Subject: ARROWDREAMS edited by Mark Shainblum and John Dupuis

From: "Evelyn C Leeper" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:42:56 -0500

ARROWDREAMS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE CANADAS edited by Mark Shainblum and
                              John Dupuis
       Nuage Editions, ISBN 0-921-833-51-2, 1997, 191pp, C$19.95
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1998 Evelyn C. Leeper

     This is a book for a fairly small audience, but one reason I'm
reviewing it is because even that audience might not hear about it.  When
I looked for it in the Toronto branch of Chapters, a Canadian superstore,
no one there could find it.  I eventually found it in short story
collections, having checked the "Canadian Interest," "Canadian Fiction,"
and science fiction sections.

     It is, as the subtitle suggests, an anthology of alternate history
stories whose focus is on Canada: Canadian history, Canadian
personalities, Canadian sensibilities.  I am (I hasten to point out) not
Canadian, so several of them simply went over my head.

     Anthologies usually start out with their strongest story, so I can
only conclude that hockey is vastly more important in Canada than any
sport is in the United States, because Edo van Belkom's "Hockey's Night in
Canada" did nothing for me.  Nancy Kilpatrick's "Gross Island--The Movie"
is not even what I would call alternate history--a movie company is
filming a historical drama about an epidemic and being very inaccurate
about it.  There is no historical speculation going on here.  Had this
appeared as a straight story somewhere else I would say it was an
interesting look at the film industry, so it's not badly written, just not
alternate history.

     "Health in Us" by Paula Johanson is also about an epidemic, but it
*is* alternate history and at least competently done, if a bit short.
Paul Scott's "On the Edge" is a post-apocalyptic story with the
"apocalypse" being the secession of Quebec in 1995.  It's barely alternate
history, the more so because a secession tomorrow could result in much the
same story.

     Michael Skeet's "Near Enough to Home" is set in a different United
States Civil War, the result of us having lost Louisiana to the British
and making Canada much more a force to be reckoned with.  The main game
here seems to be "spot the stars," but it's not too bad.

     Derryl Murphy's "Cold Ground" has Louis Riel escaping execution
through black magic.  If I actually knew who Louis Riel was, it might have
meant more.

     "Misfire" by Shane Simmons has Richthofen surviving World War I and
leading Germany to greater air power than in our timeline, and this
survival is attributed to a jammed gun on an airplane flown by a Canadian.
This is a tenuous connection to Canada at best, and the fact is that we
have no idea who shot down Richthofen in our timeline anyway.  In spite of
this, the speculation on the effect of Richthofen's survival makes this
worth reading.

     My prediction is that Jews will enjoy "The Last of the Maccabees" by
Allan Weiss and Gentiles won't.  It seems in many ways a sort of in-joke
which reminded me of the tribe in "Joe Versus the Volcano."  Not that "The
Last of the Maccabees" is a humorous story, but having "Indians" wearing
tzitzit and payes, and speaking Hebrew is by its very nature somewhat
risible.  The fact that their discoverers are from the Roman Commonwealth,
and the French seem to be Buddhists just adds to the mix, and there's even
more I won't tell you.  (Weiss does slip at least once and have the
Indians speak Yiddish instead of Hebrew.)  I enjoyed this more than most
of the other stories, but then it really is more an "alternate Judaism"
story than an "alternate Canada" one.

     "The Coming of the Jet" by Eric Choi assumes Canadian supremacy in
the aerospace industry.  I suppose techno-types will appreciate it, but it
was only slightly above the hockey story for me.  Dave Duncan's "For Want
of a Nail" assumes a French victory on the Plains of Abraham an is not
related to Robert Sobel's novel of the same name (which dealt with a
British victory at Burgoyne).

     Glenn Grant's "Thermometers Melting" takes the familiar approach of
taking well-known people and looking at them in an alternate timeline.  In
this case Grant uses Hemingway and Trotsky, and adds an additional bonus
at the end.  It's a bit hard to follow at times, since it is supposedly
excerpts from a longer work, but one of the better stories nonetheless.

     And finally there is "The Case of the Serial 'De Quebec a la Lune' by
Veritatus" by Laurent McAllister (pen name for Yves Meynard and Jean-
Louis Trudel).  I *think* it is a (fake) academic article on a (non-
existent) serial patterned after Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the
Moon" but written by a Canadian and possibly set in its own past.  Are you
sufficiently confused?  If not, read the story and you will be.  Some
people like this sort of thing, which is why Connie Willis won a Hugo for
"The Soul Selects Her Own Society ...," but this is so dry as to rive away
all but the most confirmed academic.

     Interestingly, though the final story is about a (fictional) French-
language story, none of the stories in this Canadian anthology appear to
have been written in French.  I saw no translator credits.  This in itself
seems to imply an alternate Canada, one in which there is no French-
language science fiction.  I note that the one Quebec secession story
implies a negative result.

     If you are Canadian and enjoy alternate histories, you probably want
to seek out this book.  For those of us south of the border or over the
seas or, for that matter, west of the border in Alaska, this is probably
not going to appeal to you unless you are a student of Canadian history or
culture.

%B      Arrowdreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas
%E      Mark Shainblum
%E      John Dupuis
%C      Winnipeg
%D      December 1997
%I      Nuage
%O      trade paperback, C$19.95
%G      ISBN 0-921-833-51-2
%P      191pp

Evelyn C. Leeper    |  [email-masked]
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