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rfmcdonaldI ran into taem while I was at work today. Had a nice chat about science-fiction and our favourite authors, which is cool. I borrowed Charles de Lint's Someplace to be Flying on 's recommendation. So far, it looks good.
I just finished Morris Zaslow's The Northward Expansion of Canada, 1914-1967. This book examines the increasing integration of the northern territories of Canada into the Canadian mainstream, whether by mass settlement by Euro-Canadians in the more fertile areas of the subarctic (Peace River tract on the Alberta-British Columbia frontier, clay belt on the Ontario-Québec frontier), resource extraction (mining, forestry, oil), or simply the establishment of federal and provincial government bureaucratic control over the indigenous populations in the far north.
It occurs to me that northern Canada's experience--determined by its marginality, its perennial underpopulation (and division of this population between resentful native minority and recent-arrived and often temporary non-native majorities), its hostile environment--could inform a fairly interesting space-colonization setting: Baffin Island might be cold, but at least (unlike a terraformed Mars) you can breathe the air.
I just finished Morris Zaslow's The Northward Expansion of Canada, 1914-1967. This book examines the increasing integration of the northern territories of Canada into the Canadian mainstream, whether by mass settlement by Euro-Canadians in the more fertile areas of the subarctic (Peace River tract on the Alberta-British Columbia frontier, clay belt on the Ontario-Québec frontier), resource extraction (mining, forestry, oil), or simply the establishment of federal and provincial government bureaucratic control over the indigenous populations in the far north.
It occurs to me that northern Canada's experience--determined by its marginality, its perennial underpopulation (and division of this population between resentful native minority and recent-arrived and often temporary non-native majorities), its hostile environment--could inform a fairly interesting space-colonization setting: Baffin Island might be cold, but at least (unlike a terraformed Mars) you can breathe the air.
