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Short Fiction Collections


The Slow Engines of Time




One of Canada’s most prominent and popular science-fiction authors brings her work together in one collection.

In The Slow Engines of Time and Other Stories, Elisabeth Vonarburg’s short stories appear in English for the first time. This emotional and intense work takes readers from Earth far into alien, future and alternate worlds. It presents works of vivid imagery and emotional intensity, set in the same future as the award winning novels The Silent City and The Maërlande Chronicles.


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The Game of Nautilus Shells("Le Jeu des Coquilles de Nautilus")


The Center's inhabitants are many, as are the aspiring Voyagers. And the Voyagers... Suddenly you think of the Voyagers: perhaps some of them have returned during the night, or a short while ago. You realize, then, that you are at the Center, The Center, and a kind of dizziness makes you close your eyes, clutch the edges of the bed; it seems you're falling right through the stone floors, sucked down by a great void: the underground hall with houses the gate to other universes.

She's called Kathryn, Mari, Mélané or Talitha; she travels from one universe to the next, perhaps you have met her on the canals of a Venice-like Montréal, or in Baïblanca, as she takes a walk around Colibri Park...

Six stories, six journeys in an infinitely mutable space-time.

Includes "La Course de Kathryn", Aurora Award for Best Short Work in French, 2004

Published in English as "See Kathryn Run", in Tesseract 9 (Hades Publication)

Alire, Lévis, 2003


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House by the Seashore ("La Maison au Bord de la Mer")

At the tip of the South, by a seashore, in a world poised between death and rebirth, stands Baïblanca, a city haunted by the rise of the waters, where tranformed humans live side by side with living works of art and other enigmatic creatures.

Is Baïblanca a city, or several cities? Is it the locus for several universe, the strange attractor that perhaps allows them to communicate?

Seven short stories from yesterday and today, seven journeys in the infinitely mutable space-time of Élisabeth Vonarburg.

Alire, Lévis, 2000


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Elsewhere and in Japan ("Ailleurs et au Japon")

Short Story Collection, 219 pp.
Quebec Amerique Litterature, 1991
ISBN 2890375277

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True Lies ("Vraies Histoires Fausses")

"I'm not known for my brevity in fiction, that's the least you could say ! Still, that's how it began. Also, though I write poetry, I am known for writing genre, mainly science fiction. That's not exactly how it began. The two first really short texts I ever wrote are in this collection - written in 1963 and 1964 (I was fifteen and sixteen), they were published respectively in 1991 and 2000. Neither is genre, although about half the stories in this anthology are, or are at least flirting with genre. For years I shunned non-genre fiction, which felt too close, too dangerous. Science-fiction, now, that had nothing to do whatsoever with I-me-mine, I was safe ! After ten years writing SF, of course, I got wiser. Still, I had to learn to write the so-called mainstream stuff all over again, and found out I can do it only in very short bursts. This collection spans some forty years of trying, with a few originals and reprints from more or less obscure French and Québécois publications : only there did I dare more revelatory disguises..."

Published in English as "True Lies", Hull 2004


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Short Stories

Solaris #151
Thirtieth Anniversary issue

Solaris -- artist : Armel Gaulme

Artist : Armel Gaulme

Includes "Sang de Pierre" ("Blood out of a Stone")
a novella
by Élisabeth Vonarburg


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Other Short Stories

See the the detailed bibliography.


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Updated Thursday June 05 2008

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