AEscifi.ca The Canadian Science Fiction Review

star-crossed and time-challenged

TRILLIUM by Jeff Lemire

Reviews
BY Wes Smiderle

Trillium is an Eisner Award-nominated comic book series written and drawn by Canadian Jeff Lemire and featuring a pair of lovers who are, quite literally, star-crossed and time-challenged.

quantum consciousness and self-destruction

QUANTUM NIGHT by Robert J. Sawyer

Reviews
BY Jonathan Crowe

A book by Robert J. Sawyer is always about something. His latest, Quantum Night, mines much of the same vein as his earlier work; like his next-to-last book, Triggers (2012), it’s concerned with the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. It’s a fast-paced thriller in which a psychologist and a physicist must take their discovery about the nature of human consciousness and use it to save the world from self-destruction. But it goes down some very dark paths.

A civilization with people in it I could recognize

Julie Czerneda’s IN THE COMPANY OF OTHERS

Reviews
BY Wes Smiderle

There’s a moment late in Julie Czerneda’s In the Company of Others when an otherwise stoic character erupts with frustration over the inscrutability of the alien life he and his crew members have stumbled upon.

“All I ever wanted was to someday find a civilization,” he laments. “A civilization with people in it I could recognize, talk to ... Take out for a beer.”

Work and fiction

Cory Doctorow’s MAKERS

Reviews
BY Wes Smiderle

Work is not a popular topic for science fiction. This should be surprising. Employment, or the lack of it, has an enormous impact on our lives, both as a source of income and a linchpin of personal identity. We are what we do.

First encounters with no second chances

Echopraxia by Peter Watts

Reviews
BY Jonathan Crowe

It’s impossible to talk about Peter Watts’s most recent novel, Echopraxia, without discussing his previous novel, Blindsight. The relationship between the two books is crucial to any understanding of Echopraxia.

what it really means to be an astronaut

Rockstars in Space; Astronauts on Earth

Reviews
BY AE

I’ve never been one to dream about going into space. Packing for Mars and the movie Gravity, while both entertaining, did nothing to make me think climbing into a Soyuz and being shot into orbit was something I’d personally enjoy, even if it didn’t take years of rigorous selection and training to get there. But Colonel Chris Hadfield’s memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, gave me a taste of what it’s like to want that more than anything and an appreciation of what it really means to be an astronaut.

bold and uncompromising future poetry

AE Bookshelf: William Gibson

Reviews
BY D.F. McCourt

It’s hard to imagine we’ve made it five years without tackling the incredible oeuvre of William Gibson, the author we are so eager to claim as Canadian that we have forgiven his American birth. Gibson burst onto the scene in 1984 with Neuromancer, the novel that launched a thousand terrible imitations (and a half dozen or so very good ones). Since then, he’s given us ten more novels, a wealth of short fiction, and a string of radically political non-fiction. So where to start?

Clockwork Angels (the album and the book) is a loose retelling of Voltaire’s Candide set in a universe where a genius known as the Watchmaker is able, through the power of alchemy and his own force of will, to build an empire where “all is for the best” — because he insists that it is. The follow-up, Clockwork Lives, is presented as a steampunk Canterbury Tales, and though the comparison is not so apt, it nevertheless offers its own pleasures.