Black Gate

The Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg: The Silent City (August 1992),
In the Mothers’ Land (December 1992), and Reluctant Voyagers (March 1995).
Covers by Oscar Chichoni, Oscar Chichoni, and Stephen Youll

I left Canada to attend grad school at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign in August 1987, and when I did I lost touch with much of the vibrant Canadian SF scene. There were a few Canadian authors celebrated in the States — folks like Charles de Lint, Donald Kingsbury, Julie Czerneda, Peter Watts, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a handful of others — but they were the exception. I had to get used to not hearing favorite Canadian acts on the radio (like The Box and Gowan), and I gradually got used to a lack of Canadian representation in bookstores as well.

That’s why it was such a delight to see French Canadian author Élisabeth Vonarburg experience a brief but marvelous period in the sun in the mid-90s, when Bantam Spectra translated three of her most famous novels into English, and brought them to the attention of grateful American readers.

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World’s Best Science Fiction First Series (Ace Books, 1970). Cover by Jack Gaughan

If you want to understand science fiction, it’s not a bad idea to start by reading Year’s Best volumes. And if you’re going to do that, it’s not a bad idea to start with the World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, an annual series that began in 1965 and lasted for an amazing 26 volumes. The last of which, The 1990 Annual World’s Best SF, appeared four months before Wollheim’s death at the age of 76.

The series survived both editorial changes and a switch in publishers (from Ace to DAW, in 1972), and was one of the only Year’s Best series to receive multiple paperback reprints. In fact, for collectors like me, its publication history is all rather confounding. Follow along while I try and figure it all out.

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