One of Canada’s most prominent and popular science-fiction authors brings her work together in one collection.
In The Slow Engines of Time and Other Stories, Elisabeth Vonarburg’s short stories appear in English for the first time. This emotional and intense work takes readers from Earth far into alien, future and alternate worlds. It
presents works of vivid imagery and emotional intensity, set in the same future as the award winning novels The Silent City and The Maërlande Chronicles.
The Center's inhabitants are many, as are the aspiring Voyagers. And the Voyagers... Suddenly you think of the Voyagers: perhaps some of them have returned during the night, or a short while ago. You realize, then, that you are at the Center, The Center, and a kind of dizziness makes you close your eyes, clutch the edges of the bed; it seems you're falling right through the stone floors, sucked down by a great void: the underground hall with houses the gate to other universes.
She's called Kathryn, Mari, Mélané or Talitha; she travels from one universe to the next, perhaps you have met her on the canals of a Venice-like Montréal, or in Baïblanca, as she takes a walk around Colibri Park...
Six stories, six journeys in an infinitely mutable space-time.
Includes "La Course de Kathryn", Aurora Award for Best Short Work in French, 2004
Published in English as "See Kathryn Run", in Tesseract 9 (Hades Publication)
At the tip of the South, by a seashore, in a world poised between death and rebirth, stands Baïblanca, a city haunted by the rise of the waters, where tranformed humans live side by
side with living works of art and other enigmatic creatures.
Is Baïblanca a city, or several cities? Is it the locus for several universe, the strange attractor that perhaps allows them to communicate?
Seven short stories from yesterday and today, seven journeys in the infinitely mutable space-time of Élisabeth Vonarburg.
"I'm not known for my brevity in fiction, that's the least you could
say ! Still, that's how it began. Also, though I write poetry, I am
known for writing genre, mainly science fiction. That's not exactly
how it began. The two first really short texts I ever wrote are in
this collection - written in 1963 and 1964 (I was fifteen and
sixteen), they were published respectively in 1991 and 2000. Neither
is genre, although about half the stories in this anthology are, or
are at least flirting with genre. For years I shunned non-genre
fiction, which felt too close, too dangerous. Science-fiction, now,
that had nothing to do whatsoever with I-me-mine, I was safe !
After ten years writing SF, of course, I got wiser. Still, I had to
learn to write the so-called mainstream stuff all over again, and
found out I can do it only in very short bursts. This collection
spans some forty years of trying, with a few originals and reprints
from more or less obscure French and Québécois publications : only
there did I dare more revelatory disguises..."
