Reviews

what it really means to be an astronaut

Rockstars in Space; Astronauts on Earth

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

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.

Many Possible Worlds: Clockwork Lives by Anderson and Neil Peart

BY AE

Steampunk Canterbury Tales with a twist

a prime example of non-genre science fiction

STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel

BY Jonathan Crowe

Station Eleven, the fourth novel by the Canadian-born, New York-based writer Emily St. John Mandel, is a prime example of non-genre science fiction — a novel written by an author not normally identified with science fiction, published by a mainstream rather than a genre imprint, but whose subject matter is unquestionably science fiction. Like others of its kind, it has received recognition from both mainstream and genre awards: It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, but also won this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award and is a finalist for the Sunburst Award and the British Fantasy Award (the latter inexplicably in the horror category).

Lockstep by Karl Shroeder: Stepping into a Possible Future

BY Dale L. Sproule

Karl Schroeder’s five-book Virga series was a spectacular mash-up of popular trends and memes: buccaneers, the courts of Europe, steampunk, AI — all dropped into a breathtakingly visual, theoretically viable science fictional universe. The books are smart and fun with a great cast of characters — and, although the series wasn’t expressly written for a young audience, its sense of adventure, eclecticism and familiarity gained Schroeder an enthusiastic YA following.

The Just City and The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton

BY Jonathan Crowe

Science fiction has often been described as the “literature of ideas,” so it’s no surprise that books have always been arguing with one another about those ideas. Delany’s Triton with Le Guin’s Dispossessed. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, Haldeman’s Forever War, and Panshin’s Rite of Passage. Each book adds to the genre’s ongoing conversation, generating arguments for the next book to respond to.