By Vivian Hansen

The Longest Night
by Lauren Carter
Freehand Books (2025)

There are tropes to be observed in the writing of a time-travel novel. The major trope: do not interfere with a time-space continuum; as in ‘if I could go back, I could change the outcome.’ The great writers of time travel fantasy have experimented with this rule. Jack Finney’s Time After Time, and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night offers some new theoretics and perspectives about the genre.

It seems simple enough, and possibly not fantastical at all. Where memory is the location of desire, trauma, apprehension and comprehension, it becomes the portal for travel. In this book, Ash grapples with the joy of seeing long dead relatives again in a new time with new possibilities for change. But she recalls the rules:

All the rules from a glut of science fiction clutter up her head. The prime directive. Don’t interfere in the normal development of a society or the unfolding of a timeline. She’d give anything for Jean-Luc Picard to be in charge right now, to arrive with his fatherly authority and tell her what to do. (99)

I would argue that time travel, as plotted by Lauren Carter, takes down the science fiction and fantasy construct, and leaves it in the theoretic of memoir.  

The major tension in this superbly plotted story is situated shortly after the horror of 9/11, and the ensuing questions of how to change the future for a few seemingly unimportant people. Ash is not empowered to change anything about a catastrophic event. Her personal circumstances of surviving sexual abuse and predation have effaced 9/11. The personal catastrophe affects the reality of the universal catastrophe, and this binary opposition is necessary to her own survival and to those whom she loves.  She knows the future; she has a memory of it, and when returned to her own drastically altered future, she forgets a little of this, a little of that. The past is eroded; transgressions against her slide away into abyss.  

It occurs to me that the sense of MeToo in this work is far more critical than, or sensate with, the horror of nations as exampled in 9/11. If my narrative instincts are correct, Carter has achieved a brilliance that is unimpeded by the violence of patriarchy. Is it not true that the tendency to forget the worst is a female generational problem? Surely Ash, and any of us, do not forget the atrocities of sexual abuse, predation and patriarchal injustice.  And yet, we forget a few small things in time, memory and trauma. A little of this, a little of that, until a new generation of women dares to say we’ve grown beyond all that.  

This book was a fast page-turner for me, as I absorbed the more subtle drugged-tea offerings that Ash endured, growing into memory/memoir as a site of deferred dreams and un/resolved trauma.   

Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.”

The post Review of Lauren Carter’s “The Longest Night” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Jonathan Greenbaum

The Crane
by Monica Kidd
Breakwater Books (2025)

Over the years several Canadian novelists have written about Americans who fled to Canada to evade the draft in the Vietnam war (1965 to 1973). These writers include Robert McGill (Once We Had a Country, 2013), Louis Caron (The Draft Dodger, 1980), and David Bergen (The Time in Between, 2005). In both our literature and our folklore, Canada is usually portrayed as a northern refuge for American men who refused to fight in Vietnam.

Monica Kidd, a multidisciplinary writer and award-winning journalist based in Calgary and St. John’s, has now given us her iteration of this novelistic genre. The Crane, set in 1968, recounts the story of James Anderson, a twenty-two year old American man. Following the death in Vietnam of James’s brother, Dave—James receives his draft notice for the war. Torn at first by conflicting loyalties, James decides to leave Southern Butte (Wyoming) and travel surreptitiously to St. John’s, Newfoundland (NL) where he has been told he will be safe. James does not want to be killed in Vietnam.

The scenes in the novel alternate between Southern Butte, several American locales, and places in NL. As we get to know James, we realize that in some ways he is a “refugee” from his life.

…when they asked him [James] where he was going and he said Canada and started to talk about how after this war there would always be another one, how he couldn’t trust himself to know what he wanted, and maybe all he wanted was a place for everything to stop. [p. 234]

James is a foreigner in St. John’s. What will happen to him there? Will he find work? Will he make friends? How does he see himself in this place? These are some of the central questions in the novel.

Then there is the mystery symbolized by the crane of the title—a wooden image of a bird given to James by his brother, Dave. The small carving had belonged to a soldier named Eric—a fellow soldier who fought with Dave and died in Vietnam. James is tasked with delivering the bird to a person he doesn’t know. If he succeeds in his mission, he will learn the mystery behind the crane.

Kidd manages to pull together in her narrative the diffuse settings of the story. Her writing throughout is generally strong. In my view, Kidd’s best writing is found in her descriptions of places and events in NL. For example, this description of James’s arrival in St. Johns:

…he walks towards the harbour, in the direction that must lead Downtown. There are trucks and cranes and pallets of goods and men shouting to one another and massive ships covered with tarps in for repair. [pps. 8-9]

In addition, Kidd’s account of the scuttling of The Calypso, a rotted-out ship, is extremely well done. We feel we are witnessing the destruction of the decommissioned ship. James observes the event, and his reaction to what he sees tells us much about him.

In many respects, The Crane reads like a historical novel. The Canadian characters portray the nature of life in NL in 1968. The reader is given plenty of historical and cultural information about the province. Here is Kidd’s narrator:

And other things were changing [in NL]. Last year divorce had made it to the province. The church here remained powerful, and before the new legislation people who wanted to divorce had to apply to the federal parliament with a private bill. [p. 107]

Doubtless, some readers will appreciate these historical footnotes. Others (and I include myself in this category), will feel that repeated information of this kind slows down the forward tilt of the story.

There is much in The Crane for a reader to sink their teeth into. Ultimately, the reader’s interest in and empathy for James Anderson will be the measure by which they weigh the success of this novel.

Jonathan Greenbaum is a retired Ontario high school English teacher. His short fiction has appeared in The Nashwaak Review. He is currently seeking a publisher for his short fiction manuscript.

The post Review of Monica Kidd’s “The Crane” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Kendall Bistretzan

Wish Maker
by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
Masobe Books (2025)

Wish Maker by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is a charming juvenile fiction book full of magical realism, relatable characters, and gorgeous illustrations. Nine-year-old Ebele and his mother are experiencing poverty in their Nigerian village following the death of Ebele’s father. Ebele wants nothing more than a memorable Christmas with lots of gifts, but between his mother barely being able to afford food and the mockery of his friends, he knows his wishes are unlikely to come true. When a quirky stranger comes to town and seeks help from Ebele of all people, Ebele learns that there’s more to Christmas than gifts, and that fortune awaits those who practice kindness and generosity. 

While “there’s more to Christmas than presents” is a trope that’s been overused in all sorts of storytelling formats, Umezurike’s book examines the bigger picture. Ebele comes to terms with his bleak situation (though not without some petulance – he is a nine-year-old, after all) and ends the story in a better position than he began, and not just because his heart grew three sizes, or anything like that. By feeding the stranger and helping him cross the river, Ebele is rewarded with more fish than he knows what to do with. He can feed himself and his mother, and sell the fish to afford much-needed medicine and much-desired presents. Yes, a bit of magic is involved, but it’s ultimately Ebele’s own actions and good nature that allow him to catch the fish and reap their rewards, driving home the message that kindness is a virtue worth rewarding. 

“‘I’m only sent here to help people believe in themselves. Anyone with a kind heart,’” explains the stranger on page 88. Ebele responds, “‘You’ve taught me how to believe in myself. I won’t wait till I am grown up to help people. I will fight for anyone who needs help.” 

Yes, the story can be a little heavy-handed, but at the end of the day, it’s a children’s book with a valuable message. Except for Ebele’s lack of stranger danger. Parents might want to impart that message onto their kids themselves.

Kendall Bistretzan was born and raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, before moving to Calgary in 2017. In 2021, she received her degree from Mount Royal University, majoring in journalism and minoring in creative writing. Her prose and book reviews have been published in FreeFall Magazine, Understorey Magazine, Blue Marble Review, and more.

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Beneath the Surface of Things
by Wade Davis
Greystone Books (2024)

Wade Davis’ latest essay collection “Beneath” offers a social perspective in both subject and style. Lying behind the collection is the implicit lamentation for our culture of truncated exposition and surface meaning. His title implies that we need to escape the apparent and look beneath, seeking is well worth the effort.

Each essay leaves the impression that beneath the essay, there lies a book in waiting. The subject matter is broad and moves from historical reflection to personal reportage, none of which seems out of place. The most difficult topics are the most effective, Davis manages to engage topics as divisive as the state of America, Climate Change, Jerusalem and Colonial Language with a rational and balanced treatment which confounds prejudice. Perhaps no better exemplified than in “Beyond Climate Fear and Trepidation” Davis pleads for rationality and balance in a debate which has polarized our world and yearns for solutions that are effective both practically and emotionally. In each essay, there is a plea for understanding, the real fruit of any exposition.

Davis deftly manages to illuminate the key to this nexus of travel and writing, mirrored closely to the nexus of exploration and conquering, that there are only two purposes to the activity, one to reinforce the preconceptions of ego or colonialism or the more preferred route of exploration to understanding and learning. If done correctly credit is given where credit is due, empathy as the key to human exploration, rather than acquisition.

The sequence of the collection reinforces the thematic of empathy and understanding. “The Art of Exploring” imparts the sense of respectful exploration which is followed “Mother India” which gives context for respect and humility in the time bank that is his India. Both essays deal with contact that could devolve itself into Orientalism but are saved by contact that allows empathy to flow into meaning. Through this deft treatment we understand that what we need to know of what is beneath is the lesson of empathy, meaning through connection, at which this author excels with fine writing. 

Davis imparts to us metaphor without fanfare, as he begins with the presentation of the arrogance of the British Colonial endeavor; we find it fading onto history in comparison to the embedded culture of Varanasi which continues to flow as physical and spiritual history plays itself out on the banks of the Ganges. Empires come and go but India remains. Call it what you will, the name is irrelevant, it’s the practice that is the key to any culture.

The best of the collection surfaces as “Beyond Climate Fear and Trepidation”, the process is in the title. The title refuses the standard biased polemic on the subject, immediately we are aware that there is a minefield of emotion ahead for the reader. From whatever perspective you arrive at the subject there is room for you to be both right and wrong as you move through the piece. Davis’s tone of clarity and compassion is not for the subject but for the people having to navigate the subject as no one can be untouched by it. He manages to draw our focus inwards, rejecting the righteous polarity in favor of a much-needed conversation. He ends this with the same empathetic underbelly, though exploration of what is beneath the other we may find that remains is for us to do something together rather than do nothing apart, it is sublime in the face of fear and trepidation.

As in all the essays, his writing sparks curiosity that is prerequisite to exploration, speaking to intention of the whole or the individual. Curiosity is at the core of the collection, it is the bag we carry our questions in, from questions follow exploration and in succession to that we find meaning, and as above we are curious for more. Beneath is a story based empathetic model, an understanding of our observation of the difference between what we see, how we see and what we assume. 

Michael Frey is an entrepreneur, an intellectual jack of all trades, and a renaissance man.

The post Review of Wade Davis’ “Beneath the Surface of Things” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Hides
by Rod Moody-Corbett
Breakwater Books (2024)

He is unnamed. But he is well known to us. We have sat in his classroom, shared his bench at lunch hour, lived in an apartment similar to his, and occupied a seat beside him on the C-train. We might call him Hero. And yet, it would be a mistake to define him as unique.  We do not recognize him as especially rare. He reflects all of us, especially the male gender.  

In his debut novel, Moody-Corbett has set out the trajectory of men; of success and shattering failures: the PhD acquired so that one can finally begin again at the bottom of the Sessional Instructor rung. The first person point of view reveals our Hero as an endearing and hard-working bumbler with a gift for high diction. He suffers from the grasping claw of addiction to drugs, which is only a symbolic hell to the one he wishes to escape.  

His close friend Travis has been murdered on the C-train after stepping in to ‘take a bullet’ for others. After this tragedy, the men gather. Travis’ father Willis, Baker, and Travis’ younger brother Isaac organize a hunting trip to a place called “The Castle” in Newfoundland, to hunt moose. They invite our Hero and they pay his way. This will be a bonding experience, following the mythology of men as hunters. And yet, each of these men pivot their life vision around the wisdom of some extraordinary women. From Caitlin, Travis’ mother, who reveals the near collapse of her marriage:

… the moment we knew about Travis, … everything that was wrong, just sort of dissolved.  It was almost like… through him, he gave us a second chance. (85)

And Judith, their hunt leader and owner of the lodge: “I really hate men, all men, all the men, present company included.” (163) What is man-made is toxic: “The spill was man-made, was male.  All spills, all wars, are.” (164). She theorizes: “ … in a world made of ambience, … we harness the male ego, its deepest wills, its desire to conquer, kill, quest, and juxtapose these wills against nature (168). The women exhibit an uncanny ability to excise the hunt; to see it for what it is and garner no particular threat from it.  

Moody-Corbett’s ability with simile reveals how the practice of poetics is often underrated in prose. Our Hero observes: “… slabs of ice shifting in the sluggish current like comet shards, like fallen omelets of moon.” (217) I marvelled at the discovery of a kenning: “There followed a disturbing crunch as the head broke clear of the throat and Isaac steered the gristly brain helmet away…” (189). 

Moody-Corbett has succeeded in defining a new genre: how men come of age and flee patriarchy. Perhaps it is perceived as through a glass darkly, but this novel offers a fictionalized and layered prescription for the mental health of contemporary men. I look forward to his next novel.

Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.”

The post Review of Rod Moody-Corbett’s “Hides” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Vivian Hansen

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Simon & Schuster (2024)

I pluck the easy-going Saskatoon berries, a few sacrificial ones for my mouth, and a few that speak ‘plunk’ in my pail. In the dog days of summer, thirty days after the summer solstice, the berries are ripe. My cousins pivot around me, looking for their own voluptuous branch of Saskatoons. My mother, sister and aunts are stepping around the mud paths to gather as well. I cannot think of Saskatoons, or Serviceberries, without recalling this scene of matriarchal, matrilineal labour that bonded us. We would make pies soon, and with heavy cream, eat the fresh berries for dessert.

The Serviceberry is the model that Kimmerer uses to advance her thesis of how the gift economy can work and mitigate against the oppressive capitalism. In an interview with Jenny Odell from Orion Magazine, Kimmerer reflects:

We cherish a gift for the relationship it embodies. When we use it, it is wrapped in
gratitude. When we use a resource, it is clothed in entitlement. (November 19, 2024).

What of this gift economy? How is it an improvement over abject capitalism? The notion of gift implies freedom of reciprocity. Kimmerer delves deeper: “To name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy – and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the ‘thing’ has not changed.” (22) Scarcity produces in consumers the desire for something that cannot be held or had. Kimmerer asserts that “if there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.” (77) This direction upholds diversity, allowing the earth to fallow and wait for another day. Industrial economies are short-term, and a slide of gift economy is more adaptable to human need.  Kimmerer reverts back to Serviceberry economics: “…I don’t see scarcity, I see abundance shared: photosynthate is usually not in short supply, since sun and air are perpetually renewable resources.” (78) “Market and capitalism demand that abundant, freely available, earthly gifts be converted to commodities and made scarce by privatization and high prices.” (79). So, this line of thinking: to possess, oppress and own the earth is crazy, and to use a scary cliché: unsustainable. Gift economy begins to look like a desirable option.

Gift economies flourish in a small community, where commodity is less appreciable. Kinship locates in more robust forms within groups that embrace gift economy. Kimmerer upholds a wish:

I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding
system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what
we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which
can never be commoditized. (90-91)

When a gift economy flourishes, we enjoy music, poetry, scent, and the blue, wealthy taste of a Serviceberry.

Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.”

The post Review of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Lori Hahnel

The Primitives
by Darlene Barry Quaife
Friesen Press (2024)

The Spanish Civil War of 1936 – 1939 has inspired the work of a great many writers and artists, including Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. In a time when we face the reemergence of fascism, the arrival of Southern Alberta author and artist Darlene Barry Quaife’s new novel, The Primitives, is timely indeed.

Set during the early part of the Spanish Civil War, Canadian archaeologist Dr. Grace ‘Shale’ Clifden, working on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, and the team of fellow Canadians she recruited in a London pub are in Spain to document the cave paintings of Cantabria. It’s not just any team Dr. Clifden has gathered;. It consists of the poet Dorothy Livesay, the poet P.K. Page, and Sheila Doherty (later Watson, author of the seminal modernist novel The Double Hook). As the novel begins, the team finds themselves kidnapped by a fascist commander who demands to know what they’re doing in Spain and accuses them of spying. An unexpected ally convinces the commander to allow the women to finish their work, with him as chaperone.

The Primitives is both a tautly written historical adventure story and a meditation on the nature of art. The author’s spare style and thoughtful word choice gives us many vivid scenes:

Winter winds gust off the Sierra de Guadarrama as Dorothy and Sheila are helped into the back of a troop truck. The only protection from the penetrating cold is a thin canvas tarp and huddled bodies. The two women had said their goodbyes with hugs and tears.

In contrast, deep in the caves of Galicia, the group is sequestered from the world. Away from their oppressors, they are free to discuss the origins of art in the depths of the human psyche. 

Quaife’s research is impressive and well-done. The wealth of period detail here will appeal to history lovers and CanLit fans alike:

Another evening lecture at Canada House, the speaker this time is Northrop Frye, a young Canadian attending the University of Oxford. The Romantic English poet, William Blake, is obviously his passion. Frye introduces his audience to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience by suggesting that the poems are of the times, the current times, prophetic in the face of Nazism.

Also of note is the book’s cover: Quaife’s “Cave Art”, one of her own paintings. All in all, this is a one-of-a-kind novel that will appeal to readers seeking substance in their fiction. Quaife’s passion for art and history make The Primitives a fascinating book.

Lori Hahnel, an art school dropout, is the author of three novels and two short story collections, including Vermin, which won the Alberta Literary Award for Short Story Collection in 2022. She is currently at work on a novel based on the life of Clara Schumann.

The post Review of Darlene Barry Quaife’s “The Primitives” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Kendall Bistretzan

The Genius Hour Project
by Leanne Shirtliffe
Thistledown Press (2024)

The Genius Hour Project is a middle-grade novel that follows eleven-year-old Frazzy, a quirky and scatterbrained girl with a penchant for collecting vinyl. When her class is assigned the Genius Hour Project – a chance to let their inner genius shine – Frazzy opts for an “impressive” topic, rather than one she’s passionate about in hopes of impressing her parents and teachers.

The Genius Hour Project itself is merely a crucible for everything else in Frazzy’s life. Her mom is overworked, her dad is slipping into depression, her best friend is moving, Jake the bully won’t leave her alone, and could her crush, Ebrahim, possibly like her back?

Author Leanne Shirtliffe has an impressive ability to capture the unique feelings and realities of modern-day pre-teens while trusting the reader to pick up on these intricacies for themselves. Simply put, she has mastered the age-old adage of “show, don’t tell.” An example of this is Mel’s dentist parents, who are both called Dr. Robinson by Frazzy until this interaction on page 95: 

“‘When will you start calling me Colleen?’ Mel’s mom says….‘If it’s easier, you can call me Dr. Colleen, but not Dr. Robinson. That makes me think of my – of Mel’s father.’”

The matter isn’t discussed any further, but a reader as perceptive as Frazzy will gather the gendered implications of Mel’s mother offering to go by her first name, while Mel’s father makes no effort to relinquish his title as Dr. Robinson. The Genius Hour Project is full of clever moments like these, showing young readers a greater context of the common thoughts and experiences they’ve had in their lives. Frazzy’s authentic child-like perception is a testament to Shirtliffe’s ability to observe and understand the younger generation.

Another exceptional element of The Genius Hour Project is the side characters. Frazzy’s parents, Jake the bully, and even minor characters like the record-sale patrons are all fleshed out with discernable motives. The characters don’t exist to drive the plot, but rather the plot exists because of their wants, needs, and behaviours. Every person is written with intention. The only time when character motive fell short was with Ebrahim and the third-act breakup, which was so unbelievably miscommunicated – even by a 12-year-old’s standards –  and solved so quickly that removing the plot point entirely wouldn’t have changed any outcome in the story. 

As for Frazzy herself, I was often frustrated by her distractability and procrastination. However, I’m sure most young readers will identify with these traits, because what sixth grader hasn’t gotten in trouble for talking during class, lied to their parents about school assignments, or forgotten a project until the night before it’s due? Frazzy is proof that these bumps in the road are not indicative of a bad student or unintelligent person and that sometimes kids just need some extra help. 

The Genius Hour Project is a profound and entertaining love letter to anyone who has ever felt different and proves that there’s a little bit of genius inside everyone.

Kendall Bistretzan was born and raised in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, before moving to Calgary in 2017. In 2021, she received her degree from Mount Royal University, majoring in journalism and minoring in creative writing. Her prose and book reviews have been published in FreeFall Magazine, Understorey Magazine, Blue Marble Review, and more. 

The post Review of Leanne Shirtliffe’s “The Genius Hour Project” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest
by Ariel Gordon
Wolsak and Wynn (2024)

It’s all there in the subtitle, Foraging in the Urban Forest. In Ariel Gordon’s collection of essays, Fungal, we follow Gordon’s inquiry into the Urban Forest to gather that which feeds us and gifts us a grand metaphor for life, hers and by proxy our own.

We forage to feed, and Gordon provides us with the nutrition of her revealed compulsion whilst all the while tying herself, and her progress, to that of the oft ignored mycelium.

As we walk with Gordon, curiosity and fascination intertwine with personal moral development. She constructs a grand metaphor with fungi, mapping her own values onto this parallel existence with the third kingdom of fungi, neither plant nor animal, fungi exist between predictable lifeforms, able to weave and integrate with both. Like the fruiting bodies of fungi, mushrooms appear only under specific conditions, and as we read her bold and sometimes shockingly frank expositions we are fed by the foraging of her stories.

Fungal reveals itself to be a forage of fascination driving introspection, the basket being filled with the fruits of her time feeding her relentless curiosity. Her enthusiasm is not culinary, its fundamental and flows to the profound so that we lose our separation with her and with the fungi upon which this life is intertwined.

Her moral core reflects the fungal construction, her values are the developing interactive material from which the fruiting bodies of her experience emanate. The stories could easily drift into the pastoral or the passe of the “can you eat it?” crowd but there is far too much substance to be harvested and she delivers a full basket of character and awareness. Go ahead and try it, every mushroom is “edible once”.

As with all things fungi, there is a restlessness to her thinking which belies the continual growth/decay nexus of fungal fascination. Her prose is effortless and unguarded, revealing her ease of self, her awareness of both natural and social context. Social context runs throughout the collection, she exposes an unwilling to cast off her value core for the sake of external expectation, her awareness of the implications of these choices is direct and clear, neither triumphal nor bitter, it does not escape her when slights and exclusions are launched at her either directly or by cultural proxy.

Gordon deftly provides a summation of her moral core as simple as it is effective. “…things I believe in: a just society, and a planet that is healthy and balanced” (pg. 165). Like human, like fungi: life is an action, a verb. Both are in constant process of striving towards balance of forces, sometimes the nurturer and sometimes the nurtured, but never in isolation, part of a whole. You can’t forage online to learn about fungi and humans. You have to go out in the world, get your hands dirty and feast on the results.

Gordon avoids the obsessions of typology, biochemistry, and taxonomy in favor of a holistic relationship with fungi and the world, always able to stay in a state of engagement with fungi: strange, wonderful, threatening, nurturing, repairing, decomposing, feeding, healing and above all providing a central moral purpose for life.

The strongest piece in the collection is the well titled “Eating My Words”. Describing her co- conspirator’s experiment to grow edible fungi using the literal pages of her book as growth medium, Gordon delivers a full basket for her efforts. Dense and filled with a balanced enthusiasm for the joy of the perfect circle of life, for an author captivated by fungi, to have your own words become literal food, to be cycled into fodder for health, the words feed the mind, feed the soul, feed the fungi, feed the soil, and feed the author. Circle complete, bravo.

A fascination with the fungal is no prerequisite for this collection, merely a fascination with the
human.

Michael Frey is an entrepreneur, an intellectual jack of all trades, a renaissance man, and has studied with Paul Stamets where curiosity with mushrooms became an obsession.

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The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits
by Ben Berman Ghan
Wolsak & Wynn (2024)

‘Imagine’ opens Ben Berman Ghan’s expansive and timely novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, and imagine he does. Space whales that are also ships, AI, Toronto, algorithms, colonialism, ghosts, consumerism, consciousness, unconsciousness, the last dying flickers of capitalism–Ghan imagines (or maybe extrapolates) the natural conclusion to these tantalizing threads, with language that sits somewhere between cinematic and poetic but is always precise.

The breadth of the novel, the sheer scope of it–spanning across galaxies, eons, ages–brings to mind the work of Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler with a hint of the (I would argue, often entirely correct) speculation of Philip K. Dick or George Orwell. Ghan’s style is reminiscent of that well-practiced sleight of hand these authors so frequently utilize to showcase a world so different from ours, so mythic, so alien, that it is only upon finishing it that you realize it could only be a reflection of our own current, fraught, and fractured times.

What works best about any kind of science fiction is the impulse to imagine–and in Ghan’s case, redefine, extrapolate, rearrange–a world in which people (and animals, and plants, and technology, and machines) must live with the consequences to our current actions. I often find the endless volatility and uncertainty of our times intensely overwhelming, and when reading fiction, it is difficult not to feel a bone-deep ache for what we will not be able to fix. How could we fix it when there is seemingly no end to the horrors of our world, from any number of genocides, surveillance capitalism, police brutality, or state violence? But under Ghan’s direction, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits offers a speculative view of humanity (and beyond) that highlights the endurance of spirit, decency, and of love, spanning across the cosmos itself.

A lot of the themes extrapolated in The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits reminded me of Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, particularly Justice’s notion of becoming a good relative to our non-human kin–for why would the creation of AI, arguably the first things humans have created that we have no true way of understanding, not be needing our care or consideration? So much of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits incorporates kinship: the kinship between humans, the environment, our technology(ies), our machines, our sense of time. Ghan illustrates what might or could occur when we move beyond conceiving of love as a sentimental emotion but rather, as Justice wrote, a shared experience that moves us “beyond differences” (111). I think in particular of how Ghan writes of the hologram in the prologue; “her thoughts had slipped into the great machine I’d come from. A ghost and not a machine. What was the difference between us?”(14). When a technology becomes sentient, becomes conscious, does that make it closer to a human being than a technology? Should that matter? Ghan raises and answers (some) of these questions throughout the novel, often causing me to pause the reading experience to parse through its many narrative threads.

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits bends beyond the conventions of the novel, incorporating elements of poetry and fragmentary vignettes that illustrate the expansiveness of Ghan’s universe. The dreary and eerily constructed near-future Toronto that bleeds into the more incredible expanse–a colonized moon, for instance–showcases Ghan’s gift for worldbuilding that still feels incredibly present. The characters are vibrant and deeply felt, the world rich, immersive, and desperately, desperately close. I often wished I was back in Toronto when I was reading, just to be able to walk down the streets reimagined and reordered in Ghan’s work.

Dystopian, speculative, timely, and timeless, Ghan’s work illuminates a world I feel we are already halfway to. But where Ghan could wallow in misery or doom, he deftly injects compassion, a grace, that flows throughout the novel and offers something beyond a warning–a way forward. If you are looking for something singular, a blend of cyberpunk and post-humanism, a story told in lurches and stops, look no further. I’ve never read anything like it.

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