Canada! Stretching from Halton to Clarington, from the Lake north to Brock, and beyond, Canada’s fabled history stretches back several years… Perhaps Canada has a future as well. If so, what sort of future awaits the bucolic occupants of Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, and other places one famed author called Samarkands of the North? A number of authors set out to answer that question, with varying degrees of optimism.
Exxoneration by Richard Rohmer (1974)
In the far distant year of 1980, America moves to annex Canada. The goal: to solve US energy shortages with Canadian resources. Given the vast American military-industrial complex and the miniscule Canadian armed forces, immediate surrender seems the only reasonable course of action.
Following the American surrender, Canada grapples with another challenge: enhancing Canadian security through the acquisition of Exxon. Will this corporate bid be as successful as our defense of Canadian sovereignty? Or will Canada finally face abject failure?
However you imagine Canada might defeat the American invading forces, I assure you the method used in the novel is far more implausible.
Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1981)
Sir George Reedy, Deputy Minister for Internal Development and Urban Affairs, Dominion of Canada, travels south to Los Angeles. Todos Santos is a single vast building, the first successful arcology. Is Todos Santos the model that future urban development in Canada should use?
As it happens, while the inhabitants of the panopticon/gated community are content with their domicile, relations between Todos Santos and the rest of Los Angeles are not so much strained as actively hostile. Will the community survive escalating conflict or will the arcology soon be a smoldering memory?
Informed readers will note the “Sir.” This is not, as I assumed in 1981, because the authors were unaware of the Nickle Resolution. They assumed Canada would revert to a nation of obsequious forelock-tuggers. As it turned out, that was just1 Conrad Black.
Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell (2022)
Faced with rising carbon dioxide levels and consequent climate change, Canadians did what Canadians do best: ignored the problem until it was too late, then embraced desperate coping mechanisms. Vancouver Island being particularly vulnerable, the Federal government abandoned the island to focus on more viable regions, while British Columbia’s provincial government effectively evaporated.
Throughout the 21st century, a dwindling population of Vancouver Islanders struggle to come to terms with the legacy of 20th century folly. Soaring temperatures, wildfires, and rapidly shifting ecologies mean that old methods of survival are obsolete. Nevertheless, the Islanders prevail.
Whether or not this beautifully written novel is sad or not depends on reader focus. What’s more important: that so much needless misery is visited on the world, or that despite end-Permian-level calamity, civilization survives2 and humanity does not quite go extinct?
Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice (2023)
The Anishinaabe of Shki-dnakiiwin never asked Canada to annex their lands, attempt to erase their culture, or to forcibly relocate them to the far north. The villagers miss some amenities lost when the power went out and civilization collapsed…but the Anishinaabe do not miss the overbearing settler government.
More than a decade of hunting and fishing has depleted wildlife near Shki-dnakiiwin. Migration to their former homeland near the Great Lakes could be the solution…depending on conditions in the once heavily populated south. A small band of volunteers are sent as scouts into regions long silent. They face wilderness, radiation, and armed invaders foraging north. Not everyone will be coming home.
While the novel is not at all sentimental about Canada, the author is clearly aware that the erasure of advanced technology (thanks to a Carrington event, pandemics, and what happens to nuclear reactors left untended) has profound costs. Living in the woods may sound like fun, but staying in one place will deplete the ecosystem and minor ailments become fatal.
The Everlasting Road by Wab Kinew (2023)
Anishinaabe teen Bagonegiizhigok “Bugz” Holiday vanquished her Clan:LESS online rivals. Victory is hollow. Cancer claimed her brother Waawaate.3 Grief has distracted her from reclaiming her position in the MMORPG Floraverse.
Her brother is lost to her forever, but Bugz can at least create a simulated Waawaate in the Floraverse. Not only is the software able to emulate Bug’s memories of her brother, it can learn from experience. How long will it take the AI to become an active menace to Bugz’s enemies and to Bugz herself? Not long at all!
Wab Kinew is the 25th premier of Manitoba. He is the only sitting provincial premier to have won an Aurora award. In fact, he appears to be the only premier, in office or out, living or dead, to have won the Aurora Award, period. I too wonder what the heck is wrong with all the other premiers. What are they spending their time doing?
***
To think of Canada is to be marvelously inspired. Thus, the above represent only a very small sample of the vast assortment of poutine-flavored, maple syrup-infused futures envisioned by SF authors. If you’ve favorites of your own (perhaps featuring telepathic war moose), feel free to name them in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]I assure you, this is hilarious to Canadians.
[2]In Ontario, which I grant is a less than entirely satisfactory outcome for all the other provinces.
[3]Welcome to CanLit, where every character’s Christmas card list becomes dramatically shorter each year.
To be fair, the Kinew novels are curiously unclear about the exact location of the novels. However, the fact that Kinew is now a Premier meant I could not bear to leave him off.
(Note to other authors: all that stands between you and inclusion here is becoming head of government. Kinew did it, Kessler did it and you can too! Maybe)
There was a Clive Cussler novel several decades ago where the US bought Canada during WW1.
Would it be possible to use the cover for the Niven and Pournelle Oath of Fealty (maybe the Pocket Book edition) rather than the Elizabeth Moon Oath of Fealty? I feel like it would be less confusing.
The first thing that comes to mind is Dean Ing’s Ted Quantrill novels, in which Canada annexes chunks of the post-nuclear war US, but I think you wrote about that before.
I, too, would be interested in hearing about books featuring telepathic war moose.
Elizabeth Bear’s Jenney Casey series features Canada taking over the role of imperialistic leader of the “Free World” after the US collapses into theocracy and internal disorder and the UK is swallowed by advancing glaciers. It turns out we’re just as good as being an evil empire as our much derided neighbours to the south.
The natural consequences of creating telepathic war moose would make any book about them a horror novel.
It seems that the authors of the `Oath of Fealty’ novel described, are as described, but are not the authors of the OoF novel depicted. You might want to correct that?
Telepathic moose fans need look no further than Sterling E. Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey, in which our hero Hiero ventures into the ruins of America to quest for a still-functional computer.
Yes, this is the same Lanier who purchased Dune for Chilton and subsequently got sacked.
I do not recall encountering a work of SFF featuring telepathic war moose, but I think that I would be up for that.
EDIT: @7: I stand corrected. Thank you!
UK residents of a certain age also concur with footnote#1. I think `of a certain age’ is almost as relevant as nationality however.
But it is just bad indexing that Wikipedia biography entries don’t include `Jail term: <dates>’ in the summary column on the right of the page, after `Residence(s)’ and before `Occupations’.
@3, 6: Oath of Fealty cover confusion sorted–thanks!
Marvel Comics has several versions of Canada that exceedingly manipulative, if not outright hostile.
James @1 refers to Rice as a current premier. Is that in additoon to Kinew?
12: No, I am an idiot who posts comments before he has his coffee. Fixed.
The stupid thing is i had it right in the first draft, convinced myself I got it wrong and “fixed” it without checking. There needs to be a phrase for that specific process of anticorrecting stuff.
Didn’t Nalo Hopkinson’s wonderful Brown Girl in the Ring take place in Toronto? G
Michael Christie’s Greenwood (winner of the 2020 Arthur Ellis award for best Canadian crime novel) is set mostly in the past, but it begins with the ecocatastrophized 2038; my notes say the sections go in reverse chronological order, with each (ending in 1908) showing why the mess in the previous one happened. My notes also say it’s only marginally a crime novel, as most of the alleged crimes never actually happened (including one that was a coverup for the reputation of someone who did commit a crime that wasn’t charged), and that it sometimes feels like the author was attempting to commit Literature (and maybe the Great Canadian Novel — take that, Bright to the Wanderer!).
More in the genre line:
* ISTR that Light Raid (Connie Willis) posits an independent Quebec — IIRC amid general disintegration, and without discussing whether the First Peoples of the northern part of the province re-established their independence from the Francophones of the south (as suggested by hydropower-hungry USians whenever the subject of an independent Quebec comes up).
* Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America makes most of Canada a part of the U.S. as in your first example (Labrador is contested by Mitteleuropa); the later parts happen in the present-day U.S. but the large first section traces Julian’s trials across Canada. I suspect Wilson deliberately named his liberalizer after one of the U.S.’s most notorious bluenoses.
Chip137@15: Setting text colour to white doesn’t hide spoiler text if the user’s background is not white.
I’m not actually sure how people manage to do this here (assuming they do); it would be nice if the editor had a ‘hidden’ formatting control (see, for example, Ars Technica’s comment editor’s ‘spoiler’ control).
Looks like my first comment got eaten.
Echoes of Another by Chandra Clarke ought to count.
And Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway ought to count.
17: Sometimes mod approval is a bit slow.
Spoiler alert! There will be… fewer acres of snow. ;-)
Julian May’s _Rampart Worlds_ trilogy had Toronto as the seat of the government of an interstellar polity. Most of the scenes set on Earth were in southern Ontario.
@16: It’s also terribly inconvenient on my tablet – the selected text still doesn’t show. I could copy and paste into something else, but that’s a nuisance so I don’t bother. (Also it is impossible to use the color picker box because it displays under a UI element that I can’t dismiss without… also dismissing the color picker box. So I post spoilers in the clear and you can all like it.)
Robert Rotenberg’s novel Old City Hall is set in Toronto, and is mostly a straight mystery It has a big fantasy element as one plot point: the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup (they haven’t done so IRL since 1967).
Rachel Rosen’s Cascade has a grim future, set in Canada.
If the Washington Senators can win the World Series, I don’t see why the Leafs couldn’t win the Cup.
James, the word for which you were searching in #13 is “Schlimmbesserung.” I have had all too many occasions on which it was appropriate.
Dave Duncan was a Canadian resident for many years but did not write much that was actually set in Canada. The major exception I can think of is Strings, much of which is set in Labrador, although since it’s in a relatively secure compound we don’t actually see Labrador proper. We are told (and see in a few scenes) that climate changes of various kinds have done bad things to the area, and indeed much of North America.
The Draka are of Canadian descent….
If anyone can offer a better way to hide spoilers, I’ll use it — and hope others do too; this looked like the standard solution when I started commenting. Does setting both text and background to white solve @16? (I’m blanking on a solution for @21.) Judging when a story is old enough that nothing spoils it is a different problem, but for a few-years-old work hiding seemed appropriate.
Theodore Judson’s Fitzpatrick’s War comes to mind here also.
James @13 — “xifing”? “tcerrocing”? Something analogous to “hleping” or “being hlepful”, “plehful”, etc.
Heinlein’s Friday included a sovereign Quebec, and Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (AKA Re-Birth) was set in a post-apocalyptic Labrador.
Elizabeth Bear’s Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired follow the career of an ex Canadian Forces Master Warrant Officer cyborg. During the story Toronto is wiped out by a meteorite strike. Whether or not you live in Toronto may affect your enjoyment of the story.
There’s a throwaway line in The Door Into Summer when the protagonist wakes in the far-off year of 2000 and reads newspapers to get himself back into current events. One story mentions that the UK is now a province of Canada and he wonders about the tail wagging the dog.
Parts of C B Lee’s Not your Sidekick books take place in what used to be Canada.
Thomas J Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-1 is set in a SouthWestern Ontario of somewhat flexible geography. Ryan was not Canadian but may have once visited the University of Waterloo.
I loved Exxoneration when it came out. I suspect it’s dated.
I’m really looking forward to Moon of the Turning Leaves. I was slightly disappointed in the plot of Moon over Crusted Snow, but this one seems to be going more in the direction I had hoped for the first novel.
I also mostly enjoyed Oath of Fealty (both the Niven/Pournelle and Moon novels!), but that c**p with Sir George did NOT have me laughing. otoh, Lord Cross of Black Harbout is a never-ending source of mirth.
@22 I love fantasy. But fantasy in what is supposed to be straight crime is a real turn off. How can you trust anything the author says again once they include something like the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup?
It was my impression he was a UWaterloo undergrad. I thought his lack of geographic clarity might have been because he was from away and never left campus.
In the 1970s, there was pretty much nothing closer to WLU than Waterloo Square. A student in Village One or Two might never need to explore off-campus. Everything they needed was available from UWaterloo itself [1].
UW remembers his book, at any rate.
1 There was a point in the 1980s when, apparently confident that the students had no food alternatives, Food Services food got pretty dire. I was once served something whose food group I could not determine. However, two malls with restaurants opened up and FS had no choice but to upgrade their offerings. Today we live in a utopia where UW food is widely appreciated.
A large part of Peter Watts’s Rifters series takes place in an ecologically-devastated Canada.
In John Varley’s Gaea Trilogy, Canada is the oldest nation on a politically very fissiparous future Earth. Much diminished, though – it’s shrunk to what’s now Nunavut and the NWT, and the capital is Yellowknife.
On that note, there was a line in one of Michael Swanwick’s short stories, can’t remember which one but it’s set in a far-future North America – “She was a Canadian, and could draw on the deep cthonic wisdom of her most ancient of peoples.” Words to that effect, anyway. A nice way of indicating that this is the very far future. Also hilarious, if you’re a Canadian.
For an older work, John Wyndham set The Chrysalids, a.k.a. Re-Birth, in a post-apocalyptic Labrador. This appeared a few years after Newfoundland & Labrador joined Canada.
What about The Last Canadian by William C. Heine? I swear there were copies of that all over the place in the 80s. It’s about a plague that rampages through North America, so it’s definitely science fiction.
@7; I started with The Unforsaken Hiero (the sequel), and it was not as hard to follow as you might think it could be. Possibly helped that I played Gamma World, a post apocalyptic RPG that seems to have been at least partly influenced by some of the concepts from that duology.
@33: The Wisdom of Old Earth, I think.
In John Barnes’ “Under the Covenant Stars,” Canada saves the world; people of Canadian descent are rewarded with persecution from an America that sees them as agents of Satan. Sorry, eh?
@21: Jr’yy nyjnlf unir ebg-guvegrra. :-) However, I assume that if you learn to read that, then you won’t be able not to read it – so I haven’t.
Science fiction: I just read a Doctor Who story – written by Dan Slott, drawn with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper – where the bad guys catch them, and she (Billie) tells him an escape plan in code language… but in Doctor Who, all the speech is translated telepathically, including for the bad guys! So the Doctor resorts to homonyms – puns, roughly speaking. The bad guys hear what he is saying, but not what it means.
That is a hop shown, but it is quiet aardvark.
The Last Canadian was a common sight on bookshelves until the 1980s, when it went out very thoroughly out of print. Apparently the Steven Seagal movies The Patriot is based on the Heine novel, in the sense that pretty much nothing from the book except the detail of a deadly virus made it into the movie.
I thought I had mentioned The Last Canadian here before, so I opted for something even obscurer. It was that or crack out the W. O. Mitchell and Farley Mowatt. Or Surreal 4000.
@38 — “Cockney rhyming slang is not commutative!”
I should read *Surreal 4000* (or *The City Under Ground*, the title I encountered it under) again sometime.
@14–About half of Nalo Hopkinson’s work is set in Canada,mostly Toronto.
Also, for non-Canadians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhjO-sAvLm8
An explanation of Canadian Literature.
More or less implausible than the method Canada used to annex the most northern US states in the backstory for the webcomic Antihero For Hire?
(“the US was so busy protecting themselves against Weapons of Mass Destruction that they never made anything to protect against dinosaur attacks”)
We should also take note of all the sci-fi TV shows that feature alien planets which bare a striking similarity to Canada. Obviously this is because (eg) the creators of the Stargates in SG-1 had a particular fondness for that kind of landscape. Obviously ;)
(Just like the Tardis has an affinity for planets which resemble Welsh quarries)
In A Specter Is Haunting Texas, most of North America is now “Greater Texas”; Yellowknife is now Amarillo Cuchillo. In a century-later epilogue, we learn that Texas’s overheated ambitions crashed, such that most of formerly-Canada is now part of Russia and formerly-US is now part of Anarquia Mehico.
One thing that I find surprising is how few books by Canadian authors I can think of that actually try to imagine the future of Canada. Even Robert J, Sawyer, who famously inserts CanCon wherever he can, usually just depicts his near-future Canadian settings as being basically just more of the present (though there was one short story where Quebec had separated). Margaret Atwood is Canada’s most famous living author and probably the most famous living dystopian author, and even her most famous dystopia is set in the former United States.
In terms of American authors, I can think of We Stand on Guard by Bryan K. Vaughan, which basically makes 22nd-century Canada into a futuristic version of Iraq chafing under American military occupation; Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 briefly mentions an independent Nunavut in the 24th century, and, for unexplained reasons, randomly depicts the inhabitants of Ottawa as being predominantly Slavic.
Maybe The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline.
Charles DeLint, aside from writing lovely fantasy novels, has also written a couple of very good science fiction ones. One which comes immediately to mind is Svaha, where ecological collapse hit the First People a lot more gently, leaving them in domed enclaves that resemble Wakanda, while everyone else is in urban wastelands fighting for scraps.
The problem with rereading Surreal 4000 as an adult is being able to make an educated guess as to which ethnicity the author had in mind for the non-Anglo, non-French third group that serves as antagonists.
@49: My memory is dim enough that I just map them onto Morlocks and the protagonist’s folk onto Eloi, just with less cannibalism.