Love at Last Sight

Former Vancouver native turned Edmontonian Bowering, previously published in venues from ranging from the literary Magazine The Capilano Review to the Vancouver Sun, presents nine artfully crafted stories in this debut collection from NeWest. In them, an assassin ponders her life; a young woman tolerates her lover's literary pretensions; once cherished relationships erode as romantic Brownian motion brings people together; then apart; and a woman who should know better endures her role as a prop%E2%80%94The Other Woman%E2%80%94in two other people's romance, seduced by a charming cad's transparent lies. The author's alienated flaneurs glide through modern settings, finding love but losing it, observing the world from perspectives often insightful but rarely endearing. They are sufficiently disconnected to cast a dispassionate eye on events around them while being incapable of resisting their own urges or able to avoid the inevitable consequences. Mainly prose, save for the play-style "Jeanne's Monologue," the pieces seem to teeter on the edge of poetry. A remarkable voice, Bowering is a welcome addition to the Canadian literary scene. (Sept.) Right to Know Edward Willett Bundoran Press (Canadian Manda Group, Canadian dist.; Diamond, U.S. dist.), C$17.95/US$15.95 trade paper (221p) ISBN 978-0-9880674-5-5 Life as a privileged functionary on the decaying generation starship Mayflower II suits unambitious Art Stoddard. Unfortunately for Art, his position as Information Dissemination Specialist makes him potentially useful to shipboard rebels unhappy with the captain's authoritarian rule and a potential threat to a captain already nervous about the revelation that the system Mayflower II has reached is already occupied by an unknown civilization. Contact with the locals, who are as authoritarian and as divided as the Mayflower II, only makes matters worse. Studiously passive Art will have to find it within himself to act decisively and correctly lest the Mayflower II and its hosts annihilate each other in the name of security. Reminiscent of all too many generation starship stories, from Murray Leinster's Proxima to Brenda Cooper's Ruby's Song, Willett's novel embraces the conventions of this oddly constrained sub-genre but does not build on them. Similarly, Willett's vision of the future, from the cartoonishly Islamophobic crisis that drove the starship from the Earth to the various dictatorships dominating humanity, Lacks imagination. The result is a study in mediocrity. (Sept.)