06.34 Tesseracts3 Anthology

Tesseracts3 (1990) edited by Canda Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott
Pbk., Porcepic Books, 437 pp.

When I was at the V-Con sci-fi convention this year one of the dealer tables was a publishing company called Edge. They put out tons of Canadian speculative fiction (much of which I had never heard of) and were extremely freindly in talking to me about the state of the industry and who many of the authors were that they represent.

Luckily, one of the other dealers had a copy of this anthology, Tesseracts, which has been publishing Canadian sci-fi short stories for a couple of decades. I often have trouble reading short story anthologies because the quality of the tales is usually pretty uneven. In this volume there are a number of well known authors so I expected to at least find some competent writing.

Margret Atwood writes an extremely short tale of first contact that did nothing for me.

Peter Watts has a great story which is really an early draft of one section of his novel Starfish. It really gives the flavor of the underwater station and you see how he improved from that story to an excellent novel.

William Gibson writes a little 3 page piece that shows how much talent he has in creating a setting and feeling in a story.

As you might expect, there are a number of mediocre stories in here, a few dogs and a couple of tales that made this book a worthwhile read.