shrapnel

I’ve got a new short story, “Beat the Geeks,” in the Tesseracts Eleven anthology. The Tesseracts series features speculative fiction written by Canadians, and the latest anthology was put together by Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. Here’s a snippet from Doctorow’s intro:

I grew up on the Tesseracts anthologies. I was 14 when Judy Merril’s first edition of this series shipped, in 1985. I remember reading it, curled into myself on a TTC bus, heading home on a cold winter night, nothing visible outside the windows except the lightsPaolo of snowed-in houses streaking past as we shushed through the awful, grey snow. In that volume, I found stories that were not quite like anything I ever read before. Of course, I’d read “Canadian” authors all my life — I was already a Spider Robinson fan, I’d always liked AE Van Vogt, and I had really enjoyed Phillis Gotleib’s Sunburst. But I’d never read a collection of works whose unifying theme was that they were written by Canadians. It was a heady experience. It’s not that Canadians write quiet, introspective stories while Americans write stories about kicking ass. It’s not even that Canadian stories are particularly incisive on the subject of what it means to be Canadian. But there’s one thing that Canadian stories get right more than American stories — and it’s the same thing that defines Aussie sf (Aussies being a sort of antipodean Canadian with a higher propensity for skin cancer): we’re good at looking at figuring out what makes other cultures tick.

Tesseracts Eleven is going to have launches in three cities: Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. I’ll be attending the Vancouver one. Here are the details:

Tesseracts Eleven Toronto Book Launch
Nov. 24, 3 p.m.
Bakka Books
697 Queen Street West

Tesseracts Eleven Calgary Book Launch
Nov. 30, 7 p.m.
Part of Hot off the Press Fall Book Launch
Historiic Fire Hall
1111 Memorial Drive
Calgary

Tesseracts Eleven Vancouver Book Launch
Dec. 2, 3 p.m.
White Dwarf Books
3715 West Tenth Ave.
Vancouver