George Fetherling

The heart was always seen as the noblest of the internal organs as well as the most vital. The hearts of martyrs or future candidates for sainthood would be preserved, but never their livers, say, or the entrails - at least not on their own; it was either the heart by itself or the whole lot together.

Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.