Schroeder was born into the Mennonite community in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto, where he now lives with his wife and daughter, in 1986. After publishing a dozen short stories, Schroeder published his first novel, Ventus, in 2000. A prequel to Ventus, Lady of Mazes, was published in 2005. He has published seven more novels and is co-author of the self-help book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Schroeder currently writes, consults in the area of futures studies.
Two of Schroeder's novels, Ventus and Lady of Mazes, explore themes that have recently become central to the self-identified speculative realism movement in philosophy. Although speculative realism was not labeled as a movement until 2007, both Ventus and Lady of Mazes ask questions that are very similar to those posed by speculative realists such as Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Timothy Morton. Speculative realism places ontology at the center of philosophical inquiry, and Ventus and Lady of Mazes both interrogate ontology, inventing new forms of relationship both between subjects and objects, and between objects in the absence of subjects. A primary example of this form of invention is the idea of thalience explored in Ventus. Thalience is a concept invented by Schroeder to explore a realm of entities that are not quite subjects, but not entirely objects either. As presented in the novel, the concept sometimes refers to a form of inquiry, specifically an attempt to determine whether non-human sentient systems are truly independent minds, or whether they are merely "parrots" that give back to human researchers what the researchers expect to hear. The novel says that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. However, Ventus also more consistently refers to thalience as a state of being. Entities are considered "thalient" if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world.
Awards
1982. Pierian Spring Best Story award for The Great Worm.
1989. Context '89 fiction contest winner for The Cold Convergence.
1993. Prix Aurora Award for Best Short Work in English for The Toy Mill.
2003. Prix Aurora Award for best Canadian SF novel for Permanence.
2012. Audie Award for best Original Work for MetaTropolis: Cascadia, a shared-world audiobook anthology in which Schroeder's contribution was the short storyDeodand.
