Volume ten of Tesseracts (the stupendous Canadian sf anthology series) is out, this time edited by Robert Charles Wilson (whose novel Spin won this year's Best Novel Hugo) and Edo van Belkom. The book features stories by many of Canada's great and up-and-coming authors, continuing in the tradition set by Judith Merril when she edited the first of these volumes, decades ago.
($15.29 in Canada, $14.25 in the US)
A reminder, I'm co-editing Tesseracts 11 with Holly Phillips — the deadline for submissions is December 31!
We live in strange and perilous times.
This statement is no less true for having always been true. Times have always been strange. The future is as unknowable as it always was. As always, storm clouds have lately gathered on the horizon. As always, there are scattered rays of hope.
Sometimes, however, the storm seems closer than ever. You can hear the thunder and feel the lightning in the air. The going gets tough, and the thoughtful get nervous.
* * *
The nineteen-fifties and early sixties were such a time. Media iconography has draped that era in fading, contradictory images and emblems: Joe McCarthy vs. Marilyn Monroe; the radioactive atolls of Eniwetok and Kwajalein vs. the gilded, monoracial, faux-Christian suburbs imagined in such prime-time sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Ask the average seldom-reader what the science fiction of the nineteen-fifties was like and he'll probably venture a guess involving The Jetsons, flying cars, and hyperoptimistic visions of cities on the moon.
There is some truth to this, but less than you might think. In fact, in those days, science fiction had fallen on hard times. The old pulp magazine markets had dwindled to a precious few. The revolution in paperback publishing took up some of that slack, but did so, in part, by mining the rich back catalogue of those same defunct magazines. SF was occasionally declared dead, and its salvageable organs were freely donated to B-movies and television.
