The stories of Winnipeg are as varied as the city itself. Caught in the middle of the continent by the amber of its past glory and its current penury, Winnipeg occupies a rare and beautiful place in the Canadian landscape. Winnipeg is defined by its main road, which merely circles the city, and its tottering buildings sitting on pylons driven deep into the mud of the ancient lake-bed. The principal streets crook across the flat prairie following the ancient whims of cattle and the people m...

The last few years I've been spending my summers and, as you read below, one Christmas, in the forest in central New Brunswick. I bought a large wooded acreage, built a cabin over a summer, and since then I've returned every year, discarding the attraction of the phone and the internet, and immersing myself in the forest.I first lived on the land in a shack I built in a handful of days, although it was November and below freezing every night. By the following summer, I built the mai...

After his daughter coughed herself to death and his wife left for the city, Frank hid in their house. Even while riots captured the downtown, smoke rose from the neighbourhood, and his water was cut off, he refused to leave. With only a pool in his basement and a huge bag of rice to survive, he is coming apart as rapidly as his society.When he goes down an alley to kill a dying cat and finds a child, Kaela's need rescues him from the flames that reach out from the increasingly dange...

Thirty years have passed since I went to the Cook Islands and Fiji, and although the original record of my voyage has long been lost, when I sifted through my memories of that most seminal time in my life, the entire trip was still there waiting for me. My first time overseas, teaching, and living with a family, I found that what I'd been taught about people from other countries was vague and largely untrue. Instead, the tapestry of the Islanders' way of life was much more complex, subtle,...

This annotated edition of World Brain is meant to stimulate scholars to return to this giant intellect, a writer who, with only microfiche to inspire his understanding of the possibilities of communications technology, imagined a connected and coordinated world sharing a huge knowledge base.Wells was inspired by the needs of a world teetering on the brink of global war, and eagerly met with Stalin and Roosevelt to learn what they knew of the peace process. When he found them without...

Our world is dying, people are starving and fighting wars over the few remaining resources. World Builder Corporation says it has developed the technology to build new worlds and is recruiting thousands of volunteers to train on its state-of-the-art space station.Vincent Cosa accepts that challenge. Unable to find work, despised by his ex-wife, and seeking a better life, Vince volunteers to be a World Builder recruit. Once he arrives at the space station and is given a number, howev...

Long ago Glooscap promised to return if his people were in need, but it was only when he learned of the destruction of the Atlantic Provinces that he made the journey back to the Minas Basin. There, learning about the mines and clear-cuts, the factory farms and failing fisheries, and woken by the Jackie Vautour standoff in Kouchibouguac Park, and inspired by the Burnt Church Rebellion, he has returned with a plan that will return the provinces to a prosperity they have not seen in over thr...

This annotated edition of H. G. Wells' first and justly most famous novel, The Time Machine, is meant to encourage the pursuits of scholars who are either encountering Wells' influential classic for the first time or are returning to it in order to delve more deeply into its antecedents and influences.In a story that continues to have resonance for the modern reader, Wells imagined his future world deeply divided along class lines which had split the human species into two: the Morl...

This annotated edition of H. G. Wells' second novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, is meant to encourage the pursuits of scholars who are either encountering Wells' influential classic for the first time or are returning to it in order to delve more deeply into its antecedents and influences. In the novel, Prendick, an aimless gentleman naturalist, becomes shipwrecked on the island where Moreau is creating bestial humans by a cruel and scientifically questionable application of vivisection ...

The Bio Park is the ultimate playground. A fully functioning ecological system almost a mile underground--later converted to an amusement park--it took years to build and hundreds of millions to develop. Unfortunately, it is losing money, so Linked Corporation has decided to seal the thirty foot doors with thousands of tons of blasted earth until the park has accrued in value.The closing party drew a huge crowd of sightseers, thrill seekers, and partiers, even at a thousand dollars ...

As his life fragments, and he is fired from his job and fights with his girlfriend, Mexican vacations cannot cheer the nameless narrator of In Light of Ray. In desperation, he decides to follow the cryptic advice of Ray, a shadowy figure he has only met a few times. His understanding of Ray's obscure suggestions takes him away from his friends and into unemployment, poverty and then homelessness. Drifting around a grittier Vancouver, he begins to think that the only way to fix his life is ...

We usually imagine environmental concerns in terms of a human-caused litany of losses. We have heard about the loss of biodiversity, deforestation, degradation of land, climate change, toxins in the air, and the disappearance of clean water and soil. Amongst that welter of information, if we were admit the selfish truth, we typically think about how such disasters might affect us. We consider food security, human sperm counts, and endocrine interrupters in the water. Too rapidly for the Pl...