Élisabeth Vonarburg (1947– ) is an award-winning French-born Canadian teacher, editor, critic, and writer considered by many to be one of the finest science fiction writers of her generation. Vonarburg’s work is often associated with both the New Wave and the rise of feminist science fiction; certainly, her themes and structural experimentation express sympathies with both approaches. Her fiction shares some commonalities with the work of both Leena Krohn and Ursula K. Le Guin. Vonarburg is a very deliberate writer who brings great care and thought to the depiction of characters and settings. Her themes are often uniquely societal and environmental in scope.
She has won the Aurora Award, Canada’s top science fiction honor, more than ten times, for both her stories and her novels. She has also received seven Prix Boréal and a Philip K. Dick Award special citation (runner-up) for her novel In the Mothers’ Land (1992). In addition to writing fiction, Vonarburg has served as fiction editor (1979–90) and editor (1983–85) of the magazine Solaris.
Vonarburg’s first science fiction story, “Marée haute,” appeared in Requiem in 1978 and was translated under the title “High Tide” for the influential anthology Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (1979), edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Many of her stories have been collected in L’oeil de la nuit (“The Eye of Night,” 1980), Janus (1984), and (in English) Blood out of a Stone (2009). Some of the stories collected therein form part of her Baïblanca/Mothers’ Land series, in which a semidecadent society in a far-future Europe sees the gradual appearance of shape-shifting mutants (the “métames”). The series continues in Le silence de la cité (1981; published in English as The Silent City, 1988). In the novel, a young female protagonist leaves her underground home and travels to the surface, with its wild tribes, where she begins to transform the blighted world. Revelations of the artificial nature of the feminist governance of Mothers’ Land sharpens the rite-of-passage story at the heart of Chroniques du pays des mères (1992). A one-off, Les voyageurs malgre eux (1992; published in English as Reluctant Voyagers, 1995), in a sense grounds her first series (and her subsequent work as well) through its depiction of a teacher/writer whose travels to alternate worlds are engineered through the stories she writes.
The Tyranaël series—the main sequence of which begins with Tyranaël 1: Les rêves de la mer (1996; published in English as Dreams of the Sea, 2003) and ends with Tyranaël 5: La mer allée avec le soleil (1997)—is a planetary romance set on the eponymous Living World, though it may be that only the circumambient ocean is sentient. The large cast—some reincarnations of earlier protagonists—gains through telepathy and other means a gradually intensifying symbiosis with their planet.
“Readers of the Lost Art” is a uniquely transgressive, hypersymbolic piece of science fiction about ritual and creativity. Both chilling and transformative, the story won the Aurora Award when first published as “La carte du tendre” in Aimer: 10 nouvelles par 10 auteurs quebecois (1986) and was first published in English in Tesseracts 5 (1996).