Colleen Anderson (1)

This is a seriously solid collection of speculative fiction. Ignoring the part where three of the 5-star reviews are from authors featured in this collection, and the cover which is just so awful, and that it could have used at least one more once-over to correct some typos, this is a really really good collection!

First, I love reading stuff by Canadians. And this anthology includes stories by writers from every province and territory, which is extra Canadian! This is not classic show more sci-fi...sure, there's space travel and aliens and AI and monsters, but every story is different or weird in some new way. Like any short-story collection, there are some pieces I didn't love, but none of them were due to lack of skill from the author. The first two stories both had a China Mieville-y feel to them, Vermilion Wine about a mystery city in/around/on top of/inside of Italy, with no clues to its existence except for an old book about the ritual uses of wine, and The Wall about a strange membrane separating this world from another that likes to steal babies. The third story, 2020 Vision, is about a man who created a church of Spock. The fourth, Why Pete? a wonderfully written and poignant story of a woman waking up from a deep-sleep space pod to disaster on her spaceship; the fifth, one of my favourites in this collection, Bird Bones, about a boy living with his mad scientist father and genetically modified companion - this story has such a strange amount of heart for being 10 pages long. Look, I could go on, I'm just saying, pretty much every story is great. And if you don't like it, hey, it's short, I promise there's another good one waiting for you!

But actually I have to mention a couple more that I really liked: Sin A Squay, about two Native sisters found, decades later, by their old teacher from a Residential School, a literal monster. Hereinafter Referred To as the Ghost, about the invisible world of the undead and their bureaucracy of haunting. Graffiti Borealis about living graffiti on the streets of Montreal. Team Leader 2040 about a shitty future where the only jobs that old people and refugees can get are playing zombies in a popular and dangerous game in which the rich can pay to shoot people. And everyone is racist. Everybody Wins, about a mysterious lotto game that suddenly pops up across the world and which I'm sure you can all guess is NOT WHAT IT SEEMS.

And all the stories I didn't mention are also beautiful and eerie and gross and wonderful, even the ones I didn't love. So I guess I should start reading some of the past issues of this anthology! Go Canada! Go Canadian sci-fi! show less

Here is another compendium of weird stories from north of the border, in Canada.

A new mother can't leave her baby alone for a second, out of fear that The Wall will devour the child. It's a creature that creeps along walls, looking like a shadow, and with very sharp teeth. On the other side of The Wall is a land of torment straight from Hell. Another story looks at the difference between people who are spiritual without believing in a specific religion, and those who are absolutely sure of show more the infallibility of religious doctrine, for instance, without being spiritual. What if all newborns are genetically tested, and the "non-believers" are killed?

A doll tells a little girl a story about vultures who go down chimneys, and kidnap little children as they sleep. They are taken to the deep, dark Underground, where the goblins live. The "lucky" ones are cooked and eaten, and the "unlucky" ones are sent to the mines as slaves. A young man visits his grandfather's grave, which now has an interactive video of Grandpa (the software needs some diagnostic help). He also burns his worthless Ph.D. in Education, because there no longer are any live school teachers.

All over the world, strange spheres appear and tell people "touch me and you will get twenty thousand dollars" (or win a cow, or save one hundred acres of rainforest, etc.). Their prizes come due in sixty days. Do they actually get their prizes?

As usual with this series, this is a first-rate group of stories. They are not specifically science fiction, or fantasy, or horror, but somewhere in the middle. They are the sort of tales that could easily be on a TV show like The Twilight Zone. It is very much worth reading. show less