What We See in the Smoke

The world we know is coming to an end. How will we connect in the strange and frightening one that's coming to take its place? What We See in the Smoke twists the genres of realism and science fiction to tell the future history of Toronto, a story that stretches from this millennium to the next. The novel leaps across the boundaries of time and space, as present and future Torontonians search for meaning, connection, and love in a city that grows more beautiful and frightening as its familiar characteristics fade away. A musician is caught in an endless time loop unable to reach those he loves, two broke and desperate men plan a heist of a cannibal auction, a detective with sinister proclivities hunts for a criminal who is stealing dreams, and a college student searches for his brother in the hours before a nuclear war. All of these and more lead to a world where only rich cyborgs or the homeless remain, where teleportation has made crime impossible, and where city-sized spaceships are maintained by strange creatures while planet Earth itself is left behind. Ben Berman Ghan spins a web of these lives and many more, blending the familiar with the surreal until both give way to the story of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

About the Author :
Ben Berman Ghan is an author and editor from Toronto. He is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto with an HBA in English Literature and minors in Philosophy, and Writing and Rhetoric. While attending the University, he served as a prose editor on both The Spectatorial and The Goose. He is the author of many short stories which occur at the intersection where the ideas of classic science fiction and the concerns of all literature meet. When he is not hacking away his writing, Ben can be found buried beneath comic books and sticky notes of jokes, or interrogating cats, convinced they know what's really going on, and just won't tell him.