Today you can read a new Gus story: Le lundi de la matraque (Nightstick Monday), now at Strange Horizons. There is also a podcast of it, read by Anaea Lay, and a fantastic cover illustration by Matthew Filipkowski: If you don’t already know Gus Hillyard, she is a recurring character in my work. She’s semi-immortal and hungry for violence. She walks the tightrope of her own nature, trying to do good with all the wrong tools. It drives her to drink, and wreck things a lot. This story, like most of the stories Gus appears in, is about choosing ideals over people, choosing people over ideals, and paying a price either way. It’s about an era of Canadian history that a lot of us don’t learn much about: when I started the research I was surprised at how much violence I didn’t learn about in history class. Many people who lived through that history are still around. And like most history, it isn’t past: it’s still unfolding around us, or beneath us, or through us. I wrote this story well before the recent US election and the wave of massive protests that followed; I was thinking of the setting as […]