As far as I know, Kurt Vonnegut was the first person to write about what he called getting ‘unstuck’ in time. Very different from the vision H. G. Wells proposed in his classic, The Time Machine, Vonnegut imagined a kind of time travel where the traveller had no control over ‘when’ their point of arrival would be or even when they might depart for it.
I’m not sure what question editor Lesley Choyce might have tossed out in his invitation to contributors, but moving through time is one of the recurrent themes in this far-reaching collection. In one story, it amounts to a return from the dead; in others, it’s a kind of wandering. Not surprisingly, another major thread involves technology, with a couple of these authors dreaming up visions beyond what I, an admitted techno-dinosaur, am able to fully understand.
Choyce has gathered work from some of our best-known writers of a genre I still like to call speculative fiction. That’s not to suggest that science doesn’t matter, as it plays a major role in a number of pieces—with one story even taking place almost entirely in a kind of laboratory.
With a collection representing 17 authors, including ones who appeared in Choyce’s 1992 anthology, Ark of Ice (Spider Robinson, Jean-Luis Trudel, Katherine Govier, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Robert J. Sawyer), he’s given us a veritable smorgasbord of ideas to feast upon.
For starters, there’s Sawyer’s wistful tale of people living off-planet in a low-gravity colony. They’re there as the result of a time when war so ravaged things that relocation was necessary, a fate we can only pray will not come true. But even in this piece, there’s a yearning for Earth (or, as that word in this particular future has come to be ‘translated’, Dirt).
The most poetic—and magical—piece in the anthology has to be Katherine Govier’s fable-like “Vixen, Swan, Emu, Bear”. In the midst of the four parts she reveals, “I am a theoretician of the lost wild. A researcher and a mourner for wildness.” I can only suspect, from the beautiful details running through the rest her entry, that these words are indeed a personal truth.
Offering a sharp contrast to the many lovely natural elements in Govier’s work comes a piece by C.J. Lavigne. She’s imagined a world with many all-too-recognizable features from our own era (the proliferation of short-term rentals, the fragile insecurity of contract work, the over-commercialization of just about everything) and magnifies them ten-fold. To my mind, it’s one of the most horrifyingly believable scenarios—no monsters needed—one that sets off warning bells with its vision of AI-controlled lives, in a place where it’s essential that one keep moving, even if in a directionless manner for fear of being punished for loitering. An unforgettable scenario.
Another piece where workers have arrived at a point with even less job security than in the present comes from Hugh A.D. Spencer who gives us “Shoebox or The End of Civilization in Five Objects or Less.” Its setting is a museum of sorts where items time-drift and disappear or change. In one case, the description of an object makes me believe that it’s a loonie, complete with an image of a woman (Elizabeth, I assume). But then that object transforms: “The woman on the coin is starting to look like President Custer.” Who? It’s a museum like no other, and not a particularly safe place at that, with people drifting away as easily as objects.
As for people and their memories, in a story that also echoes our society’s fixation on celebrity, “Read-Only Memory” by Julian Mortimer-Smith offers this creepy scene:
…the attendant handed me the memory sliver. I held it carefully between my fingertips. The actual ROM was tiny, but it came in a protective case that made it easy to slip into my receptacle.
“You want me to do it?” Trish said.
“Sure.” I handed her the ROM, and then felt hands at the back of my head, her fingers parting my hair to reveal the little slot nestled beneath. It felt excitingly intimate. You didn’t let other people touch your receptacle unless you trusted them.
Choyce rounds out the anthology with a story of his own, set in a greatly altered Nova Scotia, the province where he lives. Of all the stories, it clangs the most loudly on the climate change alarm, as rising seas have effectively cut off that land from the rest of Canada. The narrator seeks answers by going back to the past (yes, that theme of time travel again) where he discovers possible solutions to what-might-have-been from those who offered earlier warnings.
I’ll admit to loving the Canadian-ness of so many of these stories. It’s a delight to find references to Halifax, Ottawa or Quebec. Refreshing at the very least, considering that so much of this genre places its focus almost anywhere but here.
But a question remains: Consider what you might choose to say if the challenge were posed to describe your vision of the future. And if you think you’d need a kick-start, this collection might well be a good place to start.
Lesley Choyce is the author of more than one hundred books for adults, teens, and children. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, and his books have been published in several languages. He began Pottersfield Press in 1978, is a founding member of the spoken-word rock band the SurfPoets, and also teaches in the English Department and the Transition Year Program at Dalhousie University. He is an experienced editor and a year-round surfer in the Atlantic Ocean near his home in Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia.
- Publisher : Pottersfield Press (Aug. 28 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 228 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1990770339
- ISBN-13 : 978-1990770333
