Author Description

This series, under its initial General Editor Neil Carson, and now Alan Filewod, provides for the general public and student, plays from the contemporary stage, as selected by each Volume Editor. Volume 8, edited by Scott Duchesne, presents three "speculative dramas": Rosewell by Bruce Barton; Eden's Moon by William R. Young, and Alien Bait by Michael Green and Blake Brooker. As the editor details in his introduction, "Speculative drama" evolves from Romantic beginnings in the Science Fiction (SF) of the early 19th Century to a mode for expressing the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary life in the Western World. Judith Merrill in the late 1960s coined the term for this new form whose base rather than "science" is the act of asking "What if...?" Each of these three plays taps into contemporary angst, synthesizing the strange and the familiar into something that might be seen as a new Canadian sensibility.