Well, the word is official: Edge Books has released the table of contents for Tesseracts 18: Wrestling With Gods, and a story of mine is among them. It’s always an honour to be included in Tesseracts, but especially so for me since Tesseracts 17 saw my first professional sale, and I’d submitted to previous incarnations of the anthology without success over the years.
Editors Jerome Stueart and Liana Kerzner have put together a collection of speculative fiction that explores faith, religion and the divine. I can’t wait to read it.
I won’t say much about my own piece in it, “The Harsh Light of Morning,” except that it was fun to to examine what symbols mean to different people in the context of a life-or-death situation. It’s horror in small-town Saskatchewan, and part of a larger cycle of short stories I’m working on.
The full list of contributors has been announced by Edge, but I’ll include it here as well.
From the Tesseracts 18 blog:
Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods
- edited by Liana K and Jerome Stueart
- Faith in Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology
- ISBN: 978-1-77053-068-3 (Trade Paperback 5.5″ X 8.5″)
- E-BOOK: e-ISBN: 978-1-77053-069-0
- To be released April, 2015
“(Calgary, Alberta) EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing is pleased to announce the names of the contributing authors for the forthcoming edition of the prestigious Tesseracts series.
“Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods will include works by: Robert J. Sawyer, Matthew Hughes, Alyxandra Harvey, Halli Lilburn, Derwin Mak, J.M. Frey, Steve Stanton, Megan Fennell, Jen Laface and Andrew Czarnietzki, S. L. Nickerson, John Park, Janet K. Nicolson, Suzanne M. McNabb, Allan Weiss, Savithri Machiraju, Carla Richards, Mary-Jean Harris, James Bambury, Mary Pletsch, David Jón Fuller, and Jennifer Rahn, Erling Friis-Baastad, David Fraser, John Bell, David Clink and Tony Pi — 27 of the biggest names and brightest rising stars in Canadian science-fiction and fantasy.
“This latest volume of the Tesseracts series contains tales of creative and religious diversity – a trending topic in books and movies. The stories and poems draw from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism and the beliefs of Indigenous Canadians, (as well as actually creating faiths and religions of other worlds).
“’Any anthology that starts with a story called “Mecha-Jesus” is clearly not a traditional look at religion,’ says EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publisher, Brian Hades. ‘This robotic savior is joined by the Hindu god Ganesh trying to break into Bollywood, the Sun God Ra discovering Coronation Street, a priest on Mars, a vampire in residential schools, and a woman with a secret under her hijab. ‘Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods’ definitely contains many surprises!’
“As in past versions of the Tesseracts series, the editors are handpicked by the publisher. Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods‘ is edited by widely-published sci-fi/fantasy author and writing teacher Jerome Stueart — who is a gay Baptist from the Yukon Territory — and ‘perfect heathen’ media personality Liana Kerzner — who is best known as Liana K.
“Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods is a lively, thoughtful interfaith/interpath anthology of creative and religious diversity — with a speculative fiction and fantasy twist!”
April 10, 2014 at 10:53 am
Congratulations! Being included in Tesseracts 17 was a bucket list item for me, I can only imagine how awesome it feels to repeat that.
April 10, 2014 at 12:15 pm
Thanks! I sweated a lot over the piece I submitted to Tesseracts 18 — I really didn’t want the Tesseracts 17 acceptance to feel like a fluke. (I know it’s ridiculous to think in those terms — editors have different tastes.) Tesseracts 17 is such an interesting mix of stories and genres, it’s a blast to read everyone else’s stories. Looking forward to other writers’ takes on faith and religion in Tesseracts 18.