On the brink of the 21st century, the SF Canada writers got together, looked at each other and said, "We're a futuristic group. Why are we publishing our newsletter the old-fashioned way, on paper? Why don't we save trees and move into the next century?" Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, not to mention tidying up the language. We did not decide all at once, and admittedly, we had to be nagged into it by various members over several years to reach this momentous decision. But in the end we did make it official at the last AGM, and what you see now is the result. Members and other interested parties can access Communique on the web site (www.sfcanada.ca), though hard copies will be sent to members without access to the Internet.

Communiqué looks different, but it still provides much of the same information. Some columns, however, (such as current member news) now call SF Canada's web site home. In the newsletter, you'll find articles written by our members, market information and news from the SF Canada executive. Of course, since this electronic format is new for us, the newsletter will continue to develop. Needless to say, we welcome the input of all members. (Especially if you're willing to contribute articles!)

What's more, the beauty of electronic format is that back issues of Communique (from this issue on, at any rate) will be available in the archives. That means, for example, you can revisit Market columns. Not only will you find the market information, but we will update it as we go — an extremely useful resource, for which we thank Douglas Smith and various Quebec members. In his Market column (English version of this issue only), Doug gives first, sound advice about publishing your short stories in non-English publications and second, source information for those publications. If we did better than that, we'd be sending your stories out for you. You'll also find an on-going summary of French language markets in Débouchés, in the French version of this newsletter. (We love to have someone pen their marketing philosophy for Débouchés!)

Since Communiqué is a bilingual publication, it requires the effort of many people. It especially requires hard work from our valliant translators, Daniel Sernine and Jean-Louis Trudel. Many thanks to both of them for their dedication. Thanks, too, to our contributors, all SF Canada members.

Our feature article this issue comes from Esther Rochon, recent winner of the 2000 Grand Prix de la Science-Fiction et du Fantastique québécois, for her novel Or, published in 1999. She muses over the influences that brought her to write science fiction and her particular series. This article originally appeared in Lovecraft Studies 35, fall 1996, pp 1-8, and is reprinted here courtesy of the author. Jean-Louis Trudel translated Esther's article into French for Communiqué.

So, here we stand, feet planted firmly and virtually in two different centuries. With this new issue of Communiqué, we're risking a move into the new and the unpredictable. We'd love to receive suggestions from members and readers, as well as new features. Bit by bit we're moving into the future. There is no turning back.

- Mici Gold

If the new millennium's not already upon us — and I say it's not, not until 2001 when the calendar says — then it's close enough to smell. And it doesn't exactly smell like the times most of us spent the final few decades of the past millennium trying to predict. We're not living in big orbital habitats; cars don't fly; we don't take our nourishment in pills and astronaut food; robots don't walk and talk and think like humans. No one's come up with faster-than-light drive to push space-craft to the stars in minutes rather than centuries.

The reality of the future somehow lacks the scale, the romantic grandeur that makes for a good cover painting on a science fiction paperback. Which is not to say things completely suck. For one thing, we've managed to dodge the end of our species (and most others on the planet) through all-out nuclear war. Stock market blips aside, the economy's chugging along nicely, governments are running surpluses, and if big visionary plans are few and far between just now, that's maybe all right. Maybe the future of a Chris-Foss-like vista of twenty-storey starships and spaceports as big as Australia was never in the cards. Maybe it's time for sustainable visions. Which brings me around to SF Canada, and what I hope will become a sustainable vision for it, in the first few years of the new millennium.

As many of you know, I'm your new president. I took over the job in January from Jean-Louis Trudel, who's shepherded us through some extremely difficult times — times that have been, at their worst, downright demoralizing to both membership and executive. For this, Jean-Louis deserves our thanks. (And our money. Those of you who've forgotten to send in your cheques for the $10 surcharge, to help re-emburse Jean-Louis for his out-of-pocket costs during the embezzlement crisis should consider yourselves reminded).

Over the next few months, I'm going to do my best to carry on Jean-Louis' work. In some cases, that will mean more the spirit than the letter. For instance, early this year we were looking very seriously at an administrative alliance with PWAC. Unfortunately, such an alliance was simply out of our price-range. So over the next few months the executive will be hiring a part-time administrator from the membership. This will mean that SF Canada can have a staff and front office of sorts, and we can begin to provide the services we want to for our membership in a more reliable way.

We're also going to be moving the newsletter on-line for the most part. We'll still provide the newsletter by mail for those who need it, but we're willing to bet that those members will be few and far between. And we're going to indulge in a bit more navel-gazing. The SF Canada AGM takes place this summer at Toronto Trek, and one of the things I'd like to bring to the meeting is some form of manifesto: a document that outlines a real, sustainable action plan for the organization over the next few years. In order to do that, I'd like to hear from the membership: publicly on the SF Canada list-server, or privately via email or telephone.

I'm not sure we're up to building any starships or clever humanoid robots with British accents. But I think we can safely bet on a future in which SF Canada persists as a relevant and useful organization working on behalf of its members.

-Dave Nickles

On the Edge

The last year of the twentieth century is a good time to take stock. As SF writers, we have made great strides and yet we are caught up in a slew of metamorphoses which promise — or threaten — to affect our avocation. Publishing is in flux: total readership has been stagnating and publishers have reacted by pumping out an ever greater number of titles. The entire industry teeters on the brink of a phase change, to mix metaphors, that could turn it into just another e-business, while printing on demand could prove as momentous as the invention of printing itself. Science fiction too is in flux: lately, setting aside media tie-ins, it has produced few bestsellers in the key U.S. market. Corporate publishing is currently unkind to merely profitable endeavours, as witness the demise of SF Age in the U.S. and Science Fiction Magazine in France at the hands of corporate owners. Questions proliferate: are mass market paperbacks still profitable? is the midlist really vanishing? why is fandom greying? is the future of SF in films, television, or computer games? But they come down to: just what will be the material rewards of writing SF twenty years down the road, on the other side of the digital publishing divide?

Perhaps it's futile to worry, or too early to do so. For the first time, Canada boasts a SF writing community able to look back twenty years at the same time as it looks forward. It's an achievement worth savouring and worth pondering, if only to appreciate what went into it: the devotion of pioneering magazine editors, the sheer audacity of the first anthology editors, the humbler workshops run behind the scenes to prime a generation of new authors, the writing contests, the conventions, the founding of SF Canada... SF Canada is an embodiment of the newborn community of the late eighties and it reflects some of its discords, though it is by no means the whole of the Canadian SF writing community.

Looking back, what is there to be seen? Though SF has been written and published in Canada for over a century, it was not until the 70s that communities of SF creators in French and English stirred and made tentative beginnings. The 80s were a time of flowering: Quebec fanzines mutated into magazines, literary awards for SF were created, anthologies were launched in English and French, small press SF imprints lasted long enough to publish more than one book, an Alberta magazine catered to English-speaking readers, and SF Canada was born. It was a time of initiatives and consolidation, built in part on the achievements of Canadians from abroad: Judith Merril, Norbert Spehner, Spider Robinson, Jean-Marc Gouanvic, William Gibson, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Monica Hughes, Catherine Saouter Caya, Eileen Kernaghan... In turn, our authors started to be published in France and in the U.S. The 90s have seen setbacks, breakthroughs, an ever wider web of new endeavours, a turn to professionalism, and the emergence of a new generation of authors: Robert J. Sawyer, Yves Meynard, Dave Duncan, Peter Watts.

Consolidation has involved sacrifices and setbacks: the stillbirth of Penguin Canada's SF line, the loss of a magazine like imagine... after several years of struggle, McClelland & Stewart's withdrawal from SF publishing after one lone attempt, the ending of Québec/Amérique's Sextant imprint... The evolution of professionalism has taken different courses for the anglophone and francophone communities; the two situations could even be caricatured as mirror images of each other. On the one hand, highly professional writers have developed, plugged into the U.S. market: William Gibson, Spider Robinson, Robert J. Sawyer, Dave Duncan, Charles de Lint, Nalo Hopkinson, Phyllis Gotlieb, and many more, while the one specialized publishing house has done more overcoming of adversity than actual triumphing. On the other hand, a very competent specialty publishing house has developed in Québec, Alire, while most, but not all, francophone authors have made the jump to... part-time writing in order to have jobs and pay the rent.

Meanwhile, governments have tended to freeze their support of culture or to disengage entirely from the field. Yet, as we have seen with the recent private member's bill to establish an income tax exemption for writers and artists (patterned after similar measures in Ireland and Quebec), there is still scope for useful government intervention to support the arts.

In a time of consolidation, it may be asked what role SF Canada can play. It can certainly make the voice of SF writers heard when cultural policy is set by the various levels of government, or when new industry standards are discussed — in the matter of electronic rights, for instance.

Can we offer Canadian publishers anything more than our honest appraisals? Ten years ago, Robert Runté wrote in SWACCESS 7 that "There is no point selling a book to a publisher if the publisher doesn't sell the book to the public". It is not our place to prod publishers into doing a better job of marketing; commercial imperatives can surely be trusted to do just that. However, SF Canada could do more to promote authors themselves, as long as all eligible members benefited.

Similarly, can we help our francophone members find more readers in Europe? In France, the publishing industry shifts gears faster than Jacques Villeneuve and it is unclear how much help a Canadian-based association can provide. It might be possible, for instance, to raise federal monies to share a booth with a small SF publisher like Orion at the yearly Paris book fair, since Orion has published a few Canadians. But little else comes to mind.

Finally, can we stem the digital tide in any way, or tame it? That may sound preposterous, but this is perhaps where SF Canada has the greatest role to play by creating a shopwindow for our wares, a central meeting place for Canadian SF authors. In my time, we've made some starts, with listservers, with websites, and with TERLA. It will now be up to the next generation to take up the challenge.

Or define a new one.

-Jean-Louis Trudel

Author Bios

Mici Gold

Mici Gold is a botanist, poet and mystic. Her poetry has appeared in Northern Frights 4, Transversions and will soon appear in On Spec. She lives in Toronto where she has served as secretary for the National Science Fiction and Fantasy Society and is now helping to administer the Sunburst Award.

Dave Nickle

David Nickle is author of numerous short stories and co-author (with Karl Schroeder) of the novel The Claus Effect. His work has been adapted for the television series The Hunger, and reprinted in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. In 1998, he and collaborator Edo van Belkom won the Bram Stoker award for their short story "Rat Food." And in 1993, he and Schroeder won the Aurora Award for their novelette "The Toy Mill."

Esther Rochon

Born June 28 1948 in Québec City, now living in Montréal, Esther Rochon followed studies in superior (or higher) mathematics at the University of Montréal, earned herself a Masters degree in 1969 and began to write at an early (and young) age. She received the First Prize (ex aequo), Short Story Category, of the Concours Des Jeunes Auteurs de Radio-Canada 1964 (Young Writers' Contest of the CBC Society). In the early 70's, she was a writer of technical manuals in the computer domain for the STRTC firm. In 1974, she published her first novel, En Hommage Aux Araignées (translation:_In Praise Of Spiders). She's also one of the founding members of Imagine..., one of the best French SF magazines in Québec. In 1986, 1987, 1991 and 2000, respectively, she won The Grand Prix De La Science-Fiction et Du Fantastique Québécois with novels like L'Épuisement Du soleil (The Fading Of The Sun), Coquillage (translated and published in English as The Shell by Oberon Press), L'Espace Du Diamant (The Diamond's Space) and Or (Gold). Also an author of numerous short stories, Esther Rochon is one of the major writers on the Québec SF and Fantasy scene. (L'Année de la Science-Fiction et du Fantastique Québécois 1997.)

Douglas Smith

The Market Column is the 1st in a series of columns on marketing short SF&F fiction by Douglas Smith. Doug’s stories have appeared in seven countries and five languages, including Amazing Stories, Interzone, Cicada, The Third Alternative, Tesseracts⁶, Prairie Fire, and the recent Penguin anthology, Treachery & Treason. He is a four-time Aurora Award finalist for best SF&F short fiction by a Canadian writer, and has two stories on this year’s ballot. Two of his stories were recently selected for honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror #13.

Jean-Louis Trudel

Born in Toronto, Jean-Louis Trudel holds degrees in physics, astronomy, and the history and philosophy of science. A busy science fiction writer, he is the author of a couple of novels published in France, over fifteen young adult books published in Canada, numerous short stories in French, and a handful of stories in English. When time allows, he also produces translations and science fiction criticism.