This is On Spec’s twentieth anniversary. That achievement deserves to be celebrated—and it will be, all year long.

But 2009 is also a significant anniversary of many other milestones in Canadian SF. For instance, it’s the fortieth anniversary of the founding of what we now call The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy (which first opened its doors in 1969 as The Spaced Out Library).

And this is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Solaris, the leading French-Canadian SF magazine, which debuted in 1974.

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the publication in 1979 of Other Canadas, John Robert Colombo’s seminal anthology, the first ever of Canadian SF&F, which proved to the literary and academic worlds that Canadian speculative fiction exists. In celebration of that anniversary, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention (in Montreal) designated Colombo the keynote speaker for its academic track, the first such honoree ever at a Worldcon.

Moving forward in time, this is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding in 1984 of Canada’s first association of science-fiction professionals, a group called Hydra North, convened by the late, great Judith Merril and patterned after the Hydra Club she so fondly remembered from her youth in New York City. And it’s also the silver anniversary of that groundbreaking Canadian SF novel, Neuromancer by Vancouver’s William Gibson, the book that gave us the word cyberspace.

It’s also been a quarter century now that Canadian books have been taking the world’s top SF&F genre awards, starting with Robertson Davies earning the World Fantasy Award for High Spirits.

In addition to being the twentieth anniversary of the magazine you’re holding in your hands, 2009 also marks two decades of SF Canada, the bilingual national association of speculative-fiction writers. That anniversary is no coincidence: it’s also been twenty years since ConText ’89, the pivotal convention in Edmonton that tried to gather for the first time all Canadian SF&F writers, and out of which so much goodness sprang.

This year is also the twentieth anniversary of TVOntario’s Prisoners of Gravity, still the best TV series ever produced anywhere about science fiction.

And it’s the fifteenth anniversary of the return of World Science Fiction Conventions to Canada after a multi-decade hiatus, with the great ConAdian, held in Winnipeg. It’s also fifteen years since Tor, the largest American SF publisher, released Northern Stars: The Canadian Science Fiction Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell in New York and Glenn Grant in Montreal (with its launch at ConAdian).

That anthology spawned the Tor Canadian science-fiction and fantasy program which, in conjunction with Tor’s Canadian distributor, H.B. Fenn and Company, published novels by Joël Champetier, Cory Doctorow, Candas Jane Dorsey, Steven Erikson, Phyllis Gotlieb, Terence M. Green, Matthew Hughes, Donald Kingsbury, Donna McMahon, Scott Mackay, Yves Meynard, Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, Jo Walton, Peter Watts, and Robert Charles Wilson.

It’s the tenth anniversary of the publication of Aurora Awards: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Edo van Belkom, collecting winners of Canada’s top science-fiction honour (and it’s high time for a second volume!). It’s also the decade-mark for Julie E. Czerneda as an anthology editor; she’s become a major force in that arena on both sides of the border, and it all began in 1999 with Packing Fraction and Other Tales of Science and Imagination from a little company called Trifolium, now part of Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

Speaking of Fitz & Whits, it’s the fifth anniversary of my own editorial effort, the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, which is part of F&W’s Red Deer Press division (and we’re celebrating that by publishing an anthology entitled Distant Early Warnings: Canada’s Best Science Fiction this fall).

What an amazing series of past accomplishments! But I wouldn’t be much of a science-fiction writer if I didn’t at least try to extrapolate the trend in the classic “if this goes on” sort of way. So here I go:

In five years, by 2014, we’ll have seen several more Canadians winning Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

In ten years, by 2019, all major Canadian book publishers will routinely produce science fiction and fantasy books, following Penguin Canada’s current lead.

In fifteen years, by 2024, we’ll see a Canadian speculative-fiction novel take a major domestic mainstream honour, such as winning the CBC’s Canada Reads.

And, of course, in twenty years, in 2029, the good folks at On Spec will be celebrating this great magazine’s fortieth anniversary. I’m sure the next twenty years will be as illustrious as the past twenty have been, not just for On Spec, but for all of us in this wonderful business of Canadian speculative literature. •

 

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