York English Professor Allan Weiss has gathered together some of the best papers from eight years of the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy into a new collection.
The Canadian Fantastic in Focus: New Perspectives (McFarland, 2014), edited by Weiss, will launch Wednesday, Feb. 4, from 3 to 5pm, at Sylvester’s at 201 Stong College, Keele campus, hosted by the Department of English and Stong College. Everyone is welcome to attend.
The collection includes Veronica Hollinger’s keynote address, “The Body on the Slab,” and Robert Runté’s Aurora Award-winning paper, “Why I Read Canadian Speculative Fiction,” along with 15 other contributions on science fiction and fantasy literature, television and music by Canadian creators. Some of those other essays are by York grad students, including Cat Ashton, David Milman and Clare Wall.
Some of the authors discussed in The Canadian Fantastic in Focus include Charles de Lint, Nalo Hopkinson, Tanya Huff, Esther Rochon, Peter Watts and Robert Charles Wilson. Essays on the television show “Supernatural” and the Scott Pilgrim comics series are also included.
Weiss’s two previous edited volumes for the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy are Perspectives on the Canadian Fantastic and Further Perspectives on the Canadian Fantastic. He also published a short-story collection, Living Room, a coming-of-age narrative, in 2001.