The Dark

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With her 1991 novel, Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler brought off a remarkable feat: a work that the sometimes prissy literary world and the somewhat paranoid science fiction enclave embraced with equal ardor. While mainstream reviewers were perfectly content to discuss Sarah Canary as an exemplar of North American magical realism, SF critic John Clute hailed it as “the best First Contact novel ever written.” (The plot concerns the relationship between a Chinese laborer and a mysterious wild woman in the Pacific Northwest during the last century.) As I write these words, the Nebula Awards Report informs me that Sarah Canary has made the preliminary ballot for 1992; and so, even as she heads toward wider recognition, it appears that Fowler, like Ursula K. Le Guin before her, has retained the affections of her native community.

To date, Fowler has given us two short story collections, Peripheral Vision, from Pulphouse Publishing, and Artificial Things, from Bantam. In 1987 her work earned her the John W. Campbell Award as best new writer, and the following year she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Sarah Canary won the San Francisco Commonwealth Club medal for best first novel. It was my pleasure to reprint Fowler’s moving, poetic story “Lieserl” in Nebula Awards 26.

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