Canada as a nation owes its roots to twin European colonizing powers, Great Britain and France. Unsurprisingly, Canadian literature generally addresses, with varying degrees of anxiety, these colonial roots, but more increasingly it also writes back to the empire, questioning imperial prerogatives, deconstructing foundational myths, and asserting the ongoing presence of aboriginal communities and the arrival of new ones. The subtitle of this collection deliberately echoes Hugh MacLennan’s classic attempt to describe Canada’s original conception as a nation formed by “two founding peoples.” His novel Two Solitudes (1945) coined the now-familiar eponymous phrase to describe Canada as a nation divided between its French and English heritages. Such a divisive, binary conception is, of course, limited, first and foremost because it erases the priority of the Indigenous peoples already present on what became Canadian soil. Yet, the metaphor continues to inform much thinking about Canada as a nation, both in nonfiction and in fiction—and in fiction of the fantastic as much as in realist fiction. Much early Canadian sf is concerned with the Anglophone and Francophone cultures of Canada, and how they might develop in the future.
However, Canadian literature of the fantastic, perhaps even more so than work in the realist tradition, exposes the limitations of the solitudes concept so often applied uncritically to the Canadian experience. Canada is not two solitudes, internally. Another standard metaphor for Canada is the mosaic, reflecting Canada’s official commitment to multiculturalism and representing the nation not as one thing or even two things (Québec and The Rest of Canada, or TROC, as MacLennan’s paradigm often gets rephrased) but as a glittering array of different things that make up a whole by juxtaposing and contrasting very diverse cultures and perspectives. One of the most explicit invocations of this idea is Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Sarantine Mosaic (1998), which features as protagonist a mosaicist, Crispin, in a book that speaks repeatedly of how mosaic works through a complex interplay of factors: “When you set a tessera by hand into a surface you position it. You angle it, turn it. You adjust it in relation to the piece beside it, and the one beside that and beyond it, towards or away from the light entering through windows or rising from below” (Kay 1998, 283). Though a static form made up of discrete pieces, mosaic transforms those individual pieces into “a dazzling myriad of contrasting colours for a woven texture” (181), “to partake, however slightly, of the qualities of movement that [God] gave his mortal children and the world” (281). From many small, uniform pieces grows a complex and variegated whole. And of course absent from MacLennan’s construction but very much a reality is that Canada as a nation was settled not only by English- and French-speaking peoples but also by emigrants from other nations and cultures (e.g. the heavy Germanic presence in Ontario, Doukhobors in the West, the Chinese in every major urban center, Haitians in Montréal), all of whom came to a country in which Indigenous peoples already existed and who subsequently experienced profound displacement. Indigenous Canada is perhaps the most obviously overlooked aspect of Canada in the “two solitudes” model, Truth and Reconciliation efforts notwithstanding. Indigenous Futurism has become one way of dealing with the Indigenous experience but remains relatively new, both as an artistic phenomenon and as the subject of critical study (see Dillon 2012).
The power of the bridge metaphor has not, of course, gone unnoticed by Canadian writers of sf and f. Élisabeth Vonarburg, in particular, constructs an entire cycle of novellas in which Voyageurs use a machine referred to as the Bridge to move from one universe to another, their adventures mirroring the very act of reading science fiction. With each Voyage they discover an alternative universe to explore and learn from, but, as Vonarburg writes: “Nul ne sait ce qu’on va découvrir de l’autre côté d’un Pont” (Vonarburg 2009, 338; No one knows what one will find on the other side of a Bridge). The essays in this collection analyze how works of Canadian science fiction, fantasy, and horror represent beams in a bridge attempting to bring together Canada’s various solitudes, but sometimes their conclusions are unexpected. From revisioning the historical trauma of residential schools, to rewriting the story of contact onto distant planets in the distant future, to imagining the consequences of the very real problems that divide us, the texts analyzed by our contributors offer critical, frequently dystopian visions of Canada’s future and past. These are largely in the interest of some utopian hope that these imaginary worlds and alternate histories might lead to real change for the better, but sometimes they reveal that crossing the bridge can be dangerous. For the most part, our contributors have chosen to analyze texts that, themselves, cross the many divides that separate Canadians from each other, but also from the rest of the world, applying critical frameworks to texts which, themselves, represent alternate universes for readers to explore, and from which they can develop new perspectives on the shared consensus we call the “real world.”
For, as is daily more evident, the contemporary world is increasingly one in which the global rather than the national context is central to an understanding of self and place; the fantastic (especially sf, but other genres, as well) is ready-made for exploring in nonliteral terms the complex and problematic nature of intercultural engagement. The contemporary world is also one in which disturbing trends in current politics are working to build walls rather than bridges and therefore threaten the very idea of bridging cultural, political, and ideological differences. Hence, our focus is not on the antiquated notion of Canada as two (or more) solitudes, but rather on the more productive attitude toward nationhood and cultural engagement suggested by bridging the gaps (perceived or otherwise) between superficially separate groups, regions, and ideologies. At the same time, we and our contributors acknowledge ongoing resistance to a certain globalism fueled by neoliberal capitalist ideology. Thus, the insistence in many of the texts analyzed here on the need for difference to persist in a manner that also fosters the harmonious coexistence of diverse groups, and even species, on a commonly held globe.
The Canadian fantastic, indeed, has been understood as itself forming a kind of bridge between different generic traditions. Early scholars of the Canadian fantastic such as John Robert Colombo sought to identify what was unique about the Canadian fantastic (see Colombo et al. 1979; Colombo 1995; Weiss 2005b). By contrast, David Ketterer (1992), in the first monograph study of the Canadian fantastic, worked to define the Canadian fantastic by locating it between—or perhaps as a hybrid of—the American and the British traditions. Although he does not ...