Tesseracts is the long-running anthology of Canadian speculative fiction published for the past few years by Calgary’s Edge Publications. I’ve never sold a short story to it…until now. (This may have something to do with the fact I’ve never submitted to it before. Funny how that works.)
Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast, edited by Colleen Anderson and Steve Vernon, will include my short story “Path of Souls,” a piece inspired by Globe Theatre‘s “Lanterns on the Lake” event of a few years past.
Below is the official announcement.
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We are pleased to announce the official Table of Contents for Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast.
This anthology of speculative Canadian writing will be out this fall from Edge Publications. It was no easy task choosing from the over 450 submissions and we had to turn away many a good tale. In the end, we have a representation of Canada that spans all provinces and territories (with the exception, alas, of Nunavut). The tales themselves reach far into the past and much farther into the future.
TESSERACTS 17: SPECULATING CANADA FROM
COAST TO COAST TO COAST
- Introduction: Colleen Anderson
- Vermilion Wine: Claude Lalumière
- Night Journey: West Coast: Eileen Kernaghan
- The Wall: Rhea Rose
- 2020 Vision: Lisa Smedman
- Why Pete?: Timothy Reynolds
- Bird Bones: Megan Fennell
- Bedtime Story: Rhonda Parrish
- Graveyard Shift: Holly Schofield
- Path of Souls: Edward Willett
- Sin A Squay: David Jón Fuller
- Hereinafter Referred to as the Ghost: Mark Leslie
- Anywhere: Alyxandra Harvey
- Secret Recipes: Costi Gurgu
- Star Severer: Ben Godby
- The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife: Dave Beynon
- Graffiti Borealis: Lisa Poh
- My Child Has Winter in His Bones: Dominik Parisien
- Team Leader 2040: Catherine Austen
- Sand Hill: Elise Moser
- The Ripping: Vincent Grant Perkins
- Unwilling to Turn Around: J.J. Steinfield
- Pique Assiette: Catherine MacLeod
- Leaving Cape Roseway: John Bell
- Everybody Wins: Rachel Cooper
- In the Bubble: William Meikle
- Hermione and Me: Dwain Campbell
- Blizzard Warning: Jason Barrett
- M.E.L.: Dianne Homan
- The Calligrapher’s Daughter: Patricia Robertson
- Afterword: Editing Anthologies Made Easy: Steve Vernon
The anthology will appear this fall, but you can already pre-order from Amazon, where you’ll also find this note from editor Colleen Anderson:
What is a tesseract? You can google it and go a little nutso perusing Wikipedia or try to find a simple definition: a four-dimensional equivalent of a cube, or a hypercube, having sixteen corners. But why, back when the Tesseracts anthologies began some twentyplus years ago with Judith Merril editing the first one, did they name it Tesseracts? I think it was a funky new shape discovered in mathematics and the advent of the computer age. A tesseract was more than what it seemed, had more surfaces than you first thought, and had a depth that changed depending on how you looked at it.
Now here we are at Tesseracts 17, where Steve Vernon and I have spent buckets of time in the hypercube trying to pull out all those facets and surfaces, all those edges and corners, for you to look at and perceive. Tesseracts is somewhat like the Tardis—bigger on the inside than on the outside….
We could not gather all the types of stories and poems that fill the voids in our minds, but we tried to give a good representation of what it means to be in Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast. In reading the many submissions we found that there were tales of Wendigo, werewolves, vampires and a host of reanimated dead, though not all of them zombies. There were gentle tales of transformation and other terrors of madness and encountering the demons we know and fear. Character faced the trials of space and the spaces within.
And indeed, from Canada’s inland border with the US, to the warmer Pacific waters, to the chilly depths of the Maritime Atlantic, and the mysterious tundra of the North, these are the reaches of Canada’s geography. But the mindset of Canada’s writers stretches farther. Tesseracts 17 is rich with tales about people: there are housewives and men who find themselves in unusual and terrifying circumstances, children who deal with the transformations of their lives and their worlds, potters, keepers of light, wine reviewers, out-of-work graduates, pilots, apprentice chefs, writers, yak herders, dead actors, game leaders, and those who just have a job to do.
1 comments
Congrats, Edward! I look forward to reading “Path of Souls,”!
This was my first sale to Tesseracts, as well, though I have sent in stories in the past. Such a great series of anthologies.