French and English, CanLit and pulp SF, adult and juvenile, all are gathered between these covers, albeit the broad range of material seems less to form a distinct genre than to indicate a recognizable presence within a larger body of fiction: a familiar voice from the attic, to paraphrase Robertson Davies, faint at first but growing stronger. He is well suited to the task, being an internationally respected scholar in SF studies, as well as having contributed a pioneering article on the subject to the Oxford Guide to English Literature some 10 years back. There have in fact been more than 1,200 such works since 1839, and David Ketterer's chronological overview maps out what has hitherto been terra incognita to all but a few. UNTIL QUITE recently, the suggestion that a peculiarly Canadian science fiction and fantasy exists would have met with a response similar to that of the apocryphal Portuguese navigator who first overlooked these shores: ca nada (nothing here).
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