The SF Canada board and membership would like to take a moment today to wish the happiest of birthdays to our own Dave Duncan. A little dragon told us that Dave turns 85 today and is just completing a new book. Just another way Dave is an inspiration to us all. 🙂
SF Canada member Holly Schofield‘s story, “The Call of the Wold,” appears in the just-released Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers anthology, published by World Weaver Press, edited by Sarena Ulibarri.
As the introduction says, “Solarpunk is a type of optimistic science fiction that imagines a future founded on renewable energies. The seventeen stories in this volume are not boring utopias—they grapple with real issues such as the future and ethics of our food sources, the connection or disconnection between technology and nature, and the interpersonal conflicts that arise no matter how peaceful the world is.”
Tangent Online says that Holly’s story is “told in a lightly humorous style with a great deal of wordplay…an enjoyable story with an appealing main character.” Publishers Weekly says “this anthology is a welcome relief from dystopias and postapocalyptic wastelands, and a reassurance that the future need not be relentlessly bleak” and called Holly’s story “thoughtful, even radical.”
Links to purchase the anthology, and links to Holly’s other stories, can be found on Holly’s website
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SF Canada member Ursula Pflug has recently released a new novella, the portal fantasy “Down From,” with UK-based small press Snuggly Books.
On nice days the witch Sandrine, a wife and mother of two (or is it three?) canoes along The Stream of Consciousness to the outskirts of town where her friend Vienna lives on the edge of a swamp. At Hartwood portals litter the paths, big as dinner plates, but only if you have an eye for that sort of thing. Sometimes Vienna, who does, outlines them in circles of wildflowers or pastel chalk, to alert the unwary who might otherwise be whisked away. Instead, Vienna tells her, Sandrine should explore the disused upstairs bedrooms, haunted not by the ghosts of former inhabitants but by alternate worlds, one behind each of many brightly painted doors.
What kind of world is behind each door? How to pick? Behind Pomme Verte, the door she finally tries, Sandrine meets a tall young man with red hair, who may be a son she didn’t know she had. Is it possible that in the other worlds one has children who are searching for their biological mothers–just as if they had been adopted by a human and not, as it were, by another world? Only one way to find out.
“Pflug’s haunting novella is as oblique and slippery as its protagonist, Sandrine, a traveler between worlds who is first encountered returning from “astral adventures” that have left her disoriented and uncertain: her husband may be named Randy, Mike, or River, and she has either two or three children. (“Don’t forget you have a girl,” she reminds herself; “girls don’t like that, not at all.”) Sandrine worries about environmental damage and the politics of food, tries to recenter herself with her family, and confronts the unexpected ways in which the secrets and struggles of her best friend, Vienna, intersect with Sandrine’s own. Pflug’s prose is deceptively direct: much is stated but still more is hinted at in a setting where witches and telepaths are as much a fact of life as cell phones, and behind the bluntness of Sandrine’s inner monologue are startling depths of grief and loss. The work feels unfinished, but in the way a poem might: the narrative denouement leaves the door open for the reader’s own thoughts. (Apr.)”
The book is available in Canada from Amazon.ca, Chapters Indigo, and other sellers.
SF Canada member Claire Eamer‘s delightful picture book, Underneath the Sidewalk, has been nominated for two children’s choice awards: the Shining Willow (Saskatchewan), and the Chocolate Lily (British Columbia). The book follows a young girl who falls through a sidewalk crack into a world of monsters. The book is illustrated by Thomas Gibault of Montreal.
Contributed by Robert Runté
SF Canada founding President, Candas Jane Dorsey, was for over 45 years—and continues to be—an award-winning author, editor, publisher, organizer, university teacher, mentor and activist who grew Edmonton’s literary scene and helped found Canada’s cohesive SF community. To honour Dorsey’s astonishing career, Rhonda Parrish has compiled a unique tribute anthology: Prairie Starport: Stories in Celebration of Candas Jane Dorsey. The collection includes stories and tribute essays by authors and editors mentored by Dorsey. Contributors include Timothy J. Anderson, Greg Bechtel, Eileen Bell, Gregg Chamberlain, Alexandrea Flynn and Annalise Glinker, Barb Galler-Smith, Anita Jenkins, Laina Kelly, John Park, Rhonda Parrish, Ursula Pflug, Robert RuntĂ©, Diane L. Walton, BD Wilson and S.G. Wong.
 Download it for free at:
Paperback available at Amazon: .com | .co.uk
And add it to your shelves at Goodreads
All profits from this collection will be donated to the Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society in Candas’ name.
SF Canada member Su Sokol is pleased to announce her forthcoming novel, Run J Run. The book will be published by Renaissance Press, and is scheduled to release in 2019.
Su also has a short story, “Studies in Shadow and Light,” included in a post-Trump speculative fiction anthology titled After the Orange. The anthology is a project of B Cubed Press and is due to release this summer.
And if you’re in or near Seattle, Washington, mark your calendar for June 21st. Su will be appearing at Left Bank Books for a reading/discussion entitled “Towards a Liberated (un)imaginable.”
