Candas Jane Dorsey
Author of Black Wine
About the Author
Candas Jane Dorsey is a writer, editor, and publisher. Dorsey was the president of the Writing Guild of Alberta, and editor of Edmonton Bullet, and one of the founding editors of the River Books imprint of the Books Collective of Edmonton. Dorsey is currently a member of the editorial advising show more committee for OnSpec SF magazine, and publisher of Tesseract Books, Canada's oldest speculative fiction imprint. Various pieces of Dorsey's short fiction have been awarded the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award for Best Short-Form Work in English. "Johnny Appleseed on the New World" was chosen for the Visions of Mars CD-ROM included aboard in the 1994 launch of the U. S.-Russian exploration. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Candas Jane Dorsey
Canadian Speculative Fiction (Prairie Fire, Vol. 15., no.2 - 1994 Summer) (1994) — Editor — 11 copies
Dvorzjak Symphony 2 copies
Associated Works
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993) — Contributor — 315 copies
Women of Other Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism (1999) — Contributor — 42 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1952-11-16
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Canada
- Birthplace
- Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- Places of residence
- Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- Organizations
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
SF Canada
Writers' Union of Canada - Awards and honors
- CSFFA Hall of Fame (2018)
Edmonton Arts and Culture Hall of Fame (2019) - Agent
- Wayne Arthurson
- Short biography
- Canadian writer, arts journalist and social worker, author of three early volumes of poetry. - See more at: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 18
- Also by
- 25
- Members
- 698
- Popularity
- #36,254
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 27
- ISBNs
- 39
- Languages
- 1
- Favorited
- 3
I forgot whose work I was reading.
Feeling lost and a little at sea is Author Dorsey's calling card. That said, I was never wondering where someone came from, or how anyone fits into the schema of the story being told. It probably helps that the way events unfold is as stochastic as real life is itself...it felt to me as though I was genuinely following our nameless detective around, learning things alongside them. In any truly immersive read I hope that I will be investing in the characters along with the main character, and that was indeed the case here. What might not work quite so well was the book's use of **COPIOUS** footnotes...over two hundred!...and huge numbers of acronyms. It took me some time to find a reading rhythm in this story, but I was so ready to trust the author, from past acquaintance in her SFF days, that I kept my hopes up. I felt rewarded. Again, as one would expect from Author Dorsey, there are little SFnal grace notes relatively unobtrusively scattered about.
As in all series reads, though, it's the characters that make the reader invest or decline to invest in the story at hand. Our nameless protagonist, sharp-eyed and -tongued, is a big draw for me. The other characters are literally kaleidoscopic, forming startling and unusual conjunctions with the narrator, each other, and the story unfolding. This is, to me, a net positive because as unusual as the juxtapositions can be, they're never gratuitous or exploitively deployed. I do sometimes feel as though some authors have, in their heads or on their editors' checklists, a set of identities that they feel the need to dot around to be "inclusive." This is absolutely never the way this read came across to me. In part that's because I've read the author's earlier work; in part it's down to the way the characters are included in the sleuth's life and thus this narrative.
I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the evident pro-environment, anti-capitalist thrust of the story. That won't work for some readers, because it's intrinsic to every element of the series' world-building. You know who you are, so you should seek elsewhere for your own ma'at needs to be met.
For me, it went down like a truly excellent, complex, single-malt whisky. I heartily recommend the read.… (more)