As well as their shared status as commodities in the cultural marketplace, the terms “science fiction" and "fantasy" have much in common with "pornography," or even "art": often hard-pressed to define them, we, the public, still know them when we see them. However, just as the term "erotic" creates a contested area in the current pornography debates, and one person’s Rothko is another's scrawl, so too are the generic boundaries of science fiction and fantasy inherited from the thirties, forties, and fifties in a state of flux. Of recent coinage, the less restrictive “speculative fiction” remains controversial, both from without—with charges of popular culture making a transparent attempt at literary social climbing—and from within—while Lesley Choyce's “futurefiction" excludes fantasy, involved as it usually is with the past or with alternate timelines, almost entirely.

A number of authors have spoken against strict genrefication, in part for practical, economic reasons. Only lately have some Canadian publishers begun to consider that there may be a market for speculative fiction in this country; Canadian writers have historically had to publish south of the border. Furthermore, neither Canadian nor American publishers believe that speculative fiction has much crossover appeal, and hence, it has been ghettoized. David Ketterer argues that speculative fiction tends not to be as marginalized here as in the United States, given the impracticality of further subdividing a small market, but while this is likely accurate, any openness is still relative to the extreme segregation in American marketing strategies. The speculative fiction author or friendly reviewer, defensively insisting that the lurid cover in no way represents the text, is so commonplace as to have become a cliché.

“Science fiction" and “fantasy," then, as recognizable genres, can arguably be seen to be as much creations of the publishing industry as of writers and fans themselves. But such usage falls apart under its own weight Is Margaret Atwood a dabbler, or can she legitimately be included in the pantheon? What about such undeniably literary, yet consistently speculative, writers as, to leave Canada momentarily, Borges? What about the eminently respectable magic realism? The only certain, unarguable distinction between these and recognized science fiction or fantasy is a question of marketing

Fans have turned their own marginality from the mainstream into a strength. They have developed a rich popular culture where non-participants are regarded as "mundanes." It is still unfortunate, however, for both writers and readers, when genre is used in an exclusionary way. Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale(1985) is not the only work of speculative fiction that can be used for the "gender" segment of college courses. Elisabeth Vonarburg's The Maerlande Chronicles, for example, is equally compelling.

Two new anthologies of Canadian stories, and one scholarly book on the history of speculative fiction in this country, indicate the timeliness of this review. Also discussed here are two recent works of fiction. All are, in one sense or another, Canadian. 0f course, that statement is in itself problematic. Many authors and commentators have addressed the question of defining Canadian speculative fiction, or even whether such a phenomenon exists at all. One can be forgiven for a certain impatience with these questions. Boundaries are slippery: Who to include? Only authors who were born here? Came here? Were born here but moved away? Use Canadian settings? Publish with Canadian houses? And then there are the more nebulous considerations of theme or voice; for Canadians, as Ketterer writes, echoing a hoary truism of Canadian literary criticism, “survival, not conquest [of nature], is the issue." Any of these restrictive definitions would leave out many who are routinely considered important parts of the Canadian science-fiction/fantasy scene, such as Vonarburg, who was born in France, or David Duncan, born in Scotland. Not to mention any writer who publishes in New York, or who has never lived outside the urban core.

The term "Canadian," applied to literature, is useful politically. If we are going to speak of Canadian speculative fiction, however, it ought to be in the most inclusive, un-prescriptive way possible. Is there Canadian science fiction and fantasy? Yes, as long as there are writers who live here, were born here, write about "here," or publish here, and as long as they (the writers) think that is what they are doing, and we (the readers) think so, too. In other words, it is perhaps no more than a useful collective fiction that we should be prepared to accept, if only to underscore the need for a vantage point outside the monolith of American cultural industries. And if the entrenched system of literary areas is going to be overhauled, who is to say that the process may not begin with the denigrated little genres of science fiction and fantasy?

Ketterer's Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy is a scholarly, persuasive, and accessible history of speculative writing in this country. Ketterer begins with a brief discussion of some of the vexing questions alluded to here, but for the most part seems to take the Canadian tradition, or traditions—as he discusses French writing separately—as given and moves quickly to a detailed discussion of those traditions, the earliest roots of which he traces from 18 3 7. He does not question terms such as "genre" or "mainstream," but rather uses them in their accepted senses in order to garner a place for science fiction and fantasy on their own terms. His treatment is narrative and chronological; he discusses individual writers within his broader, and quite sweeping, historical overview.

In the early sections of his book, literary analysis gives way to recouping history, but in the later chapters, Ketterer offers critiques of many of the writers and texts. While he admits to being selective, he still conveys the shape and scope of the field from which he chooses. Of interest to Canadianists will be the number of canonical writers included: Frederick Philip Grove, Earle Birney, and Hugh MacLennan all have their place in a somewhat different context than CanLit students are taught.

Ketterer clearly sees politics as a shaping force in Canadian speculative fiction; he details a number of"Future and Alternate Canadas" and maintains that from the beginning fear of American takeover has been "a recurring theme" in Canadian writing, and that a "disproportionate number of SF stories focus directly or indirectly on the catastrophe theme."

Ketterer includes less-known speculative poetry, drama, and children's literature, along with the expected novels and shorter fiction, and also deals at length with fandom, academics working in the field, and the founding of the Speculative Writers Association of Canada in 1989, now more than one hundred writers strong However, his otherwise comprehensive study could have been rounded out with a fuller discussion of the publishing industry. The index and bibliography are most useful, and the book is an invaluable resource of previously unavailable information for anyone interested in the field either as a researcher or a reader. The only problem, of course, is that speculative-fiction publishing has zoomed off the map in this country, beginning in what Ketterer defines as the watershed year of 1984 The most recently published writers could not be included, which means that there is ongoing work to be done. None of the following books, for example, is included.

Tesseracts 4 is the most recent in a series of anthologies of short speculative pieces. Lorna Toolis and Michael Skeet have put together this fourth collection, which achieves the extremely high standards set by the earlier volumes. However, especially when taken cumulatively, many of the pieces seem a tad sentimental; they lack some of the bite, the flashes of cold displacement, of the previous anthology in particular. Charles de Lint's delicately written "Winter Was Hard," the opening story, is a melancholy urban fairy tale, peopled by lost children and a kindly old pensioner. The benign closure common to fantasy, of which this is a contemporary example, is ultimately in opposition to the dystopic tone of much cutting-edge speculative fiction: what Ketterer calls "the note of alienation that dominates the Tesseracts anthologies." This is not merely an inevitable function of the fantasy-versus-science-fiction dynamic Allan Weiss's evocative "Ants," involving space colonization in a rural outpost and android workers, is by definition science fiction, while at the same time it resembles nothing so much as a prairie Bildungsroman. A number of the texts seem to have been chosen to reflect Toolis's liberal-humanist contention that speculative writing is "concerned with humanity's attempts to define itself and its place in the universe."

However, David Nickle and Karl Schroeder's over-the-top story, "The Toy Mill," an inverted Christmas tale about a diabolical Santa Claus, gleefully undercuts the gentle tone of the preceding piece by de Lint. Robert Charles Wilson's "Extras," a moody story about a half-dead Western town and Native magic, is written in a controlled key that barely contains the storms it describes. John Park's “Falconer," an extended piece about a post-nuclear holocaust Earth in the far future, is worth the price of the anthology alone: the world Park envisions is fully realized, and many ideas rich in implications are merely dropped in passing. One can only hope he expands this story into a novel. Phyllis Gotlieb's "We Can't Go On Meeting Like This" transposes a dissatisfied adulterous couple, of the type familiar from Woody Allen films, to a future where technology allows one to “piggy back" onto the consciousnesses of, say, two mating lions at the zoo. Gotlieb is also represented in the anthology Ark of Ice—five writers have pieces in both collections—where her story, "The Newest Profession," examines gender politics, this time in a post-Handmaid's Tale space colony, where impoverished women hire themselves out as surrogate mothers to a company specializing in tailor-made workers.

Tesseracts 4 finishes with Candas Jane Dorsey's memorable "Death of a Dream," a police procedural set in a future where lovers can share technologically enhanced dreams together, and pathological sadists can harass their sleeping victims from the comfort of their own homes. The cropped prose echoes the psychological disassociation of the protagonist in the face of horror and loss, as she hunts her ex-husband in a high-tech custody battle.

Ark of Ice, edited by Lesley Choyce, differs from Tesseracts 4 inasmuch as it has an overt political agenda. While Tesseracts 4 concludes with Michael Skeet's "Afterword: No More Manifestos," Choyce places his selections, perhaps unnecessarily, in four sections, with titles like “Macroethics" and “Political Alienation." The overall title refers to the notion of Canada, the land of ice, as a potential Noah's ark in a world of chaos. The choice of stories reflects this agenda, and fits neatly with much of what Ketterer says about fear of American encroachment.

Less even in tone than Tesseracts 4, Ark of Ice ranges from the beautiful "The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery" by Katherine Govier to W.P. Kinsella's "These Changing Times," a heavy-handed piece which seems to have been included mainly for historical interest, and H.A. Hargreaves's "In His Moccasins," about a glorified vigilante in a violent urban future. Most of the stories are eminently readable: Tom Marshall's "Scenes from Successive Futures," which opens out like a series of Russian dolls, has chilling implications about our political process and the construction of knowledge and consent by a powerful élite.

The "Eco/Logical" section is very strong. Douglas Fetherling's “Memoirs of the Renaissance," Eileen Kernaghan's "The Weighmaster of Flood," and Timothy Findley's "What Mrs. Felton Knew" work well together in that they all envision future societies that have degenerated into chaos, cannibalism, and genocide. Geoffrey Ursell's “Greenhouse" evokes the same territory in a fantastical fable. Fetherling, at least, retains a note of optimism in his vision of the human need to create and communicate. Garfield Reeves-Stevens's "Outport" could be read as the touchstone of the collection: it is the story of the captain of a ship hired out to rich Florida tourists eager to see the last “outports" on a dying planet. They sail to Newfoundland, where their view of the world is radically de-centred.

In the final section, "Political Alienation," Choyce has included a segment from The Handmaid's Tale, as well as Spider Robinson's “User Friendly," a parable of a future where interest rates are 130 per cent, aliens colonize humans, and Canadians still resent Americans. Of the fictional works discussed here, this collection is the most self-reflexively Canadian.

American-born and raised, William Gibson is Canada's most successful recent science-fiction import. Gibson was in on the ground floor of the science-fiction sub-genre, cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, in a nutshell, combines the paraphernalia of cutting-edge technology—such as virtual reality; surgical enhancement, for example "skulljacks"; and cyberspace (the collective fiction of a “landscaper” of computer data)—with socially marginalized, hip characters in a dystopic, urban near future. There have since been various knock-offs, some of which pare the form down to its lowest common denominators of street machismo and clothes. With his last novel, The Difference Engine (1991), co-authored with fellow founding-father Bruce Sterling, Gibson seemed to turn his back on cyberpunk set in an alternate Victorian England, where Charles Babbage's mechanical computer has actually been built, the text breaks all the rules the two authors had established. There is not even a hero one can wholeheartedly like.

In his new novel, Virtual Light, Gibson does something more insidious: he plays with the icons of cyberpunk. The word "chrome," for example— inseparable from the fetishized mirror shades and leather jackets in Gibson's Neuromancer series (1984, 1986, and 1988) and Burning Chrome (1986), his short fiction collection—is used at least a dozen times, invariably in the context of some post-consumer commodity such as high-tech holographic paint jobs: “[Rydell]'d once seen a Harley done up so that everything that wasn't triple-chromed was crawling, fast forward, with life sized bugs." Trendy tendencies are evident even in Gibson's acknowledgements: he thanks Deborah Harry, who is also salaciously mentioned in the novel in a reference to David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982), and who, as readers of Mondo2000 will know, has said she is eager to play Molly in a film version of Neuromancer.

Gibson seems to be validating the popular appropriation of his own work, as a scorpion eats its tail. But he has not gone commercial in any simple sense; rather, the text is a convoluted delight of jokes and word play, all centring on style, consumer fetish-items, and the genre itself. The plot, such as it is, is as straightforward as any formulaic cop thriller on First Choice: innocent person accidentally acquires valuable object, precipitating chase by ruthless and powerful owners. But the text is wildly and ironically funny, ~full of images hyperbolic in their layering. And there are two heroes, Chevette and Rydell, plus a host of minor characters, one can like unabashedly. No part, though, for Deborah Harry.

Elisabeth Vonarburg is a major force in Canadian science fiction, and one of the few writers in French who has been translated into English and enjoys success in both markets. She writes some of the most intelligent speculative fiction around. The Maerlande Chronicles, her most recently translated work, is a must-read. Only very loosely connected to her earlier and slightly less persuasive The Silent City (1988)—it is set in the same world, centuries later—The Maerlande Chronicles stands alone.

Vonarburg posits a society—millennia after a nuclear holocaust, now known only as the Dark Ages —where human genes are corrupted to the extent that nine out of ten babies born are female. The society is rigidly hierarchical, matriarchal, and structured into clans that trade male engendering potential based on strict computations of compatibility in a culture with a finite gene pool. The heroine, Lisbeï, intended to be the next mother of her clan until she proves infertile, makes an archaeological discovery, which rocks the theocratic foundations of her society by throwing received doctrine into question. Her position as dissatisfied change-maker provides much of the focus. Fortunately, she avoids the morass of indecision endured by the heroine of The Silent City. Her society initially seems almost fossilized, but the novel expands with her, in ever-widening circles, as her experience grows.

Many of the things Vonarburg does with language are inevitably rendered slightly awkward when re-created in a language as comparatively gender-neutral as English; however, the translator,Jane Brierley, adeptly manages to convey a sense of the word play of the original French. In this matriarchal society, the cultural norm is feminine, and anything masculine is the exception. For example, one says “writra" instead of “writer." The impact involved in shifting from the masculine "l'écrivain" to the feminine neologism "l'écrivaine" would be all the more unsettling in a language gendered not just by usage, but by its very structuring On one level, then, the novel can be read as a parable of contemporary gender inequality, only reversed. Men are kept from positions of power, and any occupation deemed potentially violent, such as bearing arms as a border guard, is proscribed for fear of releasing atavistic tendencies.

The present is perhaps not the optimum time, however, for a female reader, at least, to contemplate willingly giving up the vision of a lesbian matriarchy to allow for gender equity with men; 584 pages are not nearly long enough to enjoy it in the first place. And perhaps it is a problem that in this future society, although strong love between women is depicted, Vonarburg's descriptions of woman-woman sexuality are scanty, and characterized as "pleasure," while the truly erotic (and detailed) encounters are the proscribed, “delightful" ones between men and women. Of course, and at the risk of rationalizing, in a homoerotic society with rigid population planning, the truly radical, outlaw sex would be heterosexual: a point, however, likely to be missed by readers more comfortable with the status quo.

The Maerlande Chronicles is an older, wiser, and sadder take on the heady all-women societies of Americans Marge Piercy and Suzy Charnas in the heyday of feminist science fiction and fantasy in the 1970s. The biggest difference, however, is that Vonarburg's novel is about more than binaries of gender it seeks, perhaps prematurely, to erase those divisions, and to provide, as the very best speculative fiction always has, a complex vision of ongoing change that sweeps all thsings static and rigid away in its wake. It is a perfect example of the breadth of scope possible from the margins, away from the centre of the monolith. And in that sense, it is wholly Canadian.