On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic

Edited by Edward Willett

The road takes you under a bridge with no ramps. The fog thickens. You will not go back the way you came…

Carrying on the legacy of On Spec magazine—Canada’s home for new literature of the fantastic from 1989 to 2025—On Spec 2026 collects twenty-eight original science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories by writers from coast to coast.

A web designer who learns that the woman in the corner office is a goddess finds herself caught up in her work. A child who remembers every word of every book she reads is hidden away with paper and pens to recreate them, because outside, the words have changed. A cloak settled over a starving orphan is the first kindness of the child’s life—but a chorus of the dead warns that the warmth is poison.

In Rapunzel’s tower, a knight plays Three Questions with a wyvern. A boy sells chocolates and justice door to door. A minor-league baseball player in Newfoundland discovers that the games are fixed in a most unusual way. Newton’s telescope reveals far more than the heavens. A third-rate cover band attends the greatest heavy-metal concert of all time in a hollowed-out asteroid, and barely lives to tell the tale. And in a bowling alley after closing, the games go on night after night, played for the highest stakes imaginable.

Step inside these worlds of rich imagination, rooted in the northern land we call home. Like that traveller through the fog, you may leave by a different road than the one that brought you here.