"Fantastic elements are integral to all faiths — gods, fantastic creatures, miracles, blessings, power and magic," says co-editor Jerome Stueart, Faith in Science Fiction college professor and author. "We are happy to continue that tradition in this unique and thought-provoking anthology with works by some of Canada's finest speculative fiction authors."

"Wrestling with Gods (Tesseracts Eighteen) is the first in the long-standing Tesseracts series to explore faith and religion in Science Fiction and Fantasy," says co-editor Liana Kerzner. "We challenged our authors to create characters who wrestled with faith — any faith, real or created for the story — who both believed and yet doubted, or who went back and forth between the two."

According to Stueart, "Wrestling has always been a pat of faith. Jacob wrestled with an angel in the night, earning him the name "Israel", which means "struggles with god." Buddha wrestled, and the hero of the Mahabharata wrestled too."

The stories and peoms published in Wrestling with Gods (Tesseracts Eighteen) are as diverse as the influences that inspired them, real and imagined, from this world and beyond.

"Some of the works are serious", says Kerzner, "Some are fantastical and humorous. All are thought provoking."

The fantastical characters featured within the works of the anthology include:

• A mechanical android Jesus in a futuristic Shinto shrine,
• a Muslim woman trying to get closer to Allah through surgery,
• a pro-fighter trying to get out of his contract and into Nirvana,
• a Catholic priest verifying an appearance of Fatima on Mars,
• an African village both fearful and dependent on the Scorched Man to guide the dead,
• a vampire in a Residential School, and
• a woman who talks to a coy mermaid about theology while teaching her to read...

These are just a few of the 25 unique and thought-provoking offerings that give readers a chance to see faith from the believer and the skeptic in worlds where what you believe is a matter of life, death, and afterlife.

According to Rev. Sharon Sheffield, Episcopal priest, long-time speculative fiction fan, "This anthology has confirmed my belief that some of the best theological writing is happening in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Who are we? Do gods — or does God — exist? What is Truth? And does it matter if we believe in any of these things, or does it only matter how we act? These are questions of faith, and these are some of the questions that are raised, and sometimes answered, in these stories. Taste and see; decide for yourself. You will find that for which you seek."

Featuring works by:

• Derwin Mak,
• Robert J. Sawyer,
• Tony Pi,
• S. L. Nickerson,
• Janet K. Nicolson,
• John Park,
• Mary-Jean Harris,
• David Clink,
• Mary Pletsch,
• Jennifer Rahn,
• Alyxandra Harvey,
• Halli Lilburn,
• John Bell,
• David Jón Fuller,
• Carla Richards,
• Matthew Hughes,
• J. M. Frey,
• Steve Stanton,
• Erling Friis-Baastad,
• James Bambury,
• Savithri Machiraju,
• Jen Laface and Andrew Czarnietzki,
• David Fraser,
• Suzanne M McNabb, and
• Megan Fennell.

Liana K's profile page

Jerome Stueart's profile page

Liana K
is an award-winning TV producer & writer who has also stepped in front of the camera as the co-host of the legendary late night show Ed & Red's Night Party, the Canadian Comedy Award-winning this Movie Sucks!, and Ed the Sock's I Hate Hollywood! An episode of I Hate Hollywood was lauded by mental health workers for de-stigmatizing mental illness. Another early episode was well-received for its look at religion in Hollywood.

Liana also provides commentary, reviews and video interviews for video game site gamingexcellence.com. She is co-columnist of 411 Mania's "The 8 Ball", and host/writer of Liana K's Geek Download, heard weekly on the internationally syndicated radio program Canada's Top 20. She has edited and contributed writing to a comic book mini-series: Ed and Red's Comic Strip.

She has hosted and produced the Prix Aurora Awards ceremony three times. She is founder and chair of the Futurecon organization, which uses Science-Fiction and Fantasy elements to reduce various types of stigma and raise money for various charities.

Her stranger achievements include: modeling for videogames, having her superhero toy & art collection featured on TV's Space channel, researching and presenting a paper on Mormon Cosmology in the Twilight Saga, and having a DC Comics character named after her. Liana is an avid cosplayer and her costume work made her the face of Western cosplay on Wikipedia.

Jerome Stueart
makes his home in the Yukon Territory. Hailing from Missouri and West Texas, Jerome came up to the Yukon to work on northern science fiction. He fell hard for the place. Stueart is a graduate of Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop in San Diego (2007) and of the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices (2013). He has been published in Fantasy, Geist, Joyland, Geez, Strange Horizons, Ice-Floe, Redivider, On Spec, Tesseracts Nine, Tesseracts Eleven, Tesseracts Fourteen and Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead. He earned honourable mentions for both the Fountain Award and Year's Best Science Fiction 2006. He co-edited Inhuman. As a cartoonist he was featured in the Yukon News, and as a journalist he wrote for Yukon, North of Ordinary, Air North's in-flight magazine. He's worked as a janitor, a trolley conductor, an embedded reporter in a remote northern research station, a Religious Education director, and a marketing director. He wrote five radio series for CBC, and one of them, Leaving America, was heard around the world on Radio Canada International. Jerome has taught creative writing for 20 years, and taught an afterschool course in fantasy and science fiction writing for teens for three years. He teaches a workshop he designed called Writing Faith in churches across Canada and the USA.