Between Waves (film)

Lore & Background

Between Waves premiered in August 2020 at the Fantasia International Film Festival, followed by its Canadian premiere in December at the Whistler Film Festival, before a commercial release in September 2021. The film stars Fiona Graham as Jamie and Luke Robinson as Isaac, with a supporting cast including Sebastian Deery, Stacey Bernstein, Edwige Jean-Pierre, Miguel Damião, Eliya Sekulova, Jessica Barrera, Grayson Stephen, Juliet Lewsaw, Lora Burke, and Holden Levack.

Reader's Guide

Critical response to Between Waves was mixed but noted its strengths. Jim Slotek of Original Cin rated it B-minus, praising the dream-state ambiguity and the question of whether Jamie's visions are hallucinations from quitting anti-anxiety drugs, but criticizing a left-field plot twist. Alisha Mughal of Exclaim! rated it 7 out of 10, calling it a gripping debut with entertaining mysterious and philosophical elements, and highlighting Graham's performance and the storytelling by Abramovich and Andrews. The film received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Original Score at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards in 2022.

Did You Know?

• The film's lead character Jamie is a photographer from Toronto.
• Isaac, Jamie's partner, is a quantum physicist researching travel between parallel dimensions.

The Expanding Canvas of Speculative Imagination

Science fiction, at its core, is a genre of speculative fiction that dares to project humanity into futures shaped by advances in technology, scientific understanding, or biological systems. What began as a relatively narrow set of imaginative concerns—space exploration, encounters with extraterrestrial beings, time travel, and the creation of robots—has broadened dramatically over the decades. Parallel universes, dystopian societies, and the manipulation of living organisms joined the palette, and in more recent years the genre has turned its gaze toward information technology, transhumanism, posthumanism, and the pressing environmental crises of our era. A unifying thread runs through all of these variations: the genre is less interested in the technology itself than in how human beings react to, grapple with, and are transformed by the consequences of scientific and technological change. This human-centered focus is what distinguishes science fiction from mere technical speculation, anchoring even the most fantastical premises in recognizable emotional and social terrain.

The Eternal Debate Over Definition

No literary genre has attracted more heated disagreement about its own boundaries than science fiction. Authors, critics, scholars, and devoted readers have wrestled with the question for decades, and no single formulation has satisfied everyone. Isaac Asimov framed it as literature dealing with humanity's reaction to shifts in science and technology. Robert A. Heinlein emphasized realistic speculation grounded in solid knowledge of the real world and a thorough grasp of the scientific method. Lester del Rey conceded that even the most passionate fan struggles to articulate what the genre is, noting that no full satisfactory definition exists because its limits resist easy delineation. Damon Knight captured the circularity with a wry observation: science fiction is simply what we point to when we say it. The 1993 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction devoted extensive discussion to the problem. Some scholars, like David Seed, suggest it is more productive to think of the genre as an intersection of more concrete subgenres rather than a single bounded category.

From Ancient Myths to the Golden Age

The roots of science fiction stretch further back than many expect. Lucian's second-century satire A True Story already contained tropes recognizable to modern readers: journeys to other worlds, alien lifeforms, interplanetary conflict, and artificial life. Stories within The Arabian Nights, the tenth-century Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and Ibn al-Nafis's thirteenth-century Theologus Autodidactus are also cited as containing speculative elements. During the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, works such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels are regarded as early science-fantasy. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, is frequently credited as the first true science fiction novel. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells became pivotal figures in shaping the genre's trajectory. The twentieth century brought the Golden Age of Science Fiction, alongside the rise of space operas, dystopian literature, and the pulp magazine format that brought speculative stories to mass audiences.

Beyond the Page: Cultural Resonance and Social Critique

Science fiction's influence has long extended well beyond the printed page, permeating film, television, and broader cultural conversation. The genre serves a dual purpose: it entertains and inspires a sense of wonder while simultaneously offering a lens through which to critique present-day society and imagine alternative social arrangements. Subgenres like cyberpunk interrogate the tangled relationship between technology and social structures, while climate fiction brings urgent environmental questions to the forefront of speculative storytelling. Hard science fiction prioritizes scientific accuracy in its world-building, whereas soft science fiction leans toward the social sciences to explore human behavior under novel conditions. Space opera, by contrast, embraces pure adventure in settings where interstellar travel is commonplace. This diversity of approaches means the genre can function as both a mirror and a window—reflecting contemporary anxieties while opening vistas of possibility. For enthusiasts within the community, the abbreviation SF or sf remains the preferred shorthand, a small but meaningful marker of belonging to a tradition that values thoughtful speculation over mere spectacle.