Category: Member News

SFC member Linda DeMeulemeester’s latest work, The Mystery of Croaker’s Island, is now available! This Heritage House Publishing Co. Ltd. publication features a diverse group of friends who risk their lives getting to the bottom of a sinister supernatural mystery that is plaguing their otherwise sleepy town.

Blending adventure and realism with a speculative twist, The Mystery of Croaker’s Island introduces a group of unlikely friends who discover connections between a haunted island, monstrous sounds in the briny deep, vanishing cats, and teenagers disappearing in the night with no recollection of where they’ve been. Drawn together, the new friends become embroiled in a perilous quest to uncover the mystery. What sinister force shrouds this sleepy town, and will the kids solve the mystery before it’s too late?

Linda is the author of the critically acclaimed Grim Hill series. The Secret of Grim Hill won the Silver Birch award in 2008. Her other books have been nominated or shortlisted for several awards, including the British Columbia Young Readers’ Choice Red Cedar Award, the Saskatchewan Young Readers’ Choice Diamond Willow Award, and the Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Award. Also a teacher, she enjoys sharing her lifelong love of reading with children.

For more information on this, and on Linda’s Grim Hill series, visit her blog.

SFC member Shereen Vedam has released her next novel. Coven at Callington is Book 1 of The Cauldron Effect, an exciting new Fantasy Regency romance series.

A kidnapped child. A witch on the warpath. A church guard in crisis.
In the year of our Lord 1815, Thomas Drake Saint-Clair, Earl of Braden, a Guard of the Green Cross, is tasked by his archbishop to rescue a missing boy and return him to his warlock father. The order lands Braden in the middle of an unholy war between witches and warlocks and shoves him headlong past a sacred line he’d sworn never to cross.
Newly confirmed Coven Protectress, Merryn Pendraven, rushes to rescue a witch’s son. She’s convinced the same evil warlock who was responsible for her younger brother’s death is behind this kidnapping, too. She has no intention of letting this vile villain get away with the same crime, twice.
When Merryn discovers Braden is also on the case, she’s tempted to join forces. Yet, how can she truly trust him when her aunt has warned that Braden’s second secret charge is to destroy their coven? Finding love in this cauldron of trouble might prove to be Merryn’s deadliest mission and Braden’s complete undoing.

Find it at Books2Read and find Shereen at her website.

SF Canada member Bevan Thomas is one of the board members of Cloudscape Comics, and his organization has recently published its latest anthology: Swan Song. This graphic novel features numerous music-themed stories in a wide variety of genres, from autobiographical explorations to emotional dramas to fantasy stories about songs that produce magic. Not only was Bevan one of the book’s editors, but Swan Song also features a story he wrote retelling the Welsh legend The Tale of Taliesin, where the bard Taliesin summons a furious wind storm with his song. Swan Song includes numerous other comic creators as well, including such prominent local artists as Simon Roy (Prophet, Tiger Lung), Angela Melick (Wasted Talent), Renee Nault (comic adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale), and Jonathon Dalton (Mad Tea Party, Lords of Death & Life). You can get your own copy at the Cloudscape store at https://www.cloudscapecomics.com/product-category/anthology/

SF Canada members, Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law, are pleased to announce their latest anthology, Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders, now available from your bookstore or any online retailer.

This is the fourth anthology in the “social causes” series—Laksa Anthology Series: Speculative Fiction—from Laksa Media. Others in this series are Strangers Among Us, The Sum of Us, and Where the Stars Rise.

From the back cover:  We are called drifters, nomads. We are expatriates, evacuees, and pilgrims. We are colonists, aliens, explorers; strangers, visitors–intruders, conquerors–exiles, asylum seekers, and . . . outsiders.

An American father shields his son from Irish discrimination. A Chinese foreign student wrestles to safeguard her family at the expense of her soul. A college graduate is displaced by technology. A Nigerian high school student chooses between revenge and redemption. A bureaucrat parses the mystery of Taiwanese time travellers. A defeated alien struggles to assimilate into human culture. A Czechoslovakian actress confronts the German WWII invasion. A child crosses an invisible border wall. And many more.

Stories that transcend borders, generations, and cultures. Each is a glimpse into our human need in face of change: to hold fast to home, to tradition, to family; and yet to reach out, to strive for a better life.

PRAISE FOR SHADES WITHIN US

“A few of the stories revisit well-worn tropes, but most take a fresh approach to their subjects and conjure terrifying futures brought on by climate change, greed, and corruption of power. Political and daring, this collection adds to the future imagined by Philip K. Dick, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Aldous Huxley.” – Foreword Reviews

“Shades Within Us is a timely collection that invites us to ask whether we still do (or still should) live in a space of national borders and national definitions of identity. It invites us to use our speculative imagination to think through new ways of understanding selfhood in relation to the borders, boxes, and categories that are placed around us.” —Speculating Canada (Derek Newman-Stille)

Read Excerpts from Shades Within Us at Laksa Media and at Tor.com

SF Canada member Colleen Anderson has been busy lately. Recent activities include editing Exile’s Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland, an anthology inspired by Lewis Carroll. Two of the stories are reviewed on the Speculating Canada podcast and the anthology garnered a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.

As well, Colleen served as editor for the July issue of SFPA’s dark-themed Eye to the Telescope online poetry magazine.

Recent publications of her own work include:
“Sir Tor and the River Maiden” in By the Light of Camelot;
“A Taste of Eden” in the Australian Worlds of SF, F and H Vol. III;
as well as these poems:
“How to Cook with Children” in Grievous Angel;
“The Enlightened” in Polar Borealis 5;
“Ode to Andrew Brechin”, placing 3rd in Wax Poetry’s Angela contest;
“Washday Blues” in Polar Borealis 6;
“Mermaid’s Comb” in Future Fire 45;
“Cinderella’s Pumpkin” in Polu Texni;
“The Sand Witch”, placing 2nd in the Balticon Poetry contest;
and “Savor” in the HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. V.

And her collection, A Body of Work, will be published this fall by UK publisher Black Shuck Books.

Congratulations on your successes, Colleen!