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ASFFQ : 1987

Output in 1987 has been so extensive that, in order to analyse it cogently, we need to divide it into two distinct categories: originals and reprints.
Let's begin with the originals, since they are the best indicators of what the new trends are and how healthy the two genres are. This production includes 19 novels or novellas, and 158 short stories, including 108 published in magazines and 50 in 14 collections and three anthologies with at least one original. In short, a year above par as far as the number of published works is concerned. Another telling indicator confirms this result: the number of authors having published at least one original work during the same period. There were 95 such writers in 1986, while there were 104 this year.
The distribution of the production between the two genres indicates a predominance of fantasy, including as usual fantastic and supernatural literature. It is the short narrative that ensures this supremacy, since 99 fantasy stories were published versus only 59 SF stories. In the novel or novella category, the gap favours instead SF: 11 SF novels versus 7 fantasy novels (in fact, mostly novellas).
In the specialized magazines, the genres are nose to nose: 33 fantasy stories and 33 SF stories. Which means that fantasy owes its predominance to non-specialized literary magazines that give them space in their pages side-by-side with realistic stories. But even more so collections and anthologies, which include 38 fantasy stories versus only 12 SF stories. These numbers show that fantasy still benefits from the literary establishment's positive bias, while SF still struggles for recognition.
It is interesting to examine the market share of the specialized magazines. We've noted that this share has been decreasing in the past years due to the creation of new outlets for the dissemination of short stories. Specialized magazines consolidated their share in 1987, printing 68 of the 117 short stories published in magazines, a 1% increase over 1986.
The modest emergence of fantasy in the Quebec literary landscape should be noted. You can't say "effervescence," but the efforts of the editors of the fanzine Faerie no doubt had something to do with it. Stories like Le Rêve, by Jean Carrière, Le fils d'Outhar, by Marie-Claire Gilles, Histoire de la Princesse et du Dragon, by Élisabeth Vonarburg, as well as Viviane Julien's novel, have also drawn some attention to a genre almost non-existent in Quebec.
The other aspect of the production in 1987, made up essentially of reissues and translations, includes 2 novels and 132 short stories, almost all of which are reprints from anthologies or collections. In 1986, 4 novels and 22 short stories were reissued. It allows us to evaluate the new phenomenon occurring this year, an unprecedented fact in the history of Quebec SF and fantasy: this performance clearly demonstrates the existence of a high-quality corpus that has been built up over the years, since those texts successfully weathered the test of time.
There, too, it is fantasy that is favoured by editors, with 100 fantasy short stories reprinted, originals or translations, while there were just 32 SF short stories. The two non-specialized anthologies, Intimate Strangers and Invisible Fictions, show the same trend, since, of 26 fiction pieces, 23 are fantasy. Tesseracts 2, an English Canadian anthology, included four Quebec short stories.
In short, one year 1987 equals two normal years and is distinguished by a few outstanding points: the clear predominance of fantasy over science fiction, the flowering of a fantasy that is more modern than ever, more elaborate in its writing per se than in the themes that helped delineate the genre's borders, the high number of reprints and the dissemination of several Quebec works in the English-speaking market.

Claude Janelle

Original Production	Science Fiction	Fantasy & Horror	Total
Novels	11	7	18
Short stories in...	59	99	158
a) collections & anthologies	12	38	50
b) specialized magazines	33	33	66
c) non-specialized magazines	14	28	42

Reissues and/or translations	Science Fiction	Fantasy & Horror	Total
Novels	1	1	2
Short stories in...	32	100	132
a) collections & anthologies	26	96	122
b) specialized magazines	2	0	2
c) non-specialized magazines	4	4	8

Combined production	Science Fiction	Fantasy & Horror	Total
Novels	12	8	20
Short stories in...	91	199	290
a) collections & anthologies	38	134	172
b) specialized magazines	35	33	68
c) non-specialized magazines	12	32	50