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North by 2000: A collection of Canadian science fiction
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 2, 2025
This is a pulpy old paperback I grabbed almost at random in a secondhand bookstore, entirely because I found the name endearingly cheesy. Shockingly, this did not prove to be a very effective way of selecting a book I’d actually enjoy reading. This has its merits as a cultural artifact, I suppose? And as a firm reminder that the past was just as full of disposable, low-quality slop as the present.
The book is, assuming the marketing copy can be trusted, of slight historic interest as one of the very first examples of self-consciously Canadian science fiction (an idea the book-jacket summary treats as strange and exotic in its own right). It is structured as a series of short stories of wildly varying length (some just a few pages, two verging on novelettes), all set in the same futuristic, computer-governed not-intentionally-dystopian Americanadian federation. Aside from the first two (and coincidentally easily the two best) stories, there’s no recurring characters or connecting narrative tying the stories together – all take place in different parts of what was once Canada, concern different men (all very much men) of different social classes, and are more about seeing them live their lives and survive the gauntlets thrown down at them rather than rising up in any sort of grand struggle.
Most of the stories are, frankly, just not very good on the level of craft and construction. Or at least, not to my modern tastes for how someone should set about those things. Setting and characters contort themselves in obviously artificial ways, the characters never rise beyond two-dimensional (if that) and what emotional life they have is more narrated at the reader than ever really shown. Pacing is all over the place, and half the stories (including one of the big novelettes) just leave you asking ‘is that it?’ at the end.
Written by a tenured English professor (who was clearly well into crotchety middle age) in the early 1970s, the book is of course socially and politically retrograde – but honestly not even in any really interesting way? Like, oh, you can count all the women in the book on one hand, and all but one of them are there to sleep with and/or be the helpmeet to the story’s protagonist? The only appearances of anyone nonwhite are two stories, one of which referencing the ‘superstitious, starving masses of India’, the other the dangers of violent, uncivilized tribesmen to newly decolonized African states? One of the novelettes portrays quite straightforwardly the importance of bullying, corporal punishment and getting in fights to an adolescent boy’s healthy socialization? Say it ain’t so. Interesting to read an example of what so much feminist genre-crit I’ve read was really fundamentally pushing against, I suppose.
The fact that it’s so proudly presented as Canadian science fiction is kind of fascinating because – I mean you could change the place names and set almost every story here somewhere in the northern United States and lose nothing at all? Postwar technocratic computerized society, vast, near-pristine wilderness with scattered resource extraction operations and a few great cities deforming the geography around them, a whole smorgasbord of last names that near-universally hail from the British Isles – you get the picture. It’s not not Canadian, but it could be (depending on the story) Alaska or Massachusetts too. Like, if you’re positioning your fiction as cultural nationalism and you have the nation incorporated into a vague American-led federation where most real power seems to actually be held by even vaguer international and corporate technocratic agencies, I feel like you should at least do something with that? Though actually just taking it as a given that Canada will be subsumed by American cultural hegemony and the tides of global economic/technological development without anyone ever making much of a fuss about it might actually be the most Canadian thing about the book.
I am always intrigued by the portrayal of the future in old sci fi – especially stuff this old, where you still have some of that lovely postwar hubris giving a sense that the author thinks the future they’re sketching really is plausible. There’s something charming about a vast computer network governing all economic and most political life running on punch cards shuffled around on conveyor racks, or a society which has entirely automated food preparation still having engineers design circuitry and draw schematics by hand. The Jetsons-level ‘all social relations flash frozen at about the time the author was a young man’ less so, but hearing the grumbling about the criminal, undisciplined youth and ungrateful university students destroying the whole system in their cosplaying as revolutionaries is kind of entertaining – some things never change, I suppose.
It’s a pity, as the first two stories in the book – one about a man whose ID card gets accidentally slotted into the ‘deceased’ bucket and finds himself falling out of society and incapable of reaching anyone who can resolve the issue, the other about the government-assigned multi-denominational priest/minister sent to see to the spiritual needs of a remote mining town’s feuding congregations – were both really charming! Good, even (if very, very dated). Sadly, they were also two of the shortest – and none of the stories which got room to breathe lived up to their promise. I’m not sure whether I should be sad there wasn’t more page count allocated to each of them, or glad that neither had the time to fully smother all the sparks of promise.
Anyway yeah, can’t say my expectations should have been higher than what I got. Call it a failed experiment, or the natural bad luck of trying to read widely. But do not recommend.
The book is, assuming the marketing copy can be trusted, of slight historic interest as one of the very first examples of self-consciously Canadian science fiction (an idea the book-jacket summary treats as strange and exotic in its own right). It is structured as a series of short stories of wildly varying length (some just a few pages, two verging on novelettes), all set in the same futuristic, computer-governed not-intentionally-dystopian Americanadian federation. Aside from the first two (and coincidentally easily the two best) stories, there’s no recurring characters or connecting narrative tying the stories together – all take place in different parts of what was once Canada, concern different men (all very much men) of different social classes, and are more about seeing them live their lives and survive the gauntlets thrown down at them rather than rising up in any sort of grand struggle.
Most of the stories are, frankly, just not very good on the level of craft and construction. Or at least, not to my modern tastes for how someone should set about those things. Setting and characters contort themselves in obviously artificial ways, the characters never rise beyond two-dimensional (if that) and what emotional life they have is more narrated at the reader than ever really shown. Pacing is all over the place, and half the stories (including one of the big novelettes) just leave you asking ‘is that it?’ at the end.
Written by a tenured English professor (who was clearly well into crotchety middle age) in the early 1970s, the book is of course socially and politically retrograde – but honestly not even in any really interesting way? Like, oh, you can count all the women in the book on one hand, and all but one of them are there to sleep with and/or be the helpmeet to the story’s protagonist? The only appearances of anyone nonwhite are two stories, one of which referencing the ‘superstitious, starving masses of India’, the other the dangers of violent, uncivilized tribesmen to newly decolonized African states? One of the novelettes portrays quite straightforwardly the importance of bullying, corporal punishment and getting in fights to an adolescent boy’s healthy socialization? Say it ain’t so. Interesting to read an example of what so much feminist genre-crit I’ve read was really fundamentally pushing against, I suppose.
The fact that it’s so proudly presented as Canadian science fiction is kind of fascinating because – I mean you could change the place names and set almost every story here somewhere in the northern United States and lose nothing at all? Postwar technocratic computerized society, vast, near-pristine wilderness with scattered resource extraction operations and a few great cities deforming the geography around them, a whole smorgasbord of last names that near-universally hail from the British Isles – you get the picture. It’s not not Canadian, but it could be (depending on the story) Alaska or Massachusetts too. Like, if you’re positioning your fiction as cultural nationalism and you have the nation incorporated into a vague American-led federation where most real power seems to actually be held by even vaguer international and corporate technocratic agencies, I feel like you should at least do something with that? Though actually just taking it as a given that Canada will be subsumed by American cultural hegemony and the tides of global economic/technological development without anyone ever making much of a fuss about it might actually be the most Canadian thing about the book.
I am always intrigued by the portrayal of the future in old sci fi – especially stuff this old, where you still have some of that lovely postwar hubris giving a sense that the author thinks the future they’re sketching really is plausible. There’s something charming about a vast computer network governing all economic and most political life running on punch cards shuffled around on conveyor racks, or a society which has entirely automated food preparation still having engineers design circuitry and draw schematics by hand. The Jetsons-level ‘all social relations flash frozen at about the time the author was a young man’ less so, but hearing the grumbling about the criminal, undisciplined youth and ungrateful university students destroying the whole system in their cosplaying as revolutionaries is kind of entertaining – some things never change, I suppose.
It’s a pity, as the first two stories in the book – one about a man whose ID card gets accidentally slotted into the ‘deceased’ bucket and finds himself falling out of society and incapable of reaching anyone who can resolve the issue, the other about the government-assigned multi-denominational priest/minister sent to see to the spiritual needs of a remote mining town’s feuding congregations – were both really charming! Good, even (if very, very dated). Sadly, they were also two of the shortest – and none of the stories which got room to breathe lived up to their promise. I’m not sure whether I should be sad there wasn’t more page count allocated to each of them, or glad that neither had the time to fully smother all the sparks of promise.
Anyway yeah, can’t say my expectations should have been higher than what I got. Call it a failed experiment, or the natural bad luck of trying to read widely. But do not recommend.
July 12, 2012
I first came across this collection over 35 years ago -- I spent the next 35 years telling everyone that this was the book that exemplified Canadian SF. When someone pointed out to me that the book had been out of print for years and that it was time I came up with a new example of Canadian SF for my lectures, I did the only thing possible -- I arranged for the collection to be reprinted as North by 2000+ (the original anthology plus all the stories Hargreaves had written since it was first published.) A classic collection that had a profound influence on my own work as an SF critic, scholar and eventually novelist.
March 12, 2011
Hargreaves, in 1976, put together a collection of science fiction short stories with a shared world, and common message: no matter how advanced our technology, humans will still be confronted by their basic need to interact and share experience. And it is this overriding theme that renders timeless Hargreaves' stories.
The collection in many ways reflects Canadian cultural values: tolerance, collective cohesion, and a profound influence of the land on our fundamental nature.
Very much worth your time to find a used copy.
The collection in many ways reflects Canadian cultural values: tolerance, collective cohesion, and a profound influence of the land on our fundamental nature.
Very much worth your time to find a used copy.
December 29, 2025
Self-proclaimed Canadian science fiction short story collection by an American who moved to Canada well into his adulthood. Nothing about this collection is particularly Canadian beyond some of the location names, making his insistence on labeling his work as specifically Canadian bizarre. The stories are also just not very good. The first one in the collection, Dead to the World was quite interesting, but unfortunately each subsequent story was worse in its concept, execution, and writing quality than the one prior making it an excruciatingly slow read despite its very short page count.
October 24, 2020
The first four shorts, contained in a single universe, are fairly good - especially the absolutely grim "Protected Environment". The other two standalone stories are dull and bring the whole thing down. Overall there's not much in the way of sci-fi, either, just unspecified future-settings and simple concepts serving as backgrounds to stories of "shared human experience"... meh.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews