Profile of Jerome Stueart

Jerome Stueart's wacky, sweet short story Lemmings in the Third Year has received Honourable Mention from this year's Fountain Award jury. Geoff Ryman and I were co-editors for Tesseracts Nine, which is, I believe, the tenth anthology in a series of original Canadian science fiction and fantasy shorts in English. Congratulations, Jerome!

Jerome Stueart opens the volume with a whimsical tale about Yukon researchers who discover the polar bears and lemmings around them can not only talk but are researching them.

"A stranded research team spends their time in the Arctic interviewing a group of lemmings who, in turn, are studying their predators in Jerome Stueart's eerie Lemmings in the Third Year...

"Lemmings in the Third Year by Jerome Stueart - in which intelligent lemmings are recruited to help in scientific research, into the feeding habits of owls, feeding on lemmings. A tongue-in-cheek story with the immortal line in response to a lemming gleefully postulating the exhilaration of being scooped into an owl's talons: "I underestimate their death wish."... Tesseracts Nine, continues the great Canadian speculative fiction anthology series, with a wonderful mix of stories.... Kudos to both Hopkinson and Ryman, for piecing together a stem-to-stern, satisfying read."

"Tesseracts 9 starts out with a strong run of stories. The opening story, "Lemmings in the Third Year" by Jerome Stueart is an unusual mix of humour and pathos, handled with a light touch and no shortage of feeling. A small group of scientists has been stranded in an alternate version of the Arctic; in this reality, the animals all speak.... Tesseracts Nine is a solid collection of short sf works ...

Jerome Stueart's "Lemmings in the Third Year" is a funny piece about a researcher marooned among talking animals.

When a father finds that his daughter has committed suicide with a line from a poem (by Emily Dickinson) clutched in her hand, he seeks out those writers for revenge. On top of creating an intriguing and disturbing future, the story is full of questions and musings on the nature and power of stories. ...a powerful look at the nature and strength of stories, and of literature in general, both the reading and the writing of it.

The story explores the idea that without artistic culture to contextualise our emotions, we can't understand them. More specifically, the father of a girl who has killed herself can't understand her suicide note, which consists of a line of poetry. Heady stuff.

...Jerome Stueart's "Lemmings in the Third Year" manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and thoughtful, almost painful in this tale of strange talking animals and the scientific method.

Favorite short story read this year? Lemmings in the Third Year, by Jerome Stueart. Its in the Tesseracts Nine Anthology put out by Edge Books.

In Brazos by Jerome Stueart, a god approaches the human narrator with a proposition of marriage between his son, the Brazos River, and the narrators daughter...Most importantly, the author doesnt forget that a story is, first and foremost, meant to entertain; Brazos does that well, too.

"One story with a sure 'nuff Canadian setting is Jerome Stueart's "Bear With Me", in which a woman goes to the Yukon to visit her long-distance boyfriend for the first time. And, of course, he's a bear a real bear, at least some of the time. Stueart plays the story completely straight, and it works well."

Why the Poets Were Banned from the City by Jerome Stueart examines the issues of murder, redemption, madness and media manipulation. Literary in style, it disturbs on both a gory, in-your-face level, and on a far more subtle, far nastier level as it examines just how far a person can be manipulated before something snaps.