Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction
Edited by Nalo Hopkinson & Geoff Ryman
Copyright © 2005
All individual contributions copyright by their respective authors.
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EDGE Science Fiction and
Fantasy Publishing
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HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
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Canadian identity? No, thanks.
by Geoff Ryman
Nationalities don’t exist. They’re an invention to help us stop thinking and imagining. Englishmen? Shy, formal and snobbish, with bad teeth. Brazilians? Samba, football and favela violence.
Nobody in their right minds wants a national identity. Canadians are lucky they don’t have one.
A strong national identity means that people think they know three or four things about you. They would almost rather die rather than give up that knowledge, however easily won. They’ll fight a war over it.
Having a strong national identity is of no use to a writer. People don’t conform to the supposed national humours, and characters certainly shouldn’t. The hero of Machado de Assis’s great novel Dom Casamuro is a dour, fragile, shy Brazilian.
What writers DO need is to live in a country that is accepted as a universally relevant venue for stories.
When you are a writer with a passport from a universal venue you can write about any character in any kind of story you like — comedy, war, romance, or a finely judged study of personal grief. People come to your story with fewer deadly fixed ideas. You can use the everyday life around you as a convincing background, confident that people won’t read it as local colour. This saves having to do research on, say, which hand people eat with. When your country is universal, you get not to be exotic.
Yes, a young Cambodian has a formal way of talking to his uncle. But that doesn’t even make it past translation. “Hello, Uncle,” covers it. (This is NOT an invitation to start writing about other countries without a lot of thought and effort or time living there. Otherwise what will come out will probably be the national identity.)
India is on its way to becoming universal, shedding images of poverty and mysticism. So is China, escaping every lotus-blossom, cruel-poverty, and red-guard stereotype.
The UK is an interesting case of a country that WAS a universal venue, which has the odd effect of meaning you tell any story you like about England so long as you set it before 1945. Otherwise it’s Hugh Grant or James Bond.
First among the universal venues is the United States of America. You can have stories about shy Americans, good Americans, corporate bastard Americans, intellectual Americans, action hero Americans, or loser Americans.
Yes, Americans do have to struggle against a particularly imprisoning national identity. But even people who see Americans as ignorant and aggressive can still watch and identify with American stories. Last year I was surprised to see American and British movies playing in Aleppo, even though both countries had just invaded Syria’s neighbouring Baathist state. Young students’ bookshelves were lined with American and British writers.
What outsiders monolithically know about Cambodia is the Khmers Rouges. The first thing Westerners want to hear from a Cambodian is about what happened to them or their families under the Khmers Rouges. We almost won’t let them say anything else.
For some reason this makes it difficult for Cambodians to write about anything else even for each other. You get few Cambodia stories about, say, the two clever women I met in a provincial capital who had set up a designer handbag shop.
You can be trapped in someone else’s eye. What the rest of the world wants to be told about you controls what gets published. Worse, a strong national identity can sometimes reach inside and control what you are able to imagine.
I started out writing Canadian stories. I was a teenage Canadian living in Los Angeles, CA. What came out was filtered through that other country’s down-home sensibilities. The most shuddersome first line of my many awful pieces of writing was “Whenever I think of Meadowvale, Ontario, a harmonica seems to play.” Rural idylls, freezing landscapes, honest isolated farmers, rabid foxes, oh, and autumn colours, lakeside cottages, airplanes that could land on lakes, moose, sanded beans, Christmas at the United Church.
I turned to SF because it was universal.
Like the USA, SF has earned the right to be a locale for war stories, romances, comedies, tragedies and any other kind of story. It is our own universal venue and makes the usual national categories irrelevant. Does anyone in SF care that writers like Candas Jane Dorsey, Robert Sawyer or John Clute are Canadian? Are there any anthologies of specifically American SF or fantasy?
So why are we doing a specifically Canadian one?
Certainly NOT to help create a strong national identity.
We do have an interest in keeping Canada as universal a venue as possible. It’s a paradox, but the more you write about a country, the less you write about its nationality. The more Canadian stories that get published or filmed, the more universal Canada becomes.
Nationalities don’t exist, but languages do. English is not a specifically American, British or Canadian language, but it must feel like a wall of exclusion to writers of other languages. So, Tesseracts Nine includes translations of work originally written in French. This is not done to lay claim to French as part of a Canadian identity. It’s done to help SF become even more universal by getting good stories from as many sources as possible.
SF has the equivalent of a national identity and it, too, is a prison. We have SF stories in Tesseracts Nine, but we also have tales of Christian miracles, pagan magic, bizarre events that have no explanation and stories as literary as anything by Donald Barthelme.
Contributors to Tesseracts Nine have almost nothing in common. A language perhaps. Not a genre or a geography. Certainly not a greater sense of cold or big empty landscapes; no particular politics or ways of being, or even a delicious post-modern Gallic sensibility. What Tesseracts Nine proves is that there is no such thing as Canadian fantasy and SF.
Which paradoxically, can only make it better.
From Fugue Phantasmagorical
by Anthony MacDonald and Jason Mehmel
Introduction: Embarking
You stand upon a boat as it wiles its way downstream. The breeze slips by your nose, scent reminding you of something; an old memory from youth that you can’t place, can’t forget. You’ve paid your toll to the boatman, got your ticket, and you’ll have a souvenir to keep with you when we’re done.
We are your tour guides, your travel-mates as we go from place to place. Please, leave your conscious luggage behind; on this trip, you’ll only need the carry-on bag of your dreamstate.
We see a speck on the horizon, the current pulls, and we approach him, inexorably. And he’s casting about in the water for fish, and he’s panning for gleaming gold, and he’s
drinking from a chalice made out of love, and he’s swimming with the water making his own currents around him.
Who is this?
Hermes Trismegistus. Artist. Mystic. Priest. God. He’s been all of these things, depending on who’s watching. He’s got multiple passports; here they call him Thoth, though he still takes care of their words and all its associated luggage. He stood on the muddy bank of the Nile, sandy liquid lapping at his feet, long before the birth of Christianity at the death of Christ. He stands now, watching the stream of information go by, drowning the unwary. Who knows where he’ll stand tomorrow?
He has his own passport for our boat; he should, he’s the captain. As far as paper trails are concerned, those mundane documents detailing our presence here — bills, pronouncements, certificates and contracts — they are burning in his hand. They return to the ash from whence we come, and each piece of this immolated life touches the water and is swept away. He lives in a well-dug bolt-hole of anonymity, only emerging long enough to be remembered, if never known. What company he has are those who search him out, to whom he doles out a sip of mystery, a morsel of wisdom.
In his home, his cabin, he is surrounded by constant work. Over there, a painted canvas partially done, the panoply of colours making one feel as though truth were to be communicated, were the work finished; a truth of human love and sorrow. Over on the desk, lie sheets of paper, covered with phrases. Reading them gives an electric bolt of understanding; electricity ungrounded though, for a few lines are yet needed to complete the text, to finish its purpose to the reader. In a third corner, to complete this triangulation of creation, he sits, one hand holding a bow, the other embracing the strings of a cello, and as hair passes over string, pulling, scraping, its notes reverberate within the air, within ourselves, and we feel the electric thrill of knowing. Here, with all this about him, Hermes joins our crew.
Lemmings in the Third Year
by Jerome Stueart
I’ve always preferred my Rodentia frozen, tagged, weighed and placed in plastic bags; it unnerves me now to be interviewed by them. The lemmings, four of them, carry notebooks and an inkwell that looks like a dark blue candelabra. They have followed me out onto the tundra, unsure why I am here. Since it is their job to observe me and ask me questions, they come so they won’t miss the one vital piece of information that they have been looking for all along. But I’m not in a talkative mood.
The tundra is quiet. I would have expected that, really, back home in the real Ivvavik National Park, the real northern coast of the Yukon Territory. I would have expected the passive look of the Beaufort Sea as it gives in to blocky chunks of ice which grow in numbers like a scar forming on the sea. I can still see the grass underneath a light snow. I expect that too. The vastness of the Arctic is amazing, breathtaking, and all this you can read about in books, see on television specials, even visit.
“What are you thinking about, Kate?” one of them asks me, breaking the silence. They have scratchy, tiny voices, not like Alvin and the Chipmunks, but more like carnies operating a Ferris wheel for the sixth day in a row, people who smoke a lot. Lemmings chitter.
“I’m thinking about home,” I tell them. I open the videophone that David gave me before we left. It was working here when we first crashed, but it’s not picking up a signal anymore. I’ve lost the window. You can’t see it out there in the sky overlooking this flat, coastal plain, but there is a window our plane came through that is completely invisible. It is only several hundred feet off the ground, we guess.
“Home is Las Vegas,” one of them says.
I laugh. “Yeah. You guys would fit in well there, especially in a casino, or maybe even your own show.” I wish I could mark the air with a dye — so I’d know where the window is. I pick up a stone and think about throwing stones up one after the other until one of them disappears — but that’s several hundred feet. Couldn’t make that if I tried. Besides, there’s a chance that any window we came through has closed or moved on. And that we are here for a long time. Like the ice freezing up behind you — we may be here until a lead opens in the air to take us back home, away from this land of speaking wildlife.
“She wants to go home,” one of the females says. “She wants to give her research back to her people.”
The wind batters my blue parka and drives black hair back into my face.
“No one,” I laugh, “would believe our research right now. It wouldn’t make a difference to them.” They watch me punch the small buttons on the videophone. These are still so new, I don’t know how to operate it like David would.
“Research is factual. It has to be believed,” one of the males says.
“How can research be unbelievable?” a female asks.
I look up at the sky. From the sea to the mountains in the distance it is all one flat colour.
“All right,” I say, and put away my phone. I take a big breath. This one is going to be a tough one. “It’s time you learned about the scientific method.”
I hear them scratching something on notepads behind me. Every once in awhile there is a glub sound of a paw dipping into the ink and coming out again.
The day hadn’t started off well. I had lived in a cabin for the last few months with two other scientists and a pilot who was trying to fix our plane. Except he had no parts. Because, surprise, there were no stores for aviation spare parts in this place.
Dr. Claude Brulé, the lead scientist on this expedition, had abandoned science altogether for theatre. I no longer saw him in the cabin as much, as he stayed now with a polar bear that lived in a cabin farther inland. The polar bears here were decidedly friendly and had a non-aggression pact with most of the animals, except the seals, but even that depended on when the seals were selling the bears something and when they were not.
The bears were putting on a play for us. Actually they were putting on a play before we got here, but Dr. Brulé had been helping them with direction since about last week. He’d always had a fondness, he said, for Shakespeare.
Dr. Kitashima and I lived in the cabin together. He was full Japanese, spoke English much better than I spoke Japanese. My father never spoke much of his own language around us girls. So I didn’t pick up much. I did study Japanese in college a bit, but didn’t speak it well enough to impress a native of the island. He didn’t say so, but I knew that he’d rather I not speak any Japanese at all. He said I spoke it like a man.
Rather than abandon what we came here to do, Dr. Kitashima and I had been trying to conduct our experiments on this tundra. We had this belief, or I had until today, that one day we would get back and that in the meantime, science would be what would keep us sane. That if we concentrated on our work we would be able to think our way through this, figure out another way to get home. At least, he told me once, we would pass the time.
Our pilot, Ernest Stout, had a tent set up by the plane, but eventually, as winter set in, I knew that he would join us. His dog, River, had started to talk to him for the first time and he didn’t know what to do.
It was strange. I couldn’t explain how strange it was. We had watched movies in North America all our lives with talking animals. I had read books when I was a child — Watership Down, fairy tales, Charlotte’s Web — and none of them prepared you for all the animals talking. I hadn’t heard a mosquito yet, but I was willing to bet that they had some language too. The only reason that the bears, lemmings, ungulates, walruses, and birds (for the most part) spoke English was because the bears learned it first. And they taught it to everyone else.
They all spoke with a southwestern twang.
“Do you mind if we continue our questioning?” one of the males asked me. They all clambered on top of one of the huge wooden desks inside this cabin, dragging with much effort, their inkwell. At one point I had named them, but I was so embarrassed about doing that that I refused to talk to them as individuals.
>
“I really have a lot to do,” I lied. What is there to do in a place you can’t escape? There were no research centres, no universities, no schools to get into, no professors to impress, no jobs to interview for. There were no other humans in this place that I’d seen, and the animals all acted as if we were the newest thing. For awhile, we had many bird visitors — kittawakes mostly, nosing around, wanting to know what kind of disturbance we would make to the environment.
I shuffled some papers on the desk, picked up my own pen and begin writing a letter to my long lost boyfriend, David, whose worst nightmare had happened. He had lost me, just as he suspected he would.
He said, “If I let you go to the Arctic, do you promise to come back and get a degree here in Vegas?”
I couldn’t tell him yes. I never wanted anyone to control my decisions, box me in. Well, now I had the whole world to move in, free and unencumbered by any other person but one bear biologist, one botanist and one pilot.
Dear David, I am doing fine. How are you? I wrote.
“Will you be eating us soon?” one of the lemmings asked me.
I looked up. Two of them were poised to write, one of them was approaching my elbow, and the other looked horrified aside the inkwell.
“I’m not going to eat you,” I told them.
“But we’re highly nutritious,” one of them said.
“We have plenty of food,” I gestured over to the back room that housed a huge supply of seal, and some vegetables that the bears traded for. “I’m not the big enemy this time.”
“Do you enjoy eating lemmings?”
One of the females tapped his shoulder, “We know they do.”
“We’ve never said that,” I said.
“You enjoy meat?” she asked.
“I do eat meat, yes,” I said. “But—”
“You will enjoy us. The bears like to dip us in gelled seal fat. I think that’s what I would like. I’ve heard it is very tasty.”
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