" 'Realistic' fiction is about things that have happened. 'Fantasy' is about things (we are fairly sure) don't happen. 'Science fiction' is about things that could happen."

-- Judith Merril

Planning for the collaborative project began in the misty past of 1991 and came to fruition after four years of time, travel and research into Canada's considerable body of science fiction and fantasy literature. The result is an ambitious exhibition that journeys into the imaginations of Canadian writers as displayed in books and magazines and through the multi-media magic of fantastic sound, visuals, music and animation.

This celebration of fantastic fiction begins in the exhibition transporter room which carries visitors out of this world and into their imaginative heritage, defines Canadian science fiction and speculative fiction and places it in a historical and international context.

The next stage is a search for identity -- of the individual, the nation and the species -- through science fiction and fantasy. This is a major theme of Canadian literature found in the works of such authors as Margaret Laurence, Joy Kogawa, Clark Blaise, Louis Hémon and Mordecai Richler. It often involves confrontation with an "Other" in the form of another person, nature or a hidden aspect of the self and asks:

• Who are we as individuals?
• Who are we as Canadians?
• Who are we as men and women?
• What are we?
• What does it mean to be human?
• Where do we draw the line between human and machine?

Noteworthy Canadian fantastic fiction directly questioning the nature of identity includes Robert Charles Wilson's The Divide, in which the main character is the subject of a medical experiment aimed at creating a man with super-intelligence, Andrew Weiner's short story "The News from D Street", a character study of a very unusual stranger, and Guy Gavriel Kay's three-volume fantasy, The Fionavar Tapestry, the forging of identity through a fierce struggle between good and evil in a magical world.

Cyberidentities

As computers and biotechnology envelop us, so the line between human and machine blurs. This is demonstrated in William Gibson's cyberpunk works, where characters, as a metaphor for human memory, maneuver through cyberspace, and in Robert Charles Wilson's Memory Wire, the tale of a human camcorder.

Machines and Robot Identities

Robots have long been the stuff of much science fiction. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- often viewed as the earliest robot in literature -- to IsaacAsimov's robot stories, Karel Capek's R.U.R. and Jack Williamson's The Humanoids, the question of technology's power to enslave and dehumanize is at the core of this area of the genre. The theme runs through a number of Canadian science fiction works, such as Phyllis Gotlieb's O Master Caliban! and Jim Willer's Paramind.

Alien Identities

Coming from out of this world, aliens are as familiar as robots in science fiction. Since H.G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, a sub-genre of fantastic literature has dealt with aliens invading Earth to destroy or save the human race. In John Mantley's The 27th Day, aliens test a group of human beings by giving them the ultimate weapon and forbidding them to use it for 27 days. In Spider and Jeanne Robinson's Stardance, dancers communicate with aliens through their art form. Esther Rochon's Coquillage studies the relationship between a strange shelled creature and human beings, and, in Michael Cherkas and Larry Hancock's The Silent Invasion, the concentration is on an apparent alien conspiracy to take over the world.

American and Canadian science fiction view the family from different angles. Much American science fiction, as demonstrated in Frank Herbert's Dune and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, concentrates on the child's evolution into superhuman. Canadian works tend to portray the child's development within a family group. Often, the child must achieve fulfillment through coming to terms with parents. Thus, Terence M. Green's stories focus on family reconciliation. Fathers in Robert Charles Wilson's novels rarely understand their extraordinarily talented sons. In Phyllis Gotlieb's O Master Caliban, the search for the father takes on a different slant with the products of a biological experiment searching for their creator on a distant planet.

Ethnicity

Canadian writers have widened the scope of fantastic fiction to include characters, images, motifs, symbols and mythologies from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Phyllis Gotlieb enriches her writing with references to her Jewish heritage in such stories as Tauf Aleph and Son of the Morning. Charles Saunders's "sword-and-sorcery" short stories feature a type of "Black Conan".

Women and Canadian Science Fiction

From the pioneer days of Frances Moore Brooke and Susanna Moodie, women have played a prominent role in Canadian literature. The tradition continues in Canadian fantastic fiction. Most important is Phyllis Gotlieb, whose short stories have appeared in American magazines for the last 40 years. Once primarily a writer, Judith Merril is now regarded as one of the most important editors on the international science fiction scene. Her work includes editing the first volume of the Tesseracts series of Canadian science fiction and fantasy anthologies. Meanwhile, her Daughters of Earth and Survival Ship story collections continue to be influential. The Merril Collection, her donation of science-fiction literature to the Toronto Public Library, is an important resource for everyone interested in fantasy and science fiction.

Speculative Feminist Fiction

Women writers have frequently used fantastic and speculative fiction as a vehicle for feminist commentary focusing on societal assumptions about gender roles and differences between the sexes through such works as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Portraying a dystopia in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, The Handmaid's Tale describes a futuristic U.S.A. as a sexist theocracy. Such writers as Candas Jane Dorsey and Élisabeth Vonarburg have used science fiction conventions and the mirror of the future to explore the meaning of sexual identity and male and female roles.

Women and Fantasy

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were prominent as fantasy writers, producing important fantasy works in Gothic and Arabian Nights' style. The most prolific was Lily Adams Beck, who specialized in magical tales set in far-off lands. One of the earliest Canadian fantasy novels was Flora MacDonald's Mary Melville the Psychic.

Women continue to be an important part of the Canadian fantasy and science-fiction scene. In French Canada, such writers as Anne Hébert and Marie-Claire Blais have been a central part of the development of Québécois Gothic and surreal novels. In English Canada, women writers, such as Pauline Gedge and Tanya Huff, have concentrated on urban, high and dark fantasy. Karen Wehrstein and Shirley Meier have collaborated with Stephen Stirling in military science fiction. Monica Hughes, Francine Pelletier and Suzanne Martel address the young-adult market.

Political Identities

The question of national identity -- long a Canadian preoccupation -- has been a focus of Canadian fantastic fiction since its beginnings. The Dominion in 1983, written under the pseudonym Ralph Centennius, is the earliest English-Canadian work of political speculative fiction. Delivered as an alternative history, it presents a "history" of Canada, beginning with a threatened invasion by the United States in 1883. The Storm of '92 by W.H.C. Lawrence portrays an invasion of Ontario, in which the Americans are driven back by colonial troops. Both works reflect fear of an American takeover, a concern which continued, particularly through the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Quebec separation was and is a continuing concern for both French-Canadian and English-Canadian writers. Nationalist themes have dominated Québécois speculative fiction since Jules Tardivel's Pour la patrie, the most famous early account of a future separate Quebec. More recent examples are Jean Wyl's Quebec Banana State and Bruce Powe's Killing Ground.

Speculation about the separation of other provinces reflects a general concern about the survival of Canada in its present incarnation. Phyllis S. Moore considers the separation of Newfoundland in Williwaw and John Ballem describes the breaking away of Alberta in The Dirty Scenario.

Other writers use fantastic fiction as a vehicle for discussing the effects of government policy. The anonymous House of the Gallery satirizes John A. Macdonald's preoccupation with building railways. Partridge of Sinaulta (a pseudonym of Edward Alexander Partridge) overcomes poverty in A War on Poverty and Hugh MacLennan in Voices in Time speculates on the development of oppressive right-wing bureaucracies as a reaction against permissiveness.

One novel sometimes viewed as an allegory of Canada's insecurity about its survival as a distinct culture is Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, which revolves around a spell designed to make the residents of Tigana and the rest of the world forget the nation's very existence.

Space Travel and Space Opera

Although space travel is one of the most identifiable features of science fiction, there are few Canadian space travel stories. Some examples are: David Edwards's Next Stop Mars, published in 1959, which tells of a journey to the red planet, and Robert J. Sawyer's Golden Fleece, published in 1990, which features a generation ship setting out to colonize a new planet. "The Starlost", a 1973 CTV television series, described a generation ship hurtling through space on a collision course. "Space Command", a 1953 CBC television series, featuring James Doohan (later Star Trek's chief engineer, Mr. Scott) also focused on travels in outer space. Space travel is frequently portrayed in science fiction for young readers, particularly in the works of Douglas Hill.

Space opera -- the portrayal of interplanetary intrigue and war -- is a subgenre of the space travel theme, of which the best-known example is the Star Wars trilogy. Much Canadian pulp fiction of the 1930s and a 1978 CBC radio production, "Johnny Chase: Secret Agent of Space", also fall into the space opera category.

Time Travel

Time travel is a major science fiction theme offering an alternative route out of this world. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine inspired many other writers to explore past and future worlds. Following Wells's lead in When the Sleeper Wakes, Canadian writers sometimes had sleeping protagonists awaking centuries later in a world very different from the one they had known. In Laurence Manning's The Man Who Awoke, a wealthy banker discovers how to sleep for 5000 years at a time, and, in Terence M. Green's Children of the Rainbow, which juxtaposes such events as the mutiny on The Bounty and the bombing of The Rainbow Warrior, time travel is a means of examining paradoxes. In Robert Charles Wilson's A Bridge of Years, time travel allows escape from a difficult present into a simpler life in the more sedate 1960s.

New Environments

In the early days of central Canadian literature, the environment was often seen as a threatening "Other", leading to what Northrop Frye described as the "garrison mentality" -- a desire for protection from external peril. More recently, writers have seen humanity as the threat and nature as the victim. Apart from political crisis, the greatest fears expressed in Canadian fantastic fiction (and much other Canadian literature) involves natural disasters and extreme weather. Novels by Basil Jackson, Wayland Drew and Lloyd Abbey postulate a near future in which oil spills and unrestricted exploitation of the environment bring disaster.

On the screen, environmental disasters caused by human irresponsibility are portrayed in such films as 23-Skidoo, Deadly Harvest and Crimes of the Future.

New Technologies, New Challenges

Science fiction frequently speculates about the societal effects of technological developments. Biotechnology, medical research and, particularly, genetic engineering and the creation of new life forms are popular themes in current writing. The adaptation of the American writer Greg Bear's novel Blood Music for the CBC radio series "Vanishing Point" depicts the catastrophic results of an experiment in bioengineering.

New Perceptions

Many science-fiction writers suggest that radiation and mutation increase inherent extrasensory perception abilities. Phyllis Gotlieb and A.E. van Vogt have written a number of works about telepathic characters and how their special abilities affect their lives. The films of David Cronenberg also frequently feature telepathy and extrasensory perception.

Fantastic fiction takes us out of this world and into many different places, frequently to utopian or dystopian societies, suggesting what might or could happen. In utopias, the inhabitants share their society's values and consent to the control exerted upon them. They are portrayed as free, content and beyond such problems as poverty, sexism and war. In dystopias, either an agency, most often a totalitarian government, controls the citizenry, whose consent is irrelevant or ensured, or chaos and total social breakdown are the order of the day.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers were often optimistic about the possibility of creating a better world through education and social reform. Authors of utopian and dystopian novels frequently addressed one particular concern. In Looking Forward, for instance, Hugh Pedley suggested that Canada could become a utopian society if Protestant Churches united. Writers, such as Frederick Philip Grove in Consider Her Ways, present alternative social and political structures in times of unrest. At least one writer made fun of the solemnity of aspects of the genre. In Afternoons in Utopia, humorist Stephen Leacock could not resist mocking the innocent optimists who foresaw a heaven on earth.

More recent Canadian fiction envisions a world either completely controlled or completely out of control. Matt Cohen's The Colors of War and Hugh MacLennan's Voices in Time portray post-war dystopias. William Gibson's cyberpunk world is one in which multi-national corporations have wrested power from national governments and life, with data and software as the greatest forms of wealth, becomes a matter of individual survival.

After the Apocalypse

Since World War II, nuclear war has been one of the most prevalent themes of speculative fiction. Many writers have explored the possible aftermath of nuclear war or accident and most conclude that the human race would revert to a primitive state. In his post-apocalypse trilogy, The Ethring Cycle, Wayland Drew writes of tribes who inhabit what is left of Canada's west coast. Other depictions of a post-nuclear holocaust world include Helene Holden's After the Fact, Hugh Hood's short story "After the Sirens" and Phyllis Gotlieb's Sunburst, which describes mutant children with telepathic abilities. Mutation is also the theme of Heather Spears's Moonfall and The Children of Atwar. Here, nuclear war has left humanity so genetically scarred that it is normal to have two heads.

Parallel Worlds

Alien worlds, parallel to our own, may exist. Through speculative fiction, we can move out of this world and enter them through portals or shifts of consciousness. In these encounters with alien landscapes and species, we discover an "Other" that expands our consciousness and forces us to revise our assumptions about the universe. In Andrew Weiner's Station Gehenna, an alien presence and political intrigue are the backdrop for a space whodunit. In Robert Charles Wilson's Gypsies, characters discover that they are able to move between parallel worlds but do not know whether they will find a place where they belong.

Prehistoric and Posthistoric Worlds

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, science-fiction writers have been fascinated by the prehistoric past and the far future. Writers, such as Arthur Conan Doyle in The Lost World and Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Land That Time Forgot, have delivered a vision of prehistory, bringing to life creatures known only through their fossil record. Olaf Stapledon in First and Last Man, Crawford Kilian in Eyas and Laurence Manning in The Man Who Awoke have sought to depict the future and humanity's final destiny.

Alternate Histories

Another route out of this world to another place is through alternate history. Alternate histories question what our world would be like if a historical event had progressed or ended differently. The most prolific Canadian writer in this genre is Steve Stirling. In The Difference Engine, published in 1992, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling speculated on what could have happened if computers had become important in the nineteenth century.

In some ways, Québécois fantastic fiction is similar to English-Canadian science fiction and fantasy in both its themes and techniques. But, in many ways, Québécois science fiction has developed distinctive features and approaches and, therefore, merits a special look. While some Québécois fantasy is based on figures from folk legend and myth, much more is based on Christian, specifically Roman Catholic, roots. Figures representing Christ and Satan appear frequently and many works have an underlying moral or satirical purpose.

The Fantastique

Very little high or heroic fantasy has been written in Quebec. Instead, the fantastic elements appear in otherwise realistic settings. The literature portraying the intrusion of the fantastic into the ordinary, the fantastique, requires the reader to shift mental gears and search for allegorical and symbolic elements. Its history begins with the publication of Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé's Le chercheur de trésors, ou, l'influence d'un livre in 1878 and became popular in the 1960s, a period when writers were challenging conventions of realistic literature.

Science Fiction for the Young

Much Québécois science fiction has been written for the young. Among the best-known early works are Yves Thériault's Volpek novels and Maurice Gagnon's Unipax series. More recently, Daniel Sernine (Alain Lortie's pseudonym) as editor of Éditions Paulines, has published his own novels and those of Francine Pelletier, Joël Champetier and Denis Coté. A graphic magazine, Odyssée, for the young was published in the 1970s.

Fantasy presents a world in which magic and dreams have real power. Following the traditions of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the novels of C.S. Lewis, writers of high fantasy are modern myth-makers, describing worlds pared down to moral and psychological basics, where heroes must battle unmitigated evil in the name of pure good.

Canada's best fantasists add depth to their characters by moving away from such stereotypes. Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry, with its detailed characterizations, is probably the most successful and best-known work of Canadian high fantasy and Tigana has often been cited as Kay's best novel. Charles de Lint is Canada's most prolific fantasy writer. Dave Duncan has also written a number of heroic fantasy works. Barry Blair's ElfLord series, in a comic-book retelling of many classic high fantasy themes, draws on the illustration style of Japanese animated cartoons.

Such writers of more exotic fantasy as Lily Adams Beck, Pauline Gedge and Ian Dennis bring a sense of The Arabian Nights into their fiction, whereas Michael Bédard's delicate fantasies are more whimsical than heroic. CBC radio drama productions over the last 40 years have included three interpretations of The Arabian Nights among several works of high fantasy.

Dark Fantasy

If high fantasy builds a world around our dreams, then dark fantasy flourishes because of our nightmares. Dark fantasy is fiction about ghosts, devils, vampires and other frightening supernatural creatures; dark dreams portray horrific creatures breaking into the normal world, attempting to destroy it.

Tales of the supernatural have a long history in such Québécois legends as those of the loup-garou (werewolf). In English Canada, the interest in vampires and other creatures of the night is a more recent phenomenon associated with the popularity of writers like Anne Rice and Stephen King. Some ghost stories, such as those by Robertson Davies, have a satiric edge, while others merely aim to frighten the reader. The most important dark fantasy anthology series is Northern Frights, edited by Don Hutchison. Prolific authors of dark fantasy include Garfield Reeves-Stevens and Tanya Huff.

In other media, John Buell's The Pyx was made into a film in the 1970s and CBC radio drama has been a regular source of dark fantasy, offering adaptations of such classics as Dracula and Frankenstein and anthology series such as Nightfall, Night Trap and Dark Waters.

Gothic Fiction

A subset of dark fantasy is the Gothic. It features a lone heroine in peril, dark strangers, mysterious buildings and hints of the supernatural. Situations in Gothic novels border on the melodramatic. Evil is real but attractive and the emotions -- usually fear and lust -- are passionate.

The Gothic has become especially prominent in French Canada, with authors reaching beyond realistic story telling into a new realm. The most prolific writer of Gothics in English Canada is Dan Ross, who wrote a series of novels based on the ABC Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. North of the 49th parallel, Strange Paradise was a Canadian soap opera heavily influenced by Dark Shadows.

Magic Realism

Other Canadian fantasy works include those by mainstream writers who use myth or magic to explore such themes as the nature of evil, the creative spirit and the meaning of knowledge and faith. Timothy Findley, Brian Moore and W.P. Kinsella have also used fantasy to comment on themes in their realistic fiction.

A sub-genre popular in the nineteenth century was animal fantasy as illustrated in the works of Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton.

The Borderlands

Some works stand on the border between realism and fantasy. They bring fantastic elements into an otherwise realistic work or create dream worlds designed to reflect the magic in our lives.

Magic realism in English Canadian writing can be compared to the fantastique in French-Canadian literature. Surrealism works with a dream world full of incongruous details, sudden metamorphosis and rich symbolism and may have a comic or philosophical intent.

Fantastic Cinema

Fantastic tales have formed an integral part of the history and development of world cinema through such milestones as A Trip to the Moon and Metropolis to the more recent Things to Come, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner and the Terminator films.

Before 1970, fantastic films produced in Canada were either short satires, such as Roman Kroiter's 1960 National Film Board short, Universe, or documentaries dealing with science fiction subject matter.

The 1970s saw the production of a number of American-style films in Canada, including Welcome to Blood City (1975), Starship Invasions (1977) and The Shape of Things to Come (1979). David Cronenberg, who has moved through several creative phases from making experimental films in the 1960s to becoming a writer-director of international repute, may well be the most important Canadian film-maker employing fantastic themes and images in his work. Other Canadians who have produced science-fiction and fantasy films with significant popular appeal and technical sophistication are Ivan Reitman (Heavy Metal, Spacehunter and Ghostbusters) and James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2). Also of significance is the 1990 film of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale with screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Fantastic Television

Television is probably the most prevalent medium for science-fiction story telling. High points during the early years of television include Rod Serling's Emmy and Hugo award-winning anthology series "The Twilight Zone" and BBC's "Doctor Who". The original series of "Star Trek" is the most re-run program in history and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is arguably the most successful science fiction project ever conceived, with audiences on every continent numbering in the tens of millions.

Important CBC science fiction from the 1950s includes "The Big Dig" by Eric Nicol, starring a very young William Shatner as an archaeologist 500 years in the future, and "Space Command", starring James Doohan, another "Star Trek" alumnus. Produced in 1953, "Space Command" was an early attempt to use "hard science fiction" conventions to create stories based on scientific fact and existing technology.

"The Unforeseen", which was similar in format to "The Twilight Zone", was a suspense fantasy series produced by CBC Radio from 1958 to 1960. One of the items on the 1972 anthology series "Peepshow" was "Secret Weapons", a short science fiction feature written and directed by David Cronenberg.

In 1973, in a joint venture between CTV and NBC, Glenn-Warren Entertainment/CFTO produced "The Starlost", which was set on a multi-generational starship. Most recent Canadian science fiction television projects have been produced for syndication on American television networks on such programs as "The Ray Bradbury Theatre", "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "War of the Worlds". From 1989 to 1994, TVOntario produced "Prisoners of Gravity", a science-fiction "infotainment" program, in which the pilot of Reality One interviewed major international science fiction creators.

Fantastic Theatre

The stage is a less usual setting for fantasy and science fiction, though fantastic stories are often included in young people's theatre and are part of the recent rock musicals Metropolis, Mission Andromeda and Return to the Forbidden Planet.

Fantastic stories on stage tend to concentrate on satire, social commentary, surrealism and young people's theatre. Plays from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Stewart Boston's The Kingdom of the Blind and The Coming of the Wild Flowers and Robert Gurik's Api 2967 and the Billy Striker trilogy, employ fantasy and science fiction as satire and social realism. More recent science fiction stage works, such as Cyberteens in Love, Drag Queens in Outer Space and Life on Mars, are often camp send-ups of the genre.

Fantastic Comic Books

Comic books and graphic novels frequently employ science-fiction images and themes to carry us out of this world. Superman, created by Canadians Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel, is the alien being from the "distant planet Krypton", who has become the archetypal figure of the contemporary superhero.

The science fiction and fantasy work of Canadians includes outstanding, and sometimes controversial, examples of sequential storytelling and illustration. Some important Canadian science fiction comics are: Orb: The Canadian Magazine of Horror, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, which featured the early work of John Allison, Gene Day and Jim Craig; Andromeda, a serious attempt to adapt major science fiction and fantasy literature to comic format; The Sacred and the Profane, a futuristic "Christian tragedy"; Silent Invasion: A Science Fiction Mystery, a graphically powerful series with a striking interpretation of the 1950s themes of alien infiltration and communist conspiracies; Vortex and Mister X, artistically successful attempts at "bohemian" science fiction, featuring Mister X as a drug-addicted architect, working endlessly to repair the socially and psychologically damaged Radiant City -- a model community gone wrong.

Fantastic Radio

Radio has special qualities uniquely suited to fantastic drama: it is imaginative, affordable and accessible. The most famous radio drama event remains Mercury Theatre's 1938 adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, which panicked thousands of North Americans. More recent science fiction radio stories include BBC's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and CBC's "Vanishing Point". The CBC has, in fact, produced most of Canada's science fiction radio drama. Adaptations of classic works include Bram Stoker's Dracula, H.G. Wells's The Crystal Egg, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed and The Word for World Is Forest.

In 1973, CBC Vancouver presented Crawford Kilian's adaptation of the first Canadian science fiction novel. CBC has also commissioned original fantastic dramas by such Canadian writers as John Bethune, John Douglas, George Salverson and Lister Sinclair.

Fantastic Animation

An acknowledged world leader in animated film making (Disney Studios regularly recruits Canadian animators), Canada is also establishing a growing tradition in science fiction and fantasy animation for film and television. The National Film Board (NFB) is a regular producer of animated short films, many with a fantasy theme. Richard Condie's award-winning The Big Snit, a tongue-in-cheek look at total nuclear war, is a high point in NFB animated humour. The Nelvana Studio (named after the 1940s super character, Nelvana of the North) has developed various animated science fiction television and film projects, particularly the rock musical Rock and Rule and the more recent Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

Fantastic Music

Science fiction and fantasy are also associated with popular music, ranging from various singles to concept albums by Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Paul McCartney, Jeff Wayne and the Alan Parsons Project. Science-fiction film has also inspired compositions by Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams and James Horner.

Music has been an inspiration to Canada's science fiction community, often providing the soundtrack for imaginary worlds. Music groups, such as Prism, Rush, Strange Advance and Klaatu have frequently drawn on science fiction themes and have used advanced production methods to create futuristic atmospheres for their compositions.

Music is also very much part of the dramatization of science fiction in other media. Howard Shore has written film scores for David Cronenberg's The Fly, Videodrome and Naked Lunch. John Mills-Cockell's synthesizer compositions have been used in science-fiction television (David Cronenberg's "Secret Weapons"), film (Deadly Harvest and Humongous) and radio ("Vanishing Point").

The Magazines

Most writers begin by publishing short stories in magazines, usually small publications with limited circulation to a small group of enthusiasts. Until recently, Canadian writers depended heavily on the pulp and paperback market in the United States and, to some extent, in the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, Canadian science fiction magazines were being published, and, today, the English-language On Spec and the French-language Imagine and Solaris magazines are publishing four times a year.

The Fans and Fanzines

Most magazines in the field are fan magazines (fanzines), inexpensively produced periodicals, published by individuals with a special interest in science fiction and fantasy and occasionally including works of fiction. Among the most famous fanzines of Canadian fantastic fiction are Leslie A. Croutch's Light Canadian Fandom and New Canadian Fandom, BCSFanzine and Maple Leaf Rag.

The Scholars of Fantastic Fiction

The readers of science fiction and fantasy are as varied as the population. They range from young to old and fans to scholars of fantastic literature themes and techniques. In English Canada, McGill University's Science-Fiction Studies is one of the premier journals in the field. In French Canada, scholarly study of Québécois science fiction and fantasy has a long and respected history.

Fantastic Fiction for Children and Young Adults

The first stories children hear are often fantasy tales featuring talking animals, wicked witches, good fairies and assorted creatures of the imagination. Fantasy and science fiction are key components of young people's literature and, in recent years, Canada has produced a considerable body of children's and young adults' literature, much of it science fiction or fantasy. Among the most prominent authors in this area are Joël Champetier, Denis Coté, Martyn Godfrey, Douglas Hill, Monica Hughes, Suzanne Martel, O.R. Melling, Ruth Nichols and Daniel Sernine.

The Identity Variations

Family and Ethnicity in Canadian Fantastic Fiction

Strange Worlds and Strange Peoples

Quebec Fantasy and Science Fiction

The Genre Variations

Fantastic Fiction for Children and Young Adults