The name of Monica Hughes on a title page generally signals a welcome venture into science fiction or fantasy for young readers. She came into prominence in Canadian children’s literature with her works of science fiction beginning in the mid-1970s, a time when our literature for the young seemed caught in a barren land and when the burgeoning literature of speculative fiction had not caught the imagination of our then few writers. Her first science fiction novel, Crisis on Conshelf Ten, was published in 1975. In 1980 came The Keeper of the Isis Light, which launched her into world-wide fame and should be considered a modern Canadian classic. For many years, she’s held sway in this field, although her talents revealed themselves in such diverse realistic works as the lighthearted The Ghost Dance Caper (1978) and Hunter in the Dark (1982), in which a teenager comes to an understanding of both life and death. Castle Tourmandyne (1995) is in the modern mode of psychological fantasy.

Hughes’s breadth of writing experience goes a long way to explain this anthology’s variety of contributions, which adhere to a philosophical continuity. Here are her views in her own words: “I think one of the functions of a good writer for children (besides, obviously, being entertaining) is to help them explore the world and the future. And to find acceptable answers to the Big Questions. ‘What’s life all about? What is it to be human?’…Those are questions that demand truthful answers, not pat ones…. One faces oneself in the darkest inside places of one’s memory and one’s subconscious, and out of that comes both joy and sorrow. But always…there must come hope.”

The title What If? is fundamentally a shorthand description of all fiction. It is the subtitle, Amazing Stories, that best brings this anthology into focus. Monica Hughes points out in her foreword that when she called for stories of either science fiction or fantasy, what she found in her mailbox “were stories more of fantasy than hard science fiction.” This is not surprising since science fiction based on an extrapolation of scientific fact (hard science fiction) has almost disappeared probably because science has outstripped fiction. A new genre has been created to fill the gap dubbed science fiction fantasy and most of the stories fall into this latter category.

So the question “What If?” here takes on a feeling of the uncanny, sometimes resulting in a shocking ending, the world turned upside down, reality seemingly out the window. And yet Hughes’s Big Questions are at the heart of most of the stories. The two poems, one beginning and one ending the collection, define it as basically earthbound. Alice Major’s “Star-Seeing Night” reminds us that we who live in large cities rarely see the stars, and Robert Priest’s “The Water Traders’ Dream” is a plea to people on Earth to appreciate and guard our generous supply of water.

All the entries, with one exception, are short stories, often with a surprise ending. The exception is “The Mask” by Joan Clark, a key psychological incident taken from her novel Wild Man of the Woods. Most contributions have been previously published in other collections or in magazines specializing in science fiction and some have been especially written for this collection. All are by Canadians and there are excellent notes on the contributors.

It is doubtful that an anthology of any kind can please everyone. Still, What If? has the benefit of being a Canadian literary rarity and also serves the main purpose of an anthology, which is to draw the reader into further exploration. Within its framework, there is something for everybody. Hughes herself in “The Stranger” takes a theme common in modern realistic fiction for the young, that of a new stepmother and consequent youthful resentment, but here the usual happy ending stops short. Sarah Ellis puts her considerable talents to work on the old theme of the power of naming in “The Tunnel” and dragon lore forms the core of Edo van Belkom’s “The Stone Scepter.” Tim Wynne-Jones envisions a spaceship refuelling on earth in “Eternity Leave” and Priscilla Galloway in “The Good Mother” adds to the dozens of versions of Little Red Riding Hood. The moral of Marcel Gagné’s “Paper” is: don’t make an origami carnivorous dinosaur. Jean-Louis Trudel’s “Luke 19” concerns the topic of cloning and genetic engineering, and Eileen Kernaghan’s “The Road to Shambhala” the equally important one of an endangered animal species. For the lighter touch, there are Jason Kapalka’s “Frosty” (a snowman of course), Charles de Lint’s “A Wish Named Arnold,” and James Alan Gardner’s “Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large” (Muffin is six years old). Only two stories are not set on Earth: Alison Baird’s “Moon Maiden” and Lesley Choyce’s contrasting tale of everyday life on Earth and deep outer space, “The Book of Days.” However, such a bald relating of a few major facts cannot do justice to the nuances, subtleties, and imagination these various authors bring to their creations.

The protagonists, often best described as heroes and heroines, in strong contrast to their self-centred siblings in modern realistic fiction, are children and young people, but adult aficionados of science fiction cum fantasy will find much to intrigue them here. It is a sharing book – like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which drew readers of all ages.