POWERFUL SPECULATIVE FICTION TAPS THE PAST FOR A VISION OF THE FUTURE
Shadow Matter
S.W. Mayse | Tyche Books
$24.99 | 508pp.
Call it what you will — science fiction, speculative fiction, or fantasy fiction. Fiction about the future or an imagined past, or parallel worlds can provide a useful and often beautiful lens that allows us to view the present day with enhanced esthetic pleasure and even, in the best cases, moral clarity.
Canada is richly supplied with authors who employ this lens. Perhaps the best known is Margaret Atwood, whose grim 1985 dystopia The Handmaid's Tale, a vision of a near future when North America is dominated by the misogynist religious zealots of Gilead, now reads as if ripped from contemporary headlines.
Nalo Hopkinson wrote luminous visions of the future from Toronto for decades until the Americans tempted her south to a California university, while in a following generation Toronto writer Victoria Hetherington crafted monitory visions of the future like her brilliant 2022 novel Autonomy.
Meanwhile, Vancouver science fiction authors like Spider Robinson and William Gibson provide speculative fiction masterpieces that have expanded genre limits and created worlds illuminated with laughter and intelligence, and Lydia Kwa's A Dream Wants Waking artfully weaves elements of myth, fantasy and science fiction into a unique and powerful narrative that spans centuries.
Add to this Canadian honour roll the multi-talented Vancouver Island author S. W. Mayse, whose most recent publication, Shadow Matter, draws on classic tropes from the golden age of science fiction and space opera and elements of myth and classical history blended with a fierce feminist perspective reminiscent of the iconic Ursula Le Guin to produce a compelling, beautifully written account of life in the 28th century.
Mayse seems to be able to do almost anything literary and do it well. Her earlier publications include a historical novel and a contemporary thriller, both set in Wales, and a biography of Ginger Goodwin, the labour socialist leader and antiwar organizer murdered by the Dominion Police in 1918, as well as short fiction pieces for On Spec and Space Illustrated magazines. She received the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction and the Arthur Ellis Best True Crime awards for the Goodwin bio, and was short listed for awards for her contemporary thriller Merlin's Web and her historical novel Awen.
All her many talents are on display as she tells a story of political intrigue, falling empires, lost love and the heart-scalding rigours of war and peacemaking.
Highly recommended.