H/T Mark Webb for the find
You can support this film at Indigogo.
Edit: One of my Twitter peeps brought up a point about Cultural appropriation and how much Aboriginal involvement there is in the project outside of casting Aboriginal people. There isn’t any information that I can see suggesting a cultural liaison has been sought.
and a Speculative Fiction Fan, you are in luck. New Zealand is about to host its 33rd National Science Fiction Convention – UnConventional.
Running from June 1-4 it should be a grand event.
Trudi Canavan, Russell Kirkpatrick, Edwina Harvey, Simon Petrie, Helen Lowe and Mary Victoria.
You can check out more details here.
My panel time has changed though and I can reveal the details and the other panellists with the assurances from the exhausted Continuum team that things will not change.
Note the excellent gender balance achieved by the Continuum team.
Sue Bursztynski, – Blogger, author and visitor to this blog. You can find her blog here.
George Ivanoff, – Blogger, and author. He blogs here
Alexandra Pierce, – Blogger, podcaster, reviewer and mild mannered teacher. Alex is here, randomly.
Gillian Polack, – Blogger, author, academic, and chocolate fanatic can be found here.
Sean Wright – Blogger, reviewer, podcaster and ne’er do well. This is me of course
Book Blogs And Reviewing Sunday 14:00 until Sunday 15:00 (60 Minutes)
Blogging has meant an explosion in book reviewing and discussion, but what makes good reviews and blogs? What boxes does a book have to check to receive 5 stars?
The Lincoln Room
Now I know I am the big draw card but you should seriously check out some of the others*. Continuum 8 is using some new software for scheduling. So If you want to download a pdf program that is pretty much set in stone you can go here.
If you are after a particular personality I suggest you try this page which will give you their specific events so that you can then highlight them on the printed out pdf.
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*this is a joke, new readers.
Did you enjoy this post? Would you like to read more? You can subscribe to the blog through a reader,by Email or Follow me on twitter.
but first a preview of the author that is bringing it to you.1
I reviewed Roil, the first in the Nightbound Lands series. It was a blast.
I have Night’s Engines to read and review. But if you want to get a taste of it here’s the free excerpt from Angry Robot.
1.You will have to go back and watch all of Trent’s book corners to determine if he is a comic genius or a deranged writer afflicted by the tropical heat and too much coffee↩
Margo Lanagan, yes that Margo Lanagan not the other one*, has written a collection for Twelfth Planet Press called Cracklescape. If you are lucky enough to be coming to Continuum 8 I hear that TPP are holding a Cupcake and Cocktail book launch on the Friday night at Continuum.
But if you are not coming and are a bit light on cash you could throw your hat in the ring for a giveaway.
The BlurbA presence haunts an old dresser in an inner-city share house. Shining sun-people lure children from their carefree beachside lives. Sheela-na-gigs colonise a middle-aged man’s outer and inner worlds. And a girl with a heavy conscience seeks relief in exile on the Treeless Plain.
These stories from four-time World Fantasy Award winner Margo Lanagan are all set in Australia, a myth-soaked landscape both stubbornly inscrutable and crisscrossed by interlopers’ dreamings. Explore four littoral and liminal worlds, a-crackle with fears and possibilities.
*The evil Margo Lanagan from another dimension…no hang on is our Margo the evil one? Anyway you shouldn’t be reading this silliness.
Well the Ditmars have closed but we can still have fun discussing them can’t we. I have read all but Paul Haines work. On reputation alone though he deserves a spot in what is a very tight field.
Some notable exclusions are Lisa Hannett’s Bluegrass Symphony and Margo Lanagan’s Yellow Cake*
I’d personally be very happy with any of them winning. The selections are only some of the top quality fiction being produced by Australian writers.
It’s good to see both Australian and International presses represented too, perhaps adding weight to Coode Street’s observation that we are now starting to see small press offerings expand beyond our isolated geography.
Although Tansy appears all over these nominations I think she’ll have the weight of time against her - L&R was released early in 2011, likewise Sue Isle who whose Nightsiders was the first in the Twelve Planets released. Those releasing works later in the year might have the advantage of freshness.
Biancotti has two horses in this race – Bad Power and one third of the Ishtar collection. Aside from being a bloody good writer, Bad Power was released in late 2011 around the middle of the season and Ishtar shortly after from memory.
Ishtar also features Cat Sparks and Kaaron Warren, both writers in top form. Credit to them and their editors for producing a hard hitting collection.
All this makes it very hard to suggest a winner without knowing what the voting populace is like - Bad power and Ishtar feel like tighter collections, in that the stories are more closely related to one another or at least thy feel that way. Does this mean they are more likely to win? Who knows?
Best of luck to all the writers & publishers.
* I am sure there are other books of equal vitality that haven’t popped up on my radar either.
**Largely talking rubbish here. I haven’t been in the scene long enough, nor do I know the community well enough to really make an informed guess on who’s likely to win.
The link below leads to an interview with Sean Williams and Writers Week Director Laura Kroetsch on Adelaide 891. It’s a nice short discussion where Sean and Laura squeeze some spec fic goodness into about 20 minutes.
ep·i·logue: an ending that serves as a comment on or conclusion to what has happened.
Climate change, natural disaster, war and disease threaten to destroy all we know. Predictions of the future are bleak. But does the apocalypse really mean the end of the world? Is there no hope for a future that follows?
Twelve writers take on the end of the world and go beyond, to what comes next.
I am currently reading Danse Macabre by Stephen King, who I am beginning to appreciate and admire the more I read him and the more I learn about him.1 I am enjoying King’s reflections on horror and his personal anecdotes that are dotted throughout the work.
I am also trying to kick my butt into writing gear. I want to get a short story to a publishable standard by the end of 2012. And so I am delving into Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction -The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction. in an attempt to refine my work and/or encourage me to finish it.
I have a couple of works that would be described as borderline horror in various stages of unfinished malaise. I have a feeling that some of the writing is good and some of the ideas original, but also that to a large degree they are boring. And if they are boring to me, then the reader doesn’t have a chance.
So I have been pondering, letting my mind drift. While doing so, it’s occurred to me that nothing fictional, really induces a sense of horror in me. No gut wrenching sense of dread or paralysing fear.
I read a very good piece of horror fiction recently by one of Australia’s top horror writers and despite being a great piece of writing, it didn’t scare me or horrify me. Indeed I can’t really remember that I have been in my adult life horrified (as result of reading).
Sure I have the usual fears and anxieties but these are relatively mundane things that are more stress inducing than terror inducing.
I’d like to be able to write something that could scare me. If I could do this then I am sure that it would sure as hell scare my readers as well.
So I have been digging deep trying to find an experience, something that has occurred in my past that evoked a childish terror. I can only think of one and it follows:
This story begins not in some haunted mansion, with rickety floor boards and uneven walls that creak loudly with a gust of wind, but in a government issue house, clad in tan coloured brick, lined with plasterboard walls and fitted with white laminate furnishings.
It is the early eighties, my sister is two and I have been given the big room. My parents are in the lounge room in the other wing of the house. To call it a wing perhaps conjures up a certain sense of size and distance though they can’t have been more than 10 metres from my bedroom door.
The house was a much used H design. A carport in the middle. A lounge and kitchen in one wing, bedrooms in the other a hall connecting them. As ordinary as one can get with budgetary constraints and unimaginative architects.
I can hear the television’s indistinct murmur. My sister is asleep in the next room. I am lying on my bed directly in line with the door that leads to the hallway. Sharing the same wall with the door is an inbuilt cupboard and a vanity lit by a fluorescent light with a pull cord.
It's not late, but I am lying in bed. The room is lit by the flouro over the vanity. I am fully awake and staring at the pull-cord. It’s last few inches hang over my teddy bear who is lying prone a top a leaning collection of golden circle children's books.
I lie staring at the cord. On reflection I think I must have seen Star Wars recently as, with a childlike naiveté, I begin reaching out with my mind, attempting to move the cord by force of will alone. I am not aware of how long I do this for but eventually I begin to notice the slightest of movements. There are no drafts in my room, the window is shut and the cord hangs in a recess.
And perhaps you will say it was my willing it to move and tiny movement in each of my eyes that makes it appear to do so. My well read, sceptical older self agrees with you.
But dear reader, it is not this small movement that is what will haunt and terrify me for the rest of my life. For while I am somewhat overjoyed at the thought that I can do it, that I can master some unseen force and engage it to do my bidding. This fleeting joy is erased by what follows.
I am no longer concentrating on making the cord move. But I am staring at the vanity.
The bear lying upon the books, begins to sit up of its own accord. This is no trick of the light, no slight movement. From lying prone, it sits until its back is ramrod straight all in a matter of seconds.
And I scream. I scream for my father - an open mouthed scream with no sound. My vocal cords feel leaden. I scream again and all that comes out is hoarse whisper. I scream and scream until eventually my father comes rushing into the room.
In a babbling confusion I explain what has happened. The bear is lying prone again. My father spends some time sitting with me, consoling me. He explains to me how it must have appeared that the bear was moving. Car lights coming around the bend and casting shadows is his explanation. He turns off the light to demonstrate and sure enough a car rounds the bend near our house and shadow and light float across the room.
But, I try to tell my father – the light was on. There was no shadow.
He takes the bear, reassures me that I must have been dreaming and closes the door. I look at the bear one last time as he hangs up ended in my fathers hand.
His cold button eyes are lifeless.
The culprit.
1.I have come to King late in my reading life. For some reason I can’t discern I had developed a bias against horror, a silly notion that it doesn’t quite sit on the same literary merit shelf as science fiction of fantasy ↩
just to name a few. Plug your favourite authors name in the search window and any discounted titles will come up under the bargains tab.
Please find for you listening pleasure Galactic Chat 13
Sean interviews Australian Novelist Deborah Kalin. They discuss her Binding Duology and her latest project, an as yet unnamed title from the Twelve Planets Series. Deborah also talks about her experiences at Clarion South and how the workshop was of fundamental importance to her career. The "dominance"by women of Australian fantasy gets a mention and they talk about the single mould approach to strong female characters.
You can download the podcast here
or play it in the player below
Next up is the best short story category
Best Short Story
Again this is a highly competitive list. I have read half of it: Bad Power, The Patrician and Alchemy, and the rest of the finalists are all well known for quality work.
Thoraiya won an Aurealis with another short, Livings and Helene are well known and Kaaron Warren is almost omnipresent.
Out of those I have read and that appear above I think Bad Power possibly has the edge(my favourite Love and Romanpunk story didn’t make it).
Your thoughts?
PS Don’t forget to vote
The Drowned Cities is listed on some sites as the second in the Ship Breaker series. It’s a novel set in the same post climate change world as Ship Breaker rather than a “Book 2”. The Obituarist is Patrick O’Duffy’s first crime novella. He’s a multitalented chap though, so check out his website.
Kendall Barber is a social media undertaker with a shady past who's returned to the equally shady city of Port Virtue.
Now a new client brings with her a host of dangers, just as Kendall's past begins to catch up with him. Can he get to the bottom of things before it's too late, or will he end up as dead as his usual subjects?
The idea of a social media undertaker in itself is quite refreshing. I have heard of companies that will offer a service to repair your online reputation but not one that will, post death notices and remove you digital traces to prevent identity theft. So bonus points for the original concept.
Now Patrick dedicates the novella to his wife Nicole and Raymond Chandler. Its style is a bit of homage to hardboiled detective fiction, I’d say Chandler-esque but then I have never read Chandler. You can read for yourself below:
Jay Moledacker was far more handsome in death than he ever had been in life. Okay, not true, but at least his Facebook profile picture was now a lot more dignified. Not difficult, since his profile picture while alive had been a photo of him drunk and vomiting onto a horse during a racing carnival.
Now that he was dead – of an embolism, rather than being kicked to death – he looked regal, elegant and a good six years younger. That's because I had to use his graduation photo; everything after that point seemed to involve Jay throwing up, getting punched in nightclubs or out cold with FUCKWIT written on his chest in mustard.
A life well lived. Well, a life. Lived.
And it had fallen to me to close it all down.
Which didn't stop my clients – his parents – from dicking me about on the invoice.
I like Patrick’s style and “A life well lived. Well, a life. Lived.” I thought was the single best line in the book.
The humour which is largely self deprecating or at Kendall’s expense endeared the character to me. This guy ain’t no muscle bound hero, he has computer smarts, not street smarts - a fact that is well played to in this novella.
There was only one thing that impacted my enjoyment of the novella and that was the resolution of the subplot(I won’t go into specifics as it would spoil the novella). It was, in my opinion, simply resolved too quickly and stretched my suspension of disbelief too far.
When I have been led to belief that Kendall is largely a reluctant detective (at least in a physical sense) and prone to having his butt kicked, the resolution felt a little out of character. Perhaps I missed some early clues but I was blindsided by this resolution.
The main plot resolution was brilliant though and I only just caught on before the reveal. Very clever Mr O’Duffy very clever.
This is funny, and fast paced detective fiction with a modern concept and an Aussie setting. A good couple of hours entertainment. I’ll be watching for more of O’Duffy’s work.
You can go here and enter.
If you live in Melbourne and are going to Continuum 8 I believe that Mr Nahrung will be there with copies to sell and sign – details when I know for sure.
But if you are a fan of his work you can put in a pre-order here.
I did let it slip in a couple of places online but, hey it’s been a little busy with work (finally) and trying to keep up with everything that is going on in Speculative Fiction land.
I also wanted to wait until I had received notice of the panel I was invited to be on.
I will be participating in the Book Blogs and Reviewing panel running from 9 -10 am Saturday (tentative times, almost set in stone). So if you are going to Continuum feel free to drop in and partake of the wisdom of a diverse range of panellists.
The wonderful Continuum organisers are still organising so I will post the full details shortly.
[edit: The panel times could be wrong. The overworked staff at Continuum have informed me that a technical snafu caused the wrong times to be sent with the notification. Will keep you posted]
You may enter here.
Of course if you are tempted to buy it you can go to the TPP site and put in a pre-order.
What the lucky so and so’s who have read it people are saying:
‘Every Warren story is a trip with no map.’ – Gemma Files
‘Her fiction shifts across genres smoothly and intelligently, never settling for the easy path… she doesn’t flinch.’ – Andrew Hook
‘As with most of the best horror writing … the power of Warren’s strongest stories comes from the mirror they hold up to our everyday practices and prejudices.’ – Ian McHugh
Not sure about short collections? Check out my reviews of other books in the series:
As you can see, I am a bit of a TPP fan.
Did you enjoy this post? Would you like to read more? You can subscribe to the blog through a reader,by Email or Follow me on twitter.
This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012. Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.Mr Scalzi attempted to reframe the discussion around privilege with a metaphor that SWM(straight white male ) gamer dudes might understand with
An admirable effort, though in hindsight using the Games analogy was always going to bring out those types of people that focus on the minutiae, the rules lawyer types, those that have no idea of what the spirit of the game may mean.
WARNING - Don’t read the comments
Mr Hines having followed the discussion, dug up some statistics to try and help those determined to turn Mr Scalzi’s post into a personal attack on their own poor disadvantaged straight white male lives, realise that its not about them on a personal level.
Can you here the sirens, yep lots of Whaaaambulances.
Anyway here’s Mr Hines post
Then I came across this comic book representation the Patriarchy as Matrix, and thought maybe we need to approach the situation visually. Anyway enjoy - you may need to embiggen the gif to rad the matrix script.
Jason informs us that the cover from his novella Salvage, soon to be released by Twelfth Planet Press has been released ---------------------------->
If my memory serves me correctly the artist is Dion Hamill who also did some of the work on Glitter Rose by Marianne de Pierres.
Jason alo informs us that Salvage is available for pre-order in paperback from Twelfth Planet Press for $15 plus postage.
JJ Abrams has a new show coming out. Many are hoping that he replicates his success with Lost ( personally I hope he’s successful but Lost I found to a one season idea strung out over as many seasons as they thought we’d put up with it).
I am not sure its fair to judge from the trailer there has been some criticism regarding racial stereotyping.
Colosoul Magazine features an article on Alisa Krasnostein and Twelfth Planet Press:
On The Twelfth Planet
It could be said that all fiction is essentially speculative, as its very nature is to imagine possible worlds (be they reflections of our own or something entirely new), different lives and the content of other minds – to form conjectures that have no requirement for evidence or rigour. The term ‘speculative fiction’, however, specifically refers to a collection of genres brought under an umbrella of family resemblance, including science fiction, fantasy, alternate history and horror.
Alisa Krasnostein identifies speculative fiction as “the ultimate genre of escape”. The appeal of the genre, she believes, is that “no matter how alien the aliens or how fantastical the creatures, they’re all still reflections of humanity.” Alisa states, “I love the genre because it constantly seeks to understand ‘the other’.
[Read On]
David MacDonald of Ebon Shores kindly invited me to guest post at his wonderful blog.
A 21st Century Fan
I love living in the future.
I grew up in a time before the internet, before mobile phones, in a remote town at least 1500 km away from any major city. My first brush with fandom came with the ABC’s running of Doctor Who (until the late 80’s the only TV channel we had). Myself and four friends formed the Dr Who gang, our arch enemies were the Spades – think the Sharks and the Jets but with flowing multicoloured scarves and Men at Work rather than Leonard Bernstein . This was primary school.
[Read On]
While you are there you might like to subscribe.
Fans of Rowena Cory Daniells, will no doubt be aware that, it won’t be long until she releases her next trilogy. But for the rest of you, sadly deprived of Rowena’s fast paced, action filled fantasy here’s a taster in book trailer form. The Outcast Chronicles:
Ishtar is a collection of novella’s written by three of Australia’s top female speculative fiction writers.
Indeed, the collection itself has been nominated for both an Aurealis and a Ditmar, and the individual novellas have picked up nominations in both awards as well.
Published by Gilgamesh press 1. for the rather paltry sum of $5.95 in ebook form, it’s well worth the money.
The stories in Ishtar, as the title suggests, centre on the Assyrian Goddess Ishtar, goddess of fertility, war, love, and sex.
The first novella, The Five Loves of Ishtar by Kaaron Warren is set in Ancient Assyria. The story is told by successive generations of washer women indentured to the Goddess as she is wife or partner to 5 great men, beginning with the deity Tammuz.
The story is written in the first person, and the language is somewhat stilted (though not in a negative sense). I think Warren is trying to create a text that feels mythic and reserved, not quite biblical but certainly encouraging more formal tone:
My goddess Ishtar had five great loves in her thousand years of living. Many lovers; so many even I lost count, I, who can tell you the number of girdles in every household in the city. But five men she loved, and five times she risked all for love.
I’ll admit that this tale took me the longest to get into. The repetition of the form , however, the continuity of generations of washer women telling the story, gave me both a sense of history and gradually drew me in.
The second novella was Deb Biancotti’s And the Dead Shall Outnumber The Living and is set in present day Sydney. It’s a police procedural that morphs into a surreal dark fantasy where the goddess Ishtar appears again, flexing her powers.
She crouches and grips the edge of a drain outlet, peering in. The stench is unbearable. Every shitting, vomiting junkie in the city crammed into one room couldn’t smell this bad. The body looks like a sack pushed up against the grate, spread out, blocking nearly the whole outlet. Water rushes around it, making the skin ripple. It’s naked, and the dark hairs on its chest and arms and legs, the dark V of hair around its genitals, are pressed flat by the weight of water. The insides must’ve floated away by now, out to sea.
“Kids thought it was a balloon or a clown suit or something,” Tarling says. “Until the face rolled round and looked at them.”
“Counselling?” Steve asks.
“Oh, years of it, I’d imagine,” Tarling says.
I am a fan of Biancotti’s work in Bad Power and the writing echoes that same beat cop, police procedural with an edge of dark fantasy, only in this instance it’s more than an edge. The ending is…unconventional perhaps, but fits into the whole package beautifully.
The final novella is Cat Sparks’ The Sleeping and The Dead. It gave me visions of a post apocalyptic gothic wasteland - Necromaidens with a fetish for skulls…
She watches nuns dancing in the dust, spinning and twirling as if the stuff’s not killing them. Necromaidens. Fallout wraiths. Praising absent gods for their blisters as well as their dreams. Like her, they have no formal training. Their cult has grown organically, exponentially as the years have dragged. Anna became conscious of the neatness of the skulls long before glimpsing the girls’ demented Tinkerbell antics around the gritty edges of Truckstop’s barbed perimeter. She might have dismissed the girls as ghosts — the barren landscape groans beneath the breathless, phantom weight of them, but no, the nuns are solid. As solid as forty-five kilos of half-starved girl can get.
It’s hard to pick a favourite out of these three, viewed as three parts of a whole they are both wonderfully distinct yet dovetail into each other smoothly. We have a mythic retelling, a police procedural and a post apocalyptic tale but it does feel like one continuous tale told from different perspectives.
The Sleeping and The Dead probably edges in front as my preferred story but it’s close. I have a penchant for the post apocalyptic.
Ishtar fits Gilgamesh Press’ vision beautifully. Here we have three quality writers giving us their take on Assyrian myth, breathing life into a culture that underpins our own. Ishtar steps from the pages; a living, breathing, sensual and violent goddess – come and meet her.
If you like your fiction dark and your women powerful don’t go past Ishtar.
1.Gilgamesh Press is an imprint of Morrigan Books. Gilgamesh Press has a vision to promote awareness of the Assyrian people and their history through literature.↩
The latest episode of Galactic Suburbia is out. I have been working all day so haven’t had a chance to listen yet. Apparently they explain boob windows1 and they cover the usual news, awards roundups and culture consumed.
Went to see Avengers the other day. Caught the 3D version which is my first since one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies back in the 90’s. And I’m pretty meh about it actually, not sure that it actually added too much to the movie.
The movie itself was pretty good, considering the cast of heroes - ensemble performances can be a bit tricky.
I was pretty impressed with the every so slightly insane Loki played by Tom Hiddleston. Here he is doing an off the cuff Shakespearean monologue (h/t @becadroit)
And here he is in the Avengers in possible my favourite scene:
Pretty sure that Robert Downey Jr. played himself. Scarlet Johansen was good as the Black Widow and I think Mark Ruffalo was a good choice for the Hulk.
Its apparently smashing box office records, I’m not sure if its THAT good, but a definite improvement over Thor. Probably on par with Iron Man 1.
Released on the 3rd of May, Issue 50 features the fiction of Patty Jansen and Jonathan Robb as well as the usual non –fiction goodness by the likes of Macleod and Thorp
You can purchase it through Smashwords for $2.99
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This is the first in a series of anthologies from Ticonderoga Publications that will focus on non-traditional horror. I want stories that are horrific, but that also fit within other genres—let’s look beyond the borders. This year’s anthology will focus on non-traditional urban fantasy. This means that I don’t want stories that feature vampires, witches or werewolves; if you send one, it probably won’t make it through to the final cut….[read on if you're interested]
First up is Cat Sparks’ cover for her upcoming book The Bride Price from Ticonderoga. If I am reading the press release correctly, Cat has done the cover herself and its kick–arse.
and missed early in the week was Cracklescape from Margo Lanagan and Twelfth Planet Press.
