decided to use.)

  At this point in any anthology—well, anyhow, my anthologies—editorial decisions no longer rest solely on the excellence of the individual submission. The book is acquiring a shape that exercises its own influence. A story may be discarded because it is too close in theme and mood to one already chosen; or one piece might edge out another precisely because it is similar to something already included, but treats the topic very differently. At the same time, eac
h reflective re-reading magnifies small flaws—and some flaws magnify more horrendously than others. The process is no longer fair.

  That’s when anthologizing stops being fun.

  * * *

  At this moment I can envision the pile of photocopies in my desk drawer organizing a protest march on my typewriter, demanding equal rights, while I snivel pathetically, “Hey, the book just wasn’t big enough.” Leading the march would be John Bell’s “Centrifugal Force,” Charles de Lint’s “A Witch in Rhyme,” Tom Henighan’s “Tourists from Algol,” Patrick Kernaghan’s “Weekend Warrior” and Andrew Weiner’s “Station Gehenna.” Right behind them would be stories from David Beck, H. A. Hargreaves, B. C. Jensen, Christopher S. Lobban, J. M. Park, Ursula Pflug, Robert J. Sawyer, David Sharpe, Graeme Skinner and Ann Walsh. (Magazine editors and anthologists, please take note.)

  * * *

  It’s not fair, I said. This is the time to talk about leaning over backwards, particularly addressed to those authors who received rejection letters from Gerry Truscott, the author of “Cee.” This was one of the stories I juggled for weeks, and not until it landed inside the target did I know that the pseudonym “Pat Laurence” on the title page was Gerry’s.

  Did you ever try leaning over backwards both ways at the same time?

  I owe some apologies and acknowledgements as well, in connection with French-language selections. We started out on a very high plane, determined to honour both official languages. I asked Élisabeth Vonarburg, the editor of Solaris, who presides over the effervescent francophone science fiction conference in Chicoutimi, to spread the word in French Canada. Sure, said I, submit in French; we’ll get the things we want translated. I blush now for three of us, Canadian editors who read only one language. My thanks to Peter Fitting and Katie Cooke, and (much too late) to Marian Engel, who all read for me and advised me. (But somewhere deep inside I am wickedly grateful that I did not have another fifty stories to compare and match against each other.)