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Wednesday, June 08, 2005

The New Old Canadian Science Fiction?

Brenda Schmidt links to an article by Peter Darbyshire on Canadian SF, and to Canadian SF writer Edward Willet's blog entry about the article.

For myself, as I noted on Willet's blog, I find it hard to believe that an article on contemporary Canadian science fiction could be written and contain no mention of James Alan Gardner. Although I suppose that, given the article's premise of there being a resurgence of "classic" SF underway in Canada at the expense of the younger cyberpunk tradition, it would be inconvenient to mention that the best (IMHO) actual storyteller working in the field seems to have found a way to successfully blend space opera with cyberpunk. It might just be that Darbyshire has yet to encounter a Gardner novel , much as I have yet to encounter Karl Schroeder's work. (Am I right, Peter?)

I have read some Robert J. Sawyer (though not recently), and it was a bit dry for my taste. Of Robert Charles Wilson's work, I can say that The Chronoliths seemed to me to be the most successful as a novel, in that the characters had some fullness to them and the ideas spent less time interfering with the story than in Blind Lake or Darwinia.

1 comment:

Brenda Schmidt said...

I attended a Robert J. Sawyer reading last fall. He read from a gadget--a blackberry or something of the sort--just like he's doing here and here. Pretty entertaining!