Toronto on the Page
I love a weird, wild take on a city. When I was writing The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, I took various inspirations from artists who have gone to task creating wild alternate (or future) versions of Toronto/Tkaronto. When I think of pieces that helped inspire me, my mind roams over to visual artists such as Matthew Borett, whose piece A Future Toronto? I must have seen it hanging on the walls of 401 Richmond Street at least a thousand times. Or I think of Lisa Jackson’s incredible VR exhibit Biidaaban: First Light, which shows a city and a people without the shackles of colonial destruction or colonial language. But I’m not the first or last person to put Toronto on the page, only to change it, destroy it, or make it stranger. The city has a rich history as a setting for speculative storytelling, and no, I’m not just talking about that one episode of Star Trek that’s pretty good, but come on, do we really believe Toronto could build a bridge over Lake Ontario? Call me when the LRT is finished.
Brown Girl in the Ring
by Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central Publishing, 1998)
Starting off with a classic, Hopkinson delivers Toronto that’s been walled off from everything else. Economic collapse, riots, and chaos have left Toronto a post-apocalypse ruled by a criminal kingpin from the CN Tower, Brown Girl in the Ring mixes an almost Escape from New York–esque landscape with a deeply grounded spiritualism and a sometimes-horrific sense of magic as a woman named Ti-Jeane tries to navigate this world, her complicated and secretive family legacy, and the awakening of strange new abilities.
The Grimoire of Kensington Market
by Lauren B. Davis (Buckrider Books, 2018)
In The Grimoire of Kensington Market, we find a Toronto flooded with a drug called Elysium, putting people into a dreamlike state, and we find Maggie, who owns The Grimoire, a magical bookshop and a portal to other worlds. Though we leave Toronto for The Silver World and the source of the addiction, I still think it’s a great entry – Toronto as portal fiction.
The Marigold
by Andrew F. Sullivan (ECW Press, 2023)
This novel is actually a work of nonfiction about the time my Toronto apartment exploded with a torrent of oozing black sludge roaring up out of the sewers during the first month of my Masters degree. Horrible condo projects become the source of human sacrifices; real estate moguls accidentally unleash a terrible, fungal consciousness of death and greed and rot; The Marigold transforms Toronto into something wild, something unforgettable and something deeply upsetting; Sullivan here crafts what remains one of my favourite works of recent times.
Fifteen Dogs
by André Alexis (Coach House Books, 2015)
Greek Gods Apollo and Hermes walk into a bar (Wheat Sheaf Tavern, at the corner of Bathurst and King) and get into an argument. Naturally, they decide to resolve things by giving fifteen dogs kenneled at a clinic in the city, the intelligence, reasoning and language skills of humans. Fifteen Dogs is a wild ride, mostly set in High Park, that utterly transforms the reader’s view of the city by putting them on all fours, tails wagging, as the dogs try to form society with these newfound cognitions.
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel (HarperAvenue, 2014)
At the Elgin Theatre, a man dies on stage. What follows is an apocalypse story, and a post-apocalypse story, as the narrative jumps between the early days of the “Georgian flu” and the long thereafter, as the world slowly begins to reorganize itself, and Shakespeare does its best to survive in a new setting. There’s a lot to love in Station Eleven, and a lot for Torontonians to recognize (unlike the HBO adaptation that moved it all to the States, like cowards), though some parts of it, post-COVID, are almost too nightmarishly familiar upon a reread.
Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada, whose prose and poetry have been published in Clarkesworld magazine, Strange Horizons, the Blasted Tree Publishing Co., the /tƐmz/ Review and others. His previous works include the short story collection What We See in the Smoke. He now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Calgary. You can find him at www.inkstainedwreck.ca.
