SpecFic Colloquium Blog: Daniel Rabuzzi

“Benedick: Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.

Beatrice: A bird of my tongue is better
than a beast of yours.”

-- Much Ado About Nothing, (Act I, scene 1: lines 138-140), William Shakespeare, c. 1600.

Fairy tales, myth, legend and other traditional story genres have long provided women (almost universally it seems, though that hypothesis needs to be tested) with subtle and subversive vehicles for self-expression.

If men controlled and commanded the power of words in the front room­―consider, for instance, the etymology of “parliament”­―women crafted a contrapuntal commentary in the back room. The counterpoint continues to this day in modern speculative fiction, not least in the many explicitly feminist retellings of traditional tales of the marvelous. The power and appeal of the old stories as ways for women to contest male speech or to reshape discourse altogether seem undiminished (if anything, they may be growing). Most intriguing, woman-centered fairy tale themes and motifs thrive today not only in written form but influence, often strongly, popular music and the visual arts.

Since the 1960s, feminist and/or post-modernist scholars have studied vigorously and with great insight both the original fairy tales and myths of the world and literary adaptations of the same. See work by, for instance, Ruth Bottigheimer, Maria Tatar, Steven Swann Jones, Marina Warner, Cristina Bacchilegia, Kay Stone, Vanessa Joosen, Valerie Paradiz, Jack Zipes, Daryl Cumber Dance, Donald Haase, Helen Pilinovsky, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Lewis Seifert, Marcelle Maistre Welch. (I will include a bibliography in my full-length SpecFic Colloquium paper). Their findings have become a core part of feminist theories of reading, poetics and literature generally, and have―somewhat more tentatively―­been connected to the work of scholars exploring issues of race, ethnicity, colonialism and class. Among many others, see work by Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Valerie Lee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Susan Sellers, Toi Derricotte, Sheila Rowbotham, Cheryl Wall, Margaret Ezell, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

Over the past few decades, writers of many stripes have continued to revise and re-fashion fairy tales (and/or folkloric elements more generally) to make feminist points, in a project that goes back at least to Marie-Jeanne Lheritier de Villandon’s “Les Enchantements de l’eloquence” and Madame d’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite in the 1690s. To name a handful from a long list:

Nalo Hopkinson, Sonya Taaffe, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, A.S. Byatt, Jane Yolen, Midori Snyder, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Tanith Lee, Angela Carter, Terri Windling, Kate Bernheimer, Theodora Goss, Joan Aiken, Virginia Hamilton, Robin McKinley, Ellen Kushner, Cat Valente, Margaret Atwood, Emma Donoghue, Erzebet YellowBoy, Nnedi Okorafor, Patricia McKillip, Malinda Lo, Theodora Goss, Bharati Mukherjee, Jeanette Winterson, Delia Sherman, Helen Oyeyemi, Gail Carson Levine, and Margo Lanagan.

Even when folklore or fairy tale do not frame or focus a modern work of fiction, themes from folkloric traditions crop up in “mainstream” works more frequently than is sometimes acknowledged. Toni Morrison’s work comes to mind, and that of Dacia Maraini, to name just two. Modern poetry is also full of fairy tale references, even that published far from the usual fantasy genre outposts.

“Imaginary gardens with real toads in them” fascinate so much that a growing number of journals and sites devote themselves to the sub-genres: The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts (founded 1987), SurLaLune Fairy Tales (1998), Cabinet des Fees (2005), Fairy Tale Review (2005), Goblin Fruit (2006), Enchanted Conversation (2010). And then there are the anthologies, above all the Windling & Ellen Datlow series begun in 1993 with Snow White, Blood Red.

At the SpecFic Colloquium we will talk about the resurgent interest in fairy tale and myth, specifically the desire to write and read them “against the grain.” I particularly want to learn more about traditions other than the various European ones and about current literary practice that is not Eurocentric.

Most of all: I want to explore how the renewed excitement for fairy tales―and especially the subversive elements of fairy tales (pace fans of Disney)―­has spread into other popular media, in particular music. Just as women have (re)shaped the fairy tale canon on the page over the past several centuries, they appear to be doing the same in the musical realm.

Male composers have freely used motifs from fairy tales and myths to create some of the dominant pieces in the Western canon. Think of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Haydn’s The Fishwives and The World on the Moon, Mahler’s Wunderhorn sequence, Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird and Princess Maleine, Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and­―towering over them all in its attempt to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk, a myth updated to encompass and overwhelm all other works―Wagner’s Ring.

In the past few decades, female musicians have been (re)claiming those themes, reworking them into works of their own, often in opposition to the dominant male canon, sometimes (most subversive of all!) indifferent to the male perspective­―creating music that is not defined or definable in terms of male categories.

Working in and around a wide variety of musical forms, and with a wide sweep of perspectives, the following artists nevertheless appear to share an underlying approach in terms of deploying fairy tale and mythic motifs in their music: Angelique Kidjo, Bjork, Missy Elliott, Grace Jones, Enya, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Sarah McLachlan, Rihanna, Kimberly Perry, Mediaeval Baebes, Alison Krauss, The Dixie Chicks, Anoushka Shankar, Goldfrapp. Yes, an idiosyncratic list. . .very far from complete. . .and begging to be queried and to be added to!

Surely one major impulse came from the British Neo-Folk movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, led by Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention, Annie Haslam of Renaissance, and Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span. Stevie Nicks further propelled Faerie onto the concert stage and into popular music (and I think Diana Ross, Chaka Khan and Patti LaBelle did the same, each in her own inimitable style). Sometimes the fairy tale overlay is explicit, self-referential even, as with many of those working the (all too often twee) Celtic Twilight angle. Other times it is less self-conscious, and more oblique.

I will end this teaser with album cover images to bolster my suggestion about the inroads of fairy tale into modern pop music, ­and to spark the conversation when we meet in Toronto in October.

See you there and then!

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Register now at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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Daniel A. Rabuzzi's first novel The Choir Boats, put out by Chizine Publications, debuted at WorldCon 2009 in Montreal. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, Sybil's Garage, Chizine, Abyss & Apex, Mannequin Envy, Goblin Fruit, and Scheherezade's Bequest.

Daniel majored in the study of folklore and fairytales as an undergraduate at Harvard, with a minor in comparative lit and history. He spent two years on fellowships at the University of Oslo's Institute for Folklore Studies, collecting oral histories in Norway and in England (with results published in journals of folklore in the U.K., Sweden and Denmark). He earned a master's at The Fletcher School at Tufts, and then a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in early modern German gender and cultural history. In all, Daniel spent eight years in Norway, Germany and France. He is married to the woodcarver and artist Deborah Mills, who also illustrated his book. They live in New York City.

In Spring 2012 CZP will publish The Choir Boats sequel, entitled The Indigo Pheasant.

SpecFic Colloquium Blog: Peter Watts

Modern mythologies, you say.

Forget the usual suspects. Forget gods and yeti and the other, more overt fantasies that clog bookstore shelves where hard-SF used to be back in better days. Forget Lost and X-Files (ah, I see you have already—good, good). At least try to forget that absurd paradigm that places "people of faith"—those who worship magical sky fairies and believe they'll go to Space Disneyland when they die—on an exalted rung of the human hierarchy, rather than sending them off for therapy with the other nutbars. Forget the good ol' days the good ol' boys from the Tea Party reminisce about: the times before gummint regulation strangled Murrikan innovation with all those nanny-state laws about clean water and child labor, back when Mexicans stayed on the right side of the border and every nigger knew his place.

Forget "Change We Can Believe In". The only change you can really believe in takes place in very small increments, takes thousands of generations to get noticed, and was pegged by a dude called Darwin back in 1859.

They're all worthy myths, if by "myth" you mean a fictional construct that resonates so strongly the gut just knows it speaks to some metaphorical Truth even if its factual claims are batshit crazy. They all benefit someone, somewhere; some even increase the reproductive fitness of whole societies (generally by uniting those societies in a bloodthirsty campaign to eradicate the competition, but nobody said fitness was pretty). Still, in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty small potatoes. Religion may be ubiquitous across the planet, but the fact that believers keep killing each other over whether the messiah wants us to cast away our sandals or gather sandals together suggests a certain lack of commonality. Lost and The Obama Administration stopped resonating the moment it became obvious they didn't have a clue what they were doing, and their appeal was always pretty limited anyway.

You want to dig your teeth into a real myth? Something that has 100% market penetration across the whole damn species, a myth as powerful now as it was before we even were a species? Here's one: the myth that there isn't a big honking hole in the middle of your visual field.

Here's another myth: the sky is blue. In fact the sky is colorless; there's actually no such thing as color outside the imaginations of human minds.

And another: that you have even the slightest control over your own actions, that you are anything but mech made of meat.

The fact is, pretty much everything we perceive is a myth; it feels real, we know it's real, and the fact that our gut "knowledge" happens to contradict the laws of physics gives us way less trouble than it really should.

I'll be going into this a bit on October 15th. I'd invite you to join me — even reassure you that the whole talk won't be a complete downer, that I plan on leavening the nihilism with the occasional joke — but really, there'd be no point.

I have no more influence over your actions than you do.

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Register now at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is an awkward hybrid of biologist, science-fiction author, and (according to Homeland Security) tewwowist. Described by the Globe & Mail as one of the best hard-sf authors alive, his work has been translated into a dozen languages. His first novel (Starfish) was a NY Times Notable Book, while his sixth (Blindsight)— a philosophical rumination on the nature of consciousness with an unhealthy focus on space vampires — has become a core text in such diverse undergraduate courses as "The Philosophy of Mind" and "Introduction to Neuropsychology". It also made the final ballot for a shitload of domestic genre awards including the Hugo, winning exactly none of them (although it has, for some reason, won multiple awards overseas). This may reflect a certain critical divide regarding Watts' work in general; his bipartite novel behemoth, for example, was praised by Publishers Weekly as an "adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke's The Deep Range and Gibson's Neuromancer" and simultaneously decried by Kirkus as "utterly repellent … horrific porn". (Watts happily embraces the truth of both views.)

Watts' 2009 novelette "The Island" was reprinted a dozen times and finally won the damn Hugo, possibly because fandom wanted to give DHS the finger. "The Things" seems to be racking up the hits as well: an unabashed piece of fanfic which is nonetheless sitting in several Best-of-Year collections, and has already won a couple of awards. His most recent novel (Crysis: Legion) once again transcends boundaries, elevating the Video Game Tie-In to the giddy status of "not-horrible potboiler." (His sidequel to Blindsight is currently overdue.) Both Watts and his cat have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature.

SpecFic Colloquium Blog: Mike Carey

I confess to being out of my depth when I talk about myth. But I think most people are. Certainly most of the definitions that come down to us seem to be inadequate. Some anthropologists argue that myths necessarily deal with the doings of gods and superhuman figures. Others suggest that myths describe the creation of the world or the nature of primary natural forces, or that they justify transient or arbitrary social orders by rooting them in an ancient and immemorial past.

But for any rule, it’s easy to think of a dozen exceptions: which suggests to me that there’s something wrong with the rules. Ruskin’s definition – that myth is “a story with a meaning attached to it other than it seems to have at first” – is at least honest about its own inadequacy.

But we believe we know a myth when we see one, and we’re usually right. There are tell-tale signs. One of them is timelessness: myths usually tell of a time before the memory of anyone living, and before the records of any human culture. Another is persistence: myths survive because they’re tenacious. Often, they originate in societies that have no written language, but then are transmitted through many generations until finally a culture comes into being which can capture them in a permanent record–although we suspect that by that time, the original stories may mean something different to those recording them than the meanings they held for their unknown originators.

From certain angles, at least, all of this seems to be a long way away from the stories told in modern fantasies–but I think there’s a continuity, or at least a very promising and telling set of correspondences, with my own work and with the work of many of the fantasists I love best. Our stories aren’t myths by any regular definition, but maybe they serve some of the same functions as myths and are best understood in the light of that tradition.

The talk I’m going to deliver at the symposium takes its title from a poem by Wallace Stevens, Some Friends from Pascagoula, which both begs the listener for a story and at the same time provides the story that it’s asking for. “Speak of the dazzling wings” is a command that obeys itself. And myths, I think, are the stories that enact themselves–the stories that happen all over again, or for the first time, or both, in the very act of being told. I think that may turn out to be one of their functions–to take us out of our own belated time into a dawn time that’s also a mental state.

I’m still in the process of putting my messy ideas together, but I hope to refer to Lord Dunsany, China Mieville, Italo Calvino, Gene Wolfe, George Orwell and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need all the help I can get.

I’m going to take a crack at R.D. Laing, too. His introduction to his own extended essay, The Politics of Experience, begins with the assertion that “Few books today are forgivable.” I want to try to prove that the books we lovers of sci-fi, fantasy and horror adhere to and write are among those few.

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Register now at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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Mike Carey was born in 1959 in Liverpool, England, where both his parents worked in a bread factory and Mike "got [his] first glimpse of hell." He began writing the Eisner-nominated Lucifer monthly -- a story about the devil's quest for autonomy in a deterministic universe -- for DC/Vertigo in 1999 after working on several projects for Caliber Comics and the British the sci-fi anthology 2000 AD. Lucifer has been described as "a work of genius in the dark fantasy genre" and "the best fantasy comic around." Other writing credits include Hellblazer, Batman: Gotham Knights, Flinch, Sandman Presents, My Faith in Frankie for DC/Vertigo, and Ultimate Elektra for Marvel, and the Felix Castor series. In the introduction to the 2001 collection Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway, Neil Gaiman describes Mike Carey's stories as "...elegantly told, solidly written" and Carey himself as "...easily one of the half-dozen best writers of mainstream comics and climbing."

SpecFic Colloquium Blog: Matt Moore

On the subject of modern mythologies, my first thought was the term is a contradiction. "Mythologies" implies ancient religions—tales of ancient cultures' pantheons of gods that convey lessons on right and wrong, identity, why the world is how it is. But in modern times, what stories do we have? There are folks tales or favourable interpretations of history, but a few myths do not make a mythology.

Giving this subject more thought, however, I see that our modern age is in fact rife with mythologies, full of pantheons of heroes and villains.
Sports fans recall "glory days" of their teams, the roster full of offensive dynamos or impassable defensive player with near-superhuman abilities. Hard done by towns stick by their hard done by sports teams, regardless of their record, with near-religious devotion. And fans of rival teams argue with the religious fervour of true believers.

Professional wrestling takes mythologies to another level. Two wrestlers begin a rivalry, but unite against a common foe and forge a powerful friendship. (Gilgamesh and Enkidu anyone?) All the while, fans gravitate toward heroes or villains based on traits they admire or emulate—sportsmanship, bravado, mercy, vanity. And these careers can last for decades, forging long, complex stories.

Comics are modern mythology due to both the pantheon of characters and the devotion of fans. The committed track the histories of characters with the fervor of biblical scholars, able to tell you if Jason Todd ever met Gentleman Ghost and rising a cry of heresy if an off-hand comment contradicts an event from 15 years ago. Unless, like the Great Flood, some crisis (or "Crisis") wiped the slate clean to start over again.

Science fiction and fantasy universes, like Star Trek and Star Wars, present mythologies growing more complicated with each new episode, film, novel, comic or game. Fans discuss the canonical authority—a religious concept—of each medium. Is the Dark Horse or Marvel version of Star Wars accepted as correct in the event of a conflict? That is to say nothing of the near-religious rivalry between these two groups. If violence was as tolerated today as in ancient times, I have no doubt blood would be spilled at many science fiction conventions as Star Wars and Star Trek fans face off, each declaring the other as heretic.

Yet this all begs the question: Why? In ancient times, why did so many tales—of Thor battling Jörmungandr, Zeus' conquests, the various incarnations of the sun god Ra—come about? Looking at them, we see tales of morality, caution, identity. Lessons to entertain, explain the supernatural and reinforce cultural norms. What's more, they were interesting.

Western monotheistic religions are no less worthy of study or interest, and certainly contain lessons of morality, but with a smaller cast of characters. Perhaps as a people we need large, complex cast of heroes, villains and everything in between so we can align ourselves with one. This allows us to be a part of something larger than ourselves, but still consider ourselves special and distinct. In the past, cults and sects arose to worship different deities—sometimes the lesser known ones. Today, there are those who extol the virtues of Guy Gardner over Hal Jordan or proudly sport Aura Sing costumes.

And such large pantheons full of heroes, villains and everything in between reinforces the notion that the world is not as clear-cut as good and evil.

With electronic communication making it easier for tales to be told, I have no doubt more and more mythologies will arise, be debated and either grow or fall. Just like in ancient times. My hope is they provide us with comfort and a sense of belonging in such a large world.

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Register now at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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Matt Moore' short fiction has appeared in a variety of print, electronic and audio markets including On Spec, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Cast Macabre and the Tesseracts Anthologies. His short story "Touch the Sky, They Say" has been nominated for this year's 2011 Aurora Award's Best Short Story category. He blogs at mattmoorewrites.com.

SpecFic Colloquium Blog: Stephen Michell

I was at a party a weekend or two ago, drinking Sleeman Original and eating delicious catered food. The ramblings of a blond-haired British gentleman caught my interest: he presented the idea that dreams create a culture's mythology. I liked the idea. The image of a whole society dreaming: a giant gelatinous mass of faces and eyes, grand and petite, awake, hungry, breathing.

The myths of Bronze Age Greece are the most prominent in my mind. The stories of Heracles, Perseus, David, and poor, perpetually-disembowelled Prometheus, are stories that invoked a sort of idolatry within ancient Greek culture. The characters and events of myth were idealized versions of their own society; men with colossal strength, women with boundless beauty, courage, honour, all were hopes, aspirations, dreams perhaps, of the society.
Indigenous North American mythology, though perhaps more abstract and unusual to our Greco-derived sensibilities, is still characterized by the same sort of idealism: stories of Raven, Coyote and Nanabush abound, all of whom are synonymous with the Trickster. These tales tell of journeys across vast landscapes, spiritual interactions with animals, and a greater understanding of nature and the universe: an expression of our society’s dreams, waking or with eyes closed.

I’m not mad. I am, however, a touch disconcerted. When I pause to think of my own mythology, of the tales and stories that echo some aspect of my hopes and dreams, and I draw a blank. Perhaps the heroes of our day are celebrities, writers and actors, great minds of art, or perhaps they’re innovators, brilliant thinkers, or money makers―I don’t know. But it makes me wonder: if Western Civilization is partially derived from the thoughts and wonders of ancient Greece, where then stands the contemporary Cyclops? What lake or labyrinth hides the modern Minotaur, the killer Kraken, the monsters of today?
. . . Perhaps they’re reading this, or perhaps they’ll be attending the 2011 Toronto SpecFic Colloquium―you should be.

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Register now at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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Stephen Michell is a student at the University of Toronto as well as a fledgling writer, with his first publication in Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine. Working as a writer in Kensington Market, he has much time for self-reflection, and believes he has nearly “found himself.” He is currently reading Crime and Punishment, and enjoying it, though he still contends that Red Dragon offers the best first sentence he’s read. He is also sort of on the market for an agent. Say hey to him at the 2011 SpecFic Colloquium; he’ll be the guy quietly drinking coffee, digesting the words and wonders that are spinning around him.

SpecFic Colloquium Blog: City Myths

By David Nickle

Could it be that a vampire is prowling the Entertainment District smugly preying on binge-drinking sons and daughters of Etobicoke, from the saddle of a 24-speed hybrid mountain bike that during daylight hours he stores next to his taxpayer-subsidized coffin somewhere deep in St. Lawrence?

Is there a Minotaur lurking at the centre of the Path, dangerously over-caffeinated on Starbucks House Blend and drunk on undeserved self-satisfaction? Has the zombie apocalypse come to Scarborough, and everyone's just somehow failed to notice?

Yeah, urban mythology. It means different things to different people. Writers of horror and fantasy—and their legions of readers – are intrigued by the confluence of traditional myths . . . ghosts, vampires, zombies, or the Gods . . . and the complexity and richness of life in the big city.

I've never shared that fascination. And for evidence, I point to the bulk of my work in horror and fantasy so far. I tend to see creatures of myth in the woods, the more sparsely-populated rural communities, and the dimly-lit, superstitious past.

But that's not to say I don't have a healthy respect for urban mythology. I'm setting this down a couple of days after my local MP Jack Layton received a hero's send-off, after his death from cancer. I remember Jack in the flesh: an ambitious, optimistic and energetically affable man. As a reporter, I knew him and liked him and respected him. I had never, however, mistaken him for a paragon. And that's what he is now: an addition to the pantheon that makes up Toronto's breathing, not-quite-real (but that's the point, isn't it?) mythology.

As a journalist who writes about many things Torontonian on a daily basis, I'm intimately concerned with this mythology. It's how, when I'm feeling the need to generalize and not think about things too deeply, I'm tempted to understand my city. It's a narrative.

So I understand that the Entertainment District (where I don't really spend much time) is populated at night by drunken Etobians, even though that may not be entirely the case (Mississauga parents have a lot to answer for, as do the founders of Liberty Village, and—okay, I admit it—likely my own neighbours here on the Danforth). I've navigated the Path (a network of underground retail tunnels here that connects downtown office towers in such a way that denizens need never step outside) like the labyrinth that it is. There's no minotaur there, but sometimes I feel like I should bring a spool of thread to find my way out of it. And as for Scarborough? People from other parts of Toronto make zombie apocalypse jokes about the east-end former city. People from Scarborough are of the view that there's nothing former about Scarborough, and the only thing standing between it and Elysium are a couple more subways and a little respect, thank you very much.

Suburbanites are a horde of socially conservative proto-fascists who are probably homophobic. People from the former City of Toronto are a bunch of libertine communists and probably gay. Suburbanites don't like that about downtowners. Downtowners don't like that about suburbanites. If Toronto is Heaven, there's a war in it—Mayor Rob Ford and Margaret Atwood are the generals—and bicycles and motorcars are the artillery.

And in the end, there's just not much room for vampires and minotaurs, angels and demons. The city has already made its own mythology, with the materials at hand.

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Register now at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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David Nickle is the author of the novel Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism and numerous short stories, some of which are collected in his story collection Monstrous Affections. In 2010, Monstrous Affections was awarded the Black Quill Reader's Choice Award for best dark genre collection.

His fiction has been published in magazines, anthologies and online, and been adapted for television. He lives and works in Toronto.

Introducing the Second Annual Toronto SpecFic Colloquium

Speculative fiction forges, challenges, remakes, and disseminates the mythologies that explain and name who we are today and what we might be tomorrow. Whether by means of technoscience or the fantastic, speculative fiction investigates how the boundaries between the familiar and the mysterious dissolve and bleed into each other, its stories expressing the hopes and fears of modernity in distinct ways and from surprising perspectives.

The 2011 Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will focus on Modern Mythologies. In a series of talks and readings, leading speculative fiction writers will discuss, pose questions about, and encourage you to consider the importance and power of the stories that define humanity in the present age . . . from the aliens hiding among us to the gates of Hell ripping open in our backyards.

As part of this, the good folks at ChiZine Publications have agreed to run a series of blog posts tackling the theme of “Modern Mythologies.” A range of guest bloggers from the industry will give their own personal take on the 2011 Colloquium’s theme. Aliens among us, masquerading as humans. Vampires hunting in our alleys at night. The singularity evolving steadily within fibre optic cables and the code of the internet. Fey waging their eons-old feuds beside us in our cities. Vigilantes confronting sociopaths and psychopaths through claustrophobic streets and crowded skyscrapers. Ancient gods and goddesses hoping to regain power and status in a secular, skeptical world. Post human cyborgs thinking and acting faster than we can comprehend. Hell boiling up into our homes and suburban neighbourhoods.

And, of course, we encourage you to register for the main event, to check out the videos of the Aurora-nominated 2010 Colloquium, and to add your own thoughts and comments to the discussion!

--Helen Marshall, co-organizer of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium

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The 2nd Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 15, 2011 at the Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue). Registration opens on March 1, 2011 at http://chiseries.ticketleap.com/specfic-colloquium/.

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Aurora-nominated poet Helen Marshall (manuscriptgal.com) is an author, editor, and self-proclaimed bibliophile. Her poetry has been published in ChiZine, NFG, Abyss & Apex and the long-running Tesseracts anthology series. "Mist and Shadows," published originally in Star*Line, appeared in The 2006 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry of 2005. She recently released a collection of poems entitled Skeleton Leaves from Kelp Queen Press and her collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2013.

An Introduction to Urban Fantasy

by Kelley Armstrong

“An Introduction to Urban Fantasy” is a primer for the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium, Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Hart House and has been written in support of the Sunburst Awards. To register for the Colloquium, visit here.  Spaces are limited!


 I’m ambivalent about the label “urban fantasy.”  It’s a term that’s been applied to a branch of fantasy for decades, but in recent years has been co-opted to describe a very specific subtype.  Old-school readers take offense at paranormal authors using it.  The new audience for paranormal fantasy is confused if authors don’t use it.  So I’m flexible.  Or indecisive.

When I sold Bitten in 1999, there was no genre label for this type of work—supernatural beings starring as the lead characters in a thriller plot.  Laurell K. Hamilton was several books into her Anita Blake series, but she hadn’t made it onto my radar yet, nor the radar of most in the industry, who still used Anne Rice as the measure for comparison.  By 2001, when Bitten came out, Jim Butcher’s first Dresden Files and Charlaine Harris’s first Southern Vampire novel had also just been published.  All these books had a suspense/mystery main plot, and were set in a world peopled by supernatural beings—vampires, werewolves, spell-casters and the like.

My publishers and I initially referred to my novels as supernatural thrillers.  Over the next few years, as more of these series were launched, they began being to be labeled “paranormal suspense.”

Many of these early series had a strong romantic subplot that seemed to appeal to romance readers, so not surprisingly, a sister sub-genre was born: paranormal romance.  What’s the difference?  Plot focus.  If you can remove the romance and still have a story, it’s paranormal suspense.  If you can’t, it’s paranormal romance.  The industry doesn’t always agree, to the chagrin of paranormal suspense authors who find their books mislabeled, and have to deal with furious romance readers.

As paranormal romance grew in popularity, there was a move to more firmly establish paranormal suspense as a separate genre.  And so the term “urban fantasy” was born.   Or so you’d think, to hear some folks explain it.  The truth, as fantasy enthusiasts know, is that urban fantasy has been used to describe the works of authors like Emma Bull and Charles de Lint for years.  So it was co-opted.  Or stolen, depending on your view.

Today, urban fantasy is an established marketing category.  We used to say it required contemporary setting…until historical urban fantasy hit the scene.  Some will say the “urban” part means it must be set primarily in a city, but that’s also not true—most of mine have rural or small town settings, as do many others.

So I think I have good reason for being ambivalent about the label.  There’s no good definition and for every “rule” given for inclusion, I can name a handful of urban fantasy authors who break it.  But as a marketing category, it seems useful enough.  So when I give my talk at Hart House on October 23, I’ll call it urban fantasy, and discuss the genre in more detail.


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Kelley Armstrong  has been telling stories since before she could write.  Her earliest written efforts were disastrous.  If asked for a story about girls and dolls, hers would invariably feature undead girls and evil dolls, much to her teachers' dismay.  All efforts to make her produce "normal" stories failed.  Today, she continues to spin tales of ghosts and demons and werewolves, while safely locked away in her basement writing dungeon.  She's the author of the "Women of the Otherworld" paranormal suspense series and "Darkest Powers" young adult urban fantasy trilogy.

What is Canadian Speculative Fiction and Why Should We Care?

by Helen Marshall

“What is Canadian Speculative Fiction and Why Should We Care?” is a primer for the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium, Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Hart House and has been written in support of the Sunburst Awards. To register for the Colloquium, visit here.  Spaces are limited!


I've been in the midst of helping out with any number of projects that aim to support Canadian speculative fiction -- that is, broadly speaking, the major genres of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Many writers have claimed that publishing, as an industry, is going through something of a crisis with the introduction of eBooks, the decline of independent (and chain!) bookstores, the possibilities of self-publishing. I don't want to debate the excitement or fear that accompany those changes. We all know we're moving towards a new landscape -- what that landscape looks like, no one is quite sure about yet.

But how is that landscape Canadian? Is there anything to be said for a Canadian aesthetics of genre writing?

I think there is.

Canadian horror writing, for example, a branch of speculative fiction and a particular passion of mine, has begun to move in strange and provocative new directions, becoming something altogether different from its American counterpart and wholly itself. In a recent blog comment, Rose Fox of Publishers Weekly praised the ingenuity of Canadian authors: “Horror is profoundly cultural. Over a couple of decades of reading a great many books, I've developed something of an immunity to American and British horror. I still can't really describe what exactly [Canadian horror authors] do differently, but it is different.”

The last several years have shown a revitalized interest in publishing darker fiction. Psychological horror dominated the short stories of the influential anthology Tesseracts, published by Calgary-based Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy.  ChiZine Publications too has demonstrated that horror (in Canada at least) is moving away from the splatter-and-gore stories of the eighties into a distinctly literary arena, giving us strong characters and themes that underpin provocative and unsettling narratives.

Things are moving here in Canada. There's a kind of excitement in the changes we are seeing, and it's generating some fantastic new literature.



And here comes the plug.  The Sunburst Award for the Fantastic, Canada's only jury award for genre writing, has been a long-valued institution. Unfortunately, the Sunburst Awards have run into a hiccup.  They do not have enough operating capital to keep going as they currently stand. This sad news comes at a particularly critical juncture in the award's life--the operating committee is in the process of getting the Sunburst organization registered as a non-profit, and getting it "national arts organization" status.  As part of a fundraising drive to shepherd the Sunburst through this change of status and structure, we’d like to ask fans, writers, editors, and publishers from the speculative fiction community to help raise awareness of this vital institution...

How to Participate

We're looking for short (30 second to 2 minutes) videos that say what you think about Canadian speculative fiction. These should be interview-style videos in the vein of Speaker's Corner and can be recorded as simply as with a web camera. Prior interviews or footage can be submitted provided that you have permission to do so.  We will host these individually on a YouTube channel (sunburstaward), but will also edit them in order to create a series of short videos to promote awareness of the fundraising campaign. A longer video will be shown at the opening remarks to the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.

Not savvy with a camera? Send us a high res image of yourself and either a short paragraph in text or a recorded audio track.

Not Canadian? Never fear. If you have something you want to say about Canadian speculative fiction then we want to hear it.

 To participate, send your name, contact information, submission and a short release statement giving us permission to use the video/image to sunburstvideo@gmail.com by October 15, 2010.

Possible Topics:
-favourite Canadian authors and/or stories
-the relationship between Canadian writing and the rest of the world
-publishing speculative fiction in Canada
-the state of Canadian fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc
-how does Canada inspire your work?
-favourite Canadian settings to use in your writing

Of course, these topics are intended to be a jumping off point. Feel free to think outside of the box. And, above all, show your enthusiasm!

To donate directly, visit http://www.sunburstaward.org/
content/please-lend-your-support-sunburst-awards.


***

Helen Marshall spends the majority of her time pursuing a Ph. D. in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto where she gets to travel across England to examine fourteenth-century manuscripts. Of course, her fascination with the making and writing of books extends well into the present. Her poetry has been published in ChiZine, NFG and the Ontarion Arts Supplement. "Mist and Shadows," published originally in Star*Line, appeared in The 2006 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry of 2005." "The Gypsy" and "Crossroads and Gateways" both received honourable mentions in the 2009 Rannu Fund Contest, while four other poems were short-listed. She also works as an editor and slush reader for ChiZine Publications.

Queering (My) Genre

By Gemma Files

"Queering (My) Genre" is a primer for "Queering the Genre," a longer talk that Gemma will present on Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.


In 1984, having heard the same “future of horror” quote from Stephen King as everybody else in the world, I bought the first of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. The last story in the book is “In the Hills, the Cities”, and readers, that’s when I knew for sure that I was lost.

I mean, I’d suspected as much previously--as I’ve said before in plenty of other venues, like Yukio Mishima, my heart’s sad leaning has always been towards “Night, and Blood, and Death”, but it’s been a while, and I’m down with that. The things I'm interested in have sharp edges and sad outcomes; I believe that anger is an energy, that the worst things we do we do to ourselves, and that wounds can become sex-organs if we play with them too often. Cronenberg, Ballard, Brite, Kiernan, Koja, Scorsese, they're all my muses: I love opera, narratives that float in a dream-state of bad romance and conflicted motivations. I like a bit of bruise with my kiss.

All of which pretty irretrievably makes “my” genre now and forever maybe horror, maybe dark fantasy, maybe just "dark".

When I was younger, I’d tell people I wanted to write horror (movies, then...how things change, though I sure wouldn’t turn a chance to go back to that down), and they’d say: “Oh, like Friday the 13th?” Aside from the fact that today the referenced film would probably be either Saw or Hostel, things haven’t really changed. “Dark” is not assumed to be a spectrum--with its steadfast concentration on the things most people would rather not think about too deeply, “dark” is assumed to come in one color only, one blood-rot-gross flavour. Because “dark” is not, has never been, never will be, the mainstream.

This is an interesting realization, especially when you factor in the perception that horror (in particular) is a genre which thrives on Other-ation. Peel back modern horror culture, and you fairly quickly reach the concept that dread comes from threat and threat comes from the violation of the "norm", with the "norm" automatically coded as the perceived societal media default: Male, white-skinned, middle-class, cisgendered, straight, Christian of some variety. People from inside these boundaries deserve to survive (our hero, his wife/GF, his kids, his support-system), but sometimes don't, which is horrifying; people from outside these boundaries don't deserve to survive unless they change themselves to fit inside them, and may in fact be coded as allied with/part of “the evil”, just by virtue of being outside the protagonists’ accepted rubric.

I find it only fair to mention here that “the default”, for the most part, bores me by definition, and always has. Not completely--I like to think I’m fluid enough that if you can convince me of something, elevate it beyond the usual, I’ll embrace it whole-heartedly. (Witness my attachment to King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and The Stand, as well as my championship of less-defensible Unca Stevie works like The Tommyknockers and Desperation.) But the problem with coding is that it’s short-hand, and short-hand is lazy; it’s a very easy way to look at the world. Darkness shouldn't be easy.

“In the Hills, the Cities” is a story about that classic horror movie protagonist pair trope, The Couple Who Go On Vacation and Stumble Across Something Unexpected. The thing they come across is a pair of giants made from lashed-together human beings acting in hypnotized concert--the rival cities of Popolac and Podujevo, who’ve had a ritualistic yearly wrestling match for district supremacy. But today, a terrible accident has left Podujevo destroyed and Popolac wandering free, massive and insane.

The story is brutal, poetic and crazed, with a striking sensual immediacy which set my creative bar forever at exactly that level--out of reach, I’m sure, but well worth trying for nonetheless, like I’ve been doing ever since. It breaks all sorts of rules, but the first one it screws with it does pretty much in paragraph one, by making that central couple a pair of dudes.

So we can credit/blame Clive Barker for having convinced me that what makes far more sense than knee-jerk heterocentrism in horror is the idea that if “dark” is for outsiders, then perhaps it’s the perfect place to find the representation that we’re denied everywhere else. The place where the outsider perspective can be centralized and given protagonist agency, as we often see in even the most mainstream of “dark” narratives--ghost stories starring women, monster stories starring children and old people, narratives in which the post-apocalyptic world boils down to a representative sample of humanity, and the freaks and geeks take over.

Or even those classic slashers which gave rise to the image of the Final Girl; once upon a time, that was a crazy idea. Now it’s become the rule rather than the exception, so we routinely stretch it just as far as it will go, and further--the same way we once began with ridiculous fake-inclusionary things like Blacula, cooked up specifically to access a particular market, and somehow (by stretching the definition of what was genre-“allowable”) ended up with the inventive, brave, unabashedly Afrocentric work of Tannarive Due, Maurice Broaddus, John Ridley and Octavia Butler.

This is why it can’t be all blood and boobs, why “dark” is the absolute best place for the envelope to be pushed--because when the biggest things are on the line, the subtext reads, anyone can be both the victim and the hero, like Barker’s Mick and Judd, who end up shattered not because they’re gay and deserve to be punished but because they’re humans confronted by the gloriously unspeakable.

And for all the blood and thunder it usually comes wrapped in, perhaps the real reason I keep on returning to darkness’s well, again and again, is that I personally find that idea...very comforting.


The End

 **
  
Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, "The Emperor's Old Bones", won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Five of her short stories were adapted for the television series The Hunger. Her first novel A Book of Tongues explores the range of homosocial and homosexual bonds that bind her exceptionally strong characters, drawing attention to the way in which an ultra-masculine network of relationships underpins the history and mythology of the American West.


A Book of Tongues: Volume 1 of the Hexslinger Series
by Gemma Files

Two years after the Civil War, Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow has gone undercover with one of the weird West's most dangerous outlaw gangs-the troop led by "Reverend" Asher Rook, ex-Confederate chaplain turned "hexslinger," and his notorious lieutenant (and lover) Chess Pargeter. Morrow's task: get close enough to map the extent of Rook's power, then bring that knowledge back to help Professor Joachim Asbury unlock the secrets of magic itself.

Magicians, cursed by their gift to a solitary and painful existence, have never been more than a footnote in history. But Rook, driven by desperation, has a plan to shatter the natural law that prevents hexes from cooperation, and change the face of the world-a plan sealed by an unholy marriage-oath with the goddess Ixchel, mother of all hanged men. To accomplish this, he must raise her bloodthirsty pantheon from its collective grave through sacrifice, destruction, and apotheosis.

Caught between a passel of dead gods and monsters, hexes galore, Rook's witchery, and the ruthless calculations of his own masters, Morrow's only real hope of survival lies with the man without whom Rook cannot succeed: Chess Pargeter himself. But Morrow and Chess will have to literally ride through Hell before the truth of Chess's fate comes clear-the doom written for him, and the entire world.

To Dream the Impossible Dream: Opening Arguments against Realism

By Claude Lalumière 

"To Dream the Impossible Dream: Opening Arguments against Realism" is a primer for "Against Realism: Hard SF, Autobiography, and Other Questionable Strategies for Writing Fiction," a longer talk that Claude will present on Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.

Genteel society loves realism. That alone should be enough of a call to arms for writers -- indeed, all artists, as iconoclasts by definition -- to strive against it. Here, I will briefly introduce why I mistrust realism, and why I believe it to be an insidious distorter of human expression and lived experience.

 
I use "realism" in its broadest sense, to encompass not only movements such as American Realism, Naturalism, Social Realism, their legacies, and their descendents -- such as Hard SF and one of its recent subsets, the Mundanes [i]--  but all artistic expression that values the comforting verisimilitude of consensus reality over the disquieting uncertainty of truth -- although few, if any, of realism's adherents and defenders would acknowledge that such is the consequence of a realist approach to art. And by "truth" I do not mean the sophistic illusion called "objective reality" but rather that utopian, romantic, and quintessentially quixotic quest not to understand but to intuit the complex, ever-changing, and fundamentally unknowable web of life and existence of which we are part, thus embracing a sense of wonder, awe, compassion, and even terror. In essence, "to dream the impossible dream." [ii]
 
The rise of realism in the nineteenth century was motivated partly by "a reaction against romanticism" and "an interest in scientific method." [iii] It will come as no surprise, then, that, as a vocal detractor of realism, I am an unabashed romantic and that my profound and unshakeable atheism encompasses a mistrust of science, its dogmas, and its societal project.
 
Furthermore, "Purporting to be undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality." [iv] Although I hope that few thinkers would now explicitly or knowingly adhere to such a naive proposition, it betrays a fundamental unease that still influences and holds sway over the decidedly anti-romantic biases of genteel institutions such as English departments, university writing programs, mainstream literary awards, and literary criticism.
 
Our individual and collective memories are formed by storytelling, by the stories we tell ourselves and each other. These narrative memories -- about our origins, our aspirations, our defeats, our victimizations, our victories, our kinships -- are the building blocks of our sense of identity, both as individuals and as societies. States, religions, and other forms of identity-based authority notoriously mistrust art, try to dictate what art should or should not express. Such authorities maintain dominance through narratives of collective identity.
 
Even when it purports to have a progressive agenda, realism, which is necessarily measured against consensus reality, reinforces dominant narratives and thus the institutions validated and empowered by these narratives. Non-realist art, by its very nature, transgresses the boundaries of consensus, identity, and social order, potentially threatening the hegemony of ruling ideologies and, at a personal level, putting into question identities constructed under its aegis.
 
Of course, I realize there are many shades between these extremes of realism and non-realism, of comforting and transgressive, and many permutations that complicate such a simplistic dichotomy. After all, yes, non-realist art can be used as a tool to validate regressive agendas, and realism can illustrate troubling inequities. Even in such a case, a non-dominant group, too, tends to form its own micro-hegemony and tightly control transgression from its proposed worldview -- and that can include controlling the art that purports to express that group's cultural identity by demanding that it conform to its brand of realism, to its realist narratives. 
 
Realism, then, being by its very nature rooted in the hegemonic worldview that defines it, remains a primarily reactionary and dominating force that gnaws at the romantic and transgressive roots of so-called "genre" fictions and, more broadly, impedes the potential of individuals and communities to transcend the limits imposed by normative narratives of identity.

In the opening paragraph, I equated "artist" with "iconoclast" -- and I fully recognize my own bias in this matter. I do not consider "art" the work of so-called "artists" whose creations serve to reiterate or reinforce without question the status quo, the dominant worldview, or an entrenched societal paradigm. Art should be the vehicle on our quixotic quest for the unattainable truth. It is by nature restless. It can never be satisfied with where we are. It must forever, at any cost, propel us elsewhere -- where there be dragons. In such dangerous waters, realism can only blind us and thus imperil our survival.

***

Claude Lalumière is the author of the collection Objects of Worship, the Fantastic Fiction columnist for The Montreal Gazette, and the editor of eight anthologies, including the Aurora Award nominee Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction. With Rupert Bottenberg, he is the co-creator of Lost Myths, which is both a live show and an online archive updated every Thursday. Claude's The Door to Lost Pages, a novella, will be released by CZP in spring 2011.
 
"To Dream the Impossible Dream: Opening Arguments against Realism" is a primer for "Against Realism: Hard SF, Autobiography, and Other Questionable Strategies for Writing Fiction," a longer talk that Claude will present on Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium. 

Objects of Worship
by Claude Lalumière

Twelve strange, eerie, sensual stories by a bold new voice in weird fiction. Capricious gods rule a world of women. Zombies breed human cattle. The son of a superhero must decide between his heritage and his religion. Young lovers worship a primordial spider god. The apocalyptic rebirth of the god of the elephants. Monstrous chimeras roam through a devastated future Earth. A retired fisherman caught in the middle of a conflict between gods and superheroes. Teenagers struggle to survive a surreal ice age . . .

---

[i] mundane-sf.blogspot.com.

[ii] "The Impossible Dream," from Man of La Mancha (1972), lyrics by Joe Darion, music by Mitch Leigh.

[iii] Donna M. Campbell,"Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890," www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm.

[iv] "Realism (Arts)," en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts).

Escaping the Genre Ghetto – Exploring the State of Speculative Fiction at Toronto’s SpecFic Colloquium

TORONTO, ON (September 7, 2010) – On October 23, 2010 authors, editors and readers will gather to explore the state of speculative fiction in Canada at Toronto’s SpecFic Colloquium.

Canadian speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) has been increasingly recognized internationally for the calibre of its authors and their insight into the nature of social and religious identities, the implications of new technologies, and the relationship between humankind and its environments.  “Our authors are breaking out of the genre ghetto,” says co-organizer Helen Marshall. “Their stories disrupt habits, overcome barriers of cultural perception to make the familiar strange.  They show us the speculative fiction can be an ideal tool for social examination and critique.”

The colloquium, a one-day event to launch the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, will deliver lectures by major names in the field on topics such as urban fantasy, cognitive science, queering the genre, and how Canadian science fiction is taking over the world, nicely.  The lectures will be followed by readings that showcase emergent and experienced Canadian speculative fiction writers.

Guests include Kelley Armstrong, Julie Czerneda, Guy Gavriel Kay, Tony Burgess, Gemma Files, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, David Nickle, Michael Rowe and Claude Lalumière. 

Sponsored by ChiZine Publications, an independent publisher of weird, surreal, subtle, and disturbing dark literary fiction, the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium will take place on Saturday October 23, 2010 in the Debates Room and Hart House, 7 Hart House Circle.   Register at http://www.specfic-colloquium.com/registration.htm.

For further information about the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium, visit http://specfic-colloquium.com. For sponsorship partnering, advertizing opportunities or media queries, contact Sandra Kasturi, co-organizer at sandra@chizinepub.com or Helen Marshall, co-organizer at helen@chizinepub.com.