Tales from the Silence

Tales from the Silence
Edited by James Bow
Published by Endless Sky Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$26.99 ISBN 9781998273225

James Bow spawned a stellar idea for an anthology. The fantasy and science fiction aficionado and communications officer (most Canadian writers have a day job) not only created a fictional universe, “Silent Earth,” he also bravely invited ten other sci-fi, fantasy and YA writers to share this post-apocalyptic universe by contributing their own diverse stories, each set within the confines he’d created for “the isolated colonies of the inner solar system.”

The Ontario writer and editor’s included five of his own stories—including the 48-page “The Phases of Jupiter,” set in 2151—and his contributors hail from across Canada and as far away as Australia. One commonality between the stories is that the characters all “operate independently but in tandem, encountering the same tragedies, occasionally the same joys, fighting the same battles, and making the same mistakes.” Readers will identify with the soup of human emotions the displaced individuals feel, and credible dialogue—something Bow’s particularly good at creating—helps “ground” the stories and makes them relatable.

Bow’s first piece, “The Phases of Jupiter, is significantly set on August 4^th, 2151. After climate disasters and civil strife, “nukes” obliterated much of Earth, and our little blue planet “[fell] silent”. “Riots and disasters multiplied … the old countries declared their independence, and nobody from the UN stepped up to stop them.” The Manhattan Sea Wall was destroyed and New York flooded. News stations “winked out one by one.” Prophetic?

Cameron Dixon, from Toronto, also set his story in 2151. His philosophical protagonist, Jericho Cavender, is “the last man on the Moon,” and readers are privy to his thoughts as he sits in the observation deck and considers the moon’s “grey landscape, all crags and plains stretching out to the mountains on the horizon, with the Earth hanging overhead like a broken marble.” Dixon’s a gifted writer, ie: “The ships and shuttles are silver, but that’s just grey pretending to have a twinkle in its eye.” Cavender is “alone in a place [he] never expected to be alone in,” yet he doesn’t want to return to Earth, now “a world full of weathers and wars.”

Another highlight was Kate Blair’s “The Queen Can Never Win the Game,” set on the British Isles, “sometime around 2165.” This story read like a fairytale for adults: a British girl’s drunken father “decided to [marry his ‘hot’ daughter] off to the King of North Kent”. The polygamist King took the “hot” reference literally, and, considering the torrential rains’ effect on his crops, locked the girl in the barn to dry his soggy wheat. Three times she has to perform an overnight drying, and three times she’s aided by a mysterious woman with a “patchy hairline” and “deep pockmarks”.

Torontonian Joanna Karaplis wins the award for style: she includes letters and video interviews in her Mercury-set story about friendship and strong female leaders.

Tales from the Silence may be about what happened after Earth went silent, but the characters in these assorted stories have much to say.

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