While my attention was taken up with all of the literary award news earlier this month, Rachel Giese at the CBC was writing about a new book that’s making a bit of a splash on the CanLit scene this fall. The catch? This book isn’t the latest by Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder) or Alice Munro (The View from Castle Rock), but a speculative fiction (let me say that again in case you missed it: speculative fiction) novel called Before I Wake by British Columbia author Robert J. Wiersema.

Giese touches upon two issues in her article: the first has to do with the way Wiersema had to construct a second career as a book reviewer in Quill & Quire and The Globe & Mail in order to get any of his novels looked at by publishers — as Tyee points out, not exactly “a credit to the Canadian book industry”; the second has to do with popular fiction in this country.

In short, there isn’t much of a place made for it. In the past few decades, we’ve managed to carve out a place for Canadian literary fiction, not only here but globally. But is there such a thing as CanLit generic fiction? Really, it’s still in it’s infancy. For the most part, most of those authors who are Canadian and writing sci-fi, fantasy, mystery or the like have to do their work in the States (just like big-budget movie directors).

“[Canada is] known around the world for our writers, rightly so. We have a literary culture that includes Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, you could go on and on. But as far as CanLit goes, that’s it. We have the upper crust, but there’s no filling,” Wiersema says. “Our genre writers and commercial writers generally publish out of the U.S.: Charles De Lint, Robert Charles Wilson, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Nalo Hopkinson. We do publish certain commercial writers — like Giles Blunt at Random House, or Penguin with Jack Whyte and Guy Gavriel Kay. But all of those people are published within a certain literary structure, because there’s no existing commercial structure in this country.”

Maybe this is a promise that things are changing. Maybe Canada’s finally ready for some pop lit. Maybe there’s room for lots of contemporary genre fiction set in Victoria and promising new Canadian authors won’t be tempted to pull out their hair or collapse in despair.