From rec.arts.sf.reviews Thu Nov 19 14:01:29 1998 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed1.news.luth.se!luth.se!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.gtei.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet From: "Evelyn C Leeper" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: ARROWDREAMS edited by Mark Shainblum and John Dupuis Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:42:56 -0500 Organization: none Lines: 115 Sender: wex@ronin.media.mit.edu Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: ronin.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.2 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2169 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 | eleeper@lucent.com +1 732 957 2070 | http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824 "Children of the future Age, Reading this indignant page: Know that in a former time Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime." --Wm Blake