By Scott Price on September 3, 2013

 

The 36 works of Canadian speculative fiction that make up Imaginarium 2013 (ChiZine Publications, 289 pp., $18.95) accomplish most of what they set out to do, leaving the reader bewildered, curious, and frightened, but rarely sated.

 

Michael Kelly’s “Blink,” the anthology’s opening entry, brings a struggling author’s writing to life. It’s a first-person narrative in which the author is also the protagonist — a writer on a date with someone he met on LoveMatch.com. He struggles to shape the story as we read it, explaining what he’s trying to write, and how it isn’t quite working. It’s a rough draft that he’s both developing and re-working on the fly.

 

This isn’t an entirely original premise, but when the narrator’s date, Mabel, loses interest and takes on a life of her own, the story heads in a direction the author never intended. “I didn’t like him,” Mabel says. “Or you, for that matter. Not that there was any difference between the two.”

 

“Blink” is a well-suited entry point to the anthology and even the genre, giving unfamiliar life to a relatable process. Kelly asks you to confront your understanding of the writing process through the story’s absurdities, and locates certain truths within both the familiar and the bizarre.

 

Indeed, part of the appeal of speculative fiction lies in this willingness to question the commonplace, throwing our conscious and unconscious biases into stark relief through imaginative and sometimes haunting constructs that are just too peculiar to ignore. It’s a genre that features a fluid and limitless spectrum of rules, forms, and inspirations, often linked solely by their inquiring nature.

 

J.W. Schnarr’s “Opt-In” is a futuristic, surreal commentary on corporate indecency, though one that is intertwined with a grieving protagonist’s struggle to cope with the loss of a loved one. The story is disorienting at times, with many conclusions off-loaded for the reader to draw on his own, but is also moving in its human narrative and, through its graphic imagery, profoundly unsettling.

Amal El-Mohtar’s “No Poisoned Comb” — one of a limited number of poems in the anthology — reclaims the truth in the childhood fable Snow White, at least as recounted by the Evil Queen. El-Mohtar riffs heavily on the story’s traditional motifs, but perverts them to create a much different, much more morbid, picture than the tale we’ve come to cherish: “The tale is wrong. Their way / is kinder, I confess. / But mine is fair.”

 

The Queen’s telling is more grim than Grimm, but no less compelling.

 

Each of the anthology’s entries has a distinct feel and tone. Some capture the imagination and inspire different ways of thinking better than others. Indrapramit Das, for instance, uses allegory amidst a fantastical setting to address cultural intolerance and familial bonds in “Weep for Day.” Dave Duncan’s “Son of Abish” dryly undermines the tradition of the heroic epic with welcome subtlety and humour. Gemma Files’s “Fin de Siècle” — my personal favourite — chronicles the last days of troubled (and fictional) Belgian artist Gustave Knauff in captivating, disturbing, and unforgettable fashion.

 

Yet it isn’t all sunshine and roses for Imaginarium 2013. Because there are no imaginative parameters by which the authors are bound, this can be a double-edged sword. While many of the entries capture your imagination, others strain it. For example, Matthew Johnson’s “The Last Islander” makes a concerted effort to address how humanity and technology intersect in a not-so-distant future, but the human elements are diminished by the cognitive leaps required to understand the digitized world around them. Christopher Willard’s “What a Picture Doesn’t Say” is a clever yet choppy tour through an old-fashioned freak show, but the tale ultimately feels contrived and disengaging, some sharp humour notwithstanding.

 

The stories in Imaginarium 2013 cover a number of extraordinary environments and circumstances, but, in the end, what engages your curiosity most are the human experiences. Unfortunately, many of the narratives are left deliberately open-ended, so instead of clear answers you’re left only with a sense of wonder, not to mention a litany of further questions.