Book Review – Caution: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott

Glancing at my Goodreads stats, I began reading Caution well over a year ago.  It was going to be one of those quick personal reads you fit in before the review copy starts padding the walls of your cell library.

I may have let it languish longer were it not for the death of my ereader, which prompted the purchase of another ($65 Kobo Touch at Brisbane Airport).  I had bought Caution through Kobo and it downloaded as part of the setup process again.  The intervening year of not reading hadn’t dulled my memory but I embarked on reading the first 3 stories again.

It struck me on a second reading that this collection does really showcase McDermott’s versatility.  All the stories are a mix of dark/weird/horror/fantasy but McDermott gives us something fresh in each of the 4 tales.

Kij Johnson (whose work I also have in the personal reading pile) introduces the collection, outlining the reasons why I continue to enjoy Kirstyn’s work i.e. that Kirstyn isn’t afraid to drag the reader toward big messy uncomfortable themes and bind them together with good story.

 

What Amanda Wants kicks off the set and presents initially as a fairly straight psychological thriller before edging its way into the weird. Without giving too much away, I enjoyed being manipulated in this story, the build up of dread and the twist.

Horn was a very interesting bit of fun, a thick vein of cultural commentary wrapped up in a good horror story. If you like fluffy tales about unicorns…well ( why would you be reading McDermott) skip this one.

Caution: Contains Small Parts was another wonderful piece of manipulation, playing with genre expectations around possessed childhood toys.  I think this would work well as a short film.

The final novella is The Home for Broken Dolls where Kirstyn manages to blend genre tropes, criticism and adult dolls in the one story that should be given so much more critical analysis than this short recommendation will provide.  Out of all the stories this one impressed me the most.  Horn, What Amanda Wants and Caution are great stories, entertaining stories.  The Home for Broken Dolls though managed to really provoke some introspection on top of having the qualities of the stories previously mentioned.

This collection continues Twelfth Planet Press’ wonderful series of female talent. Caution and indeed the entire series should receive wider attention than the usual genre haunts.  I encourage readers especially those not fans or readers of genre to try Kirstyn’s collection, to sample what serious topics and themes can be packaged in horror and dark fantasy short story.

So a thumbs up from me.

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This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2015.  Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.

 

 

 

 

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Incoming - Defying Doomsday Fundraiser

The folks at Twelfth Planet Press are going to be fundraising for an anthology to be edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench.  Titled Defying Doomsday, it’s an anthology of apocalypse-survival fiction with a focus on disabled and chronically-ill characters.  Here’s a snippet from the press release:

The anthology will be varied, with characters experiencing all kinds of disability from physical impairments, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses and/or neurodiverse characters. There will also be a variety of stories, including those that are fun, sad, adventurous and horrific.

The stories in Defying Doomsday will look at periods of upheaval from new and interesting perspectives. The anthology will share narratives about characters with disability, characters with chronic illnesses and other impairments, surviving the apocalypse and contending with the collapse of life as they know it.

 

Fundraising for the project will launch on April 1st and they will be attempting to raise $13,000 through Pozible and with the assistance of a Tasmanian Government Crowbar grant.  For further info check out the specific landing page at Twelfth Planet Press.

 

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Cover Reveal - The Female Factory

Another awesome cover for what I am confident will be another great book in the Twelve Planets Series.  Congrats to Twelfth Planet Press for securing the artistic talent of Amanda Rainey and the writerly talents of Hannett & Slatter.

What is The Female Factory?

In The Female Factory, procreation is big business. Children are a commodity few women can afford.

Hopeful mothers-to-be try everything. Fertility clinics. Pills. Wombs for hire. Babies are no longer made in bedrooms, but engineered in boardrooms. A quirk of genetics allows lucky surrogates to carry multiple eggs, to control when they are fertilised, and by whom—but corporations market and sell the offspring. The souls of lost embryos are never wasted; captured in software, they give electronics their voice. Spirits born into the wrong bodies can brave the charged waters of a hidden billabong, and change their fate. Industrious orphans learn to manipulate scientific advances, creating mothers of their own choosing.

From Australia’s near-future all the way back in time to its convict past, these stories spin and sever the ties between parents and children.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Vox
• Baggage
• All the Other Revivals
• The Female Factory

You can check out publication and order details here.

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Twelfth Planet Press – New Subscriptions Tab

Released on to the interwebs yesterday:

 

Twelfth Planet Press offers a curated experience of fiction that seeks to interrogate, commentate, inspire or provoke thought by way of the Twelfth Planet Press Tab Subscription.

Want to make sure you maintain a complete set of Twelfth Planet Press books?

Let us do the admin for you. Subscribe to have every book automatically sent to you on publication.

Choose where to start, whether to exclude any particular titles, or select ebooks or print only.

And when your tab runs out, we'll send you a friendly email with the option to renew.

 

Check out the subscriptions page here.  It’s well worth a look as I have found that TPP consistently produce a good product, paper or digital.

 

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Kaleidoscope Giveaway at Goodreads

Twelfth Planet are giving away copies of their crowd funded Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories.  You can go here to participate.

Kaleidoscope is an anthology of diverse contemporary YA fantasy and science fiction stories.
What do a disabled superhero, a time-traveling Chinese-American figure skater, and a transgendered animal shifter have in common? They’re all stars of Kaleidoscope stories!

Kaleidoscope collects fun, edgy, meditative, and hopeful YA science fiction and fantasy with diverse leads. These twenty original stories tell of scary futures, magical adventures, and the joys and heartbreaks of teenage life.

 

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Perfections in print

Listeners to Galactic Suburbia will already have heard the news, however is you aren’t into podcasts you might be interested that Kirstyn McDermott’s Perfections, originally released by Xoum publishing as an ebook, has been acquired by Twelfth Planet Press for its first print run.

The new cover is by the talented Amanda Rainey.

Here is my review of the novel on first release:

If you liked Madigan Mine, you’ll still like Perfections but they don’t occupy quite the same space.

Ian Mond, Kirstyn’s co-host on the Writer and the Critic described it as more of a character piece.    Kirstyn herself has tentatively called it modern urban gothic, situating it at the subtler end of the horror continuum.

And I think Perfections is a subtler piece of work than Madigan Mine. I always had suspicions with what was going on with Kirstyn’s first novel, it had a stronger affinity with well known Horror tropes.

Don’t get me wrong though, Perfections is still gut wrenchingly nasty at times, enough to really unsettle you but I was hard pressed to figure out where the horror was going to emerge - which of course kept me slightly on edge.

Now you notice here I am avoiding telling you the story.  And I am not going to reveal …[read on]

If you are a fan of subtle, creeping horror I recommend picking this one up.

 

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Kaleidoscope edges closer to production

It didn’t seem that long ago that I helped fund this project but its edging closer and TOR reveals that it should be coming out some time in August.  We have a stunning and entirely appropriate cover fro the talented Amanda Rainey and thanks to the editors the TOC has been released.

I am very happy to see some familiar names but equally happy to read names I have never heard of before.

 

Kaleidoscope’s Table of Contents:

• “Welcome”—Will Alexander
• “Double Time”—John Chu
• “Celebration”—Sean Eads
• “The Truth about Owls”—Amal El Mohtar
• “Careful Magic”—Karen Healey
• “Chupacabra’s Song”—Jim Hines
• “Ordinary Things”—Vylar Kaftan
• “Every Little Thing”—Holly Kench
• “End of Service”—Gabriela Lee
• “Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon”—Ken Liu
• “The Day the God Died”—Alena McNamara
• “Signature”—Faith Mudge
• “Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell”—E. C. Myers
• “Happy Go Lucky”—Garth Nix
• “Cookie Cutter Superhero”—Tansy Rayner Roberts
• “Walkdog”—Sofia Samatar
• “The Lovely Duckling”—Tim Susman
• “Krishna Blue”—Shveta Thakrar
• “The Legend Trap”—Sean Williams

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Love and Romanpunk gets a reprint

In what I imagine is a pretty cool thing to happen to a small press ie that your print stocks sell out, Twelfth Planet Press have announced that they will be doing a small run to take with them to Worldcon. 

So if you ever wanted to grab a hard copy (the eBook is still available) then mosey on over to the Twelfth Planet Press site to pre order a copy here.

 

 

 

 

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Rendering women Invisible

Twelfth Planet Press Deals – Care of Aurealis Awards Shortlists Announcement

Twelfth Planet Press has announced a three ebook bundle to celebrate three of their books making an appearance on the Aurealis Award Shortlist.  So you can get

•  Trucksong by Andrew Macrae
• Caution: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott and
• Asymmetry by Thoraiya Dyer

for just $15 by using the coupon AurealisAwards2014 at checkout. The offer runs till April 30, 2014. 

And you can begin purchasing here.

 

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Attention YA authors

Twelfth Planet Press are producing a Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction.  The details below:

Editors Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely are now reading internationally for the inaugural anthology, and are seeking Young Adult speculative fiction first published in 2013 for consideration.

Our goal is to uncover the best young adult short fiction of the year published in the anthologies dedicated to the form, the occasional special edition of a magazine, and individual pieces appearing in otherwise “adult” anthologies and magazines, and bring them together in one accessible collection. So many young readers are avidly reading speculative fiction in novel form; we want to introduce them to the delight that can be found in the short story as well.

What is YA? We define the Young Adult arena of speculative fiction as being multi-faceted. It’s not just about the age of the protagonist; it’s not just about the generally accepted “coming of age” story; it’s not just stories about young people and the (figurative or literal) journey they are on in life. We’re not afraid of stories that shine a dark light on human nature, if it is relevant to the YA theme being explored. We aren’t scared of things that go bump in the night. We want science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all of the subgenres associated with these. We want to explore diversity in all forms, because young people are diverse, and they want to see themselves and their friends in the stories they read. We consider Young Adult to be a subset of adult fiction rather than children’s fiction.

This is a REPRINT anthology. We are only reading material first published during the calendar year of 2013. Reprint submissions are welcome from anywhere in the world, in the English language (we are more than happy to consider translations of works appearing for the first time in 2013). We anticipate a publication date in the first half of 2014.

READ ON . . .

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Twelfth Planet Press – Trucksong in eBook form

Andrea Macrae’s Trucksong is now rolling out in digital form across a number of platforms.  You can get it from the publisher at Twelfth Planet Press – Trucksong.  Or from any number of reliable online retailers.

What’s it about?

In a post-apocalyptic Australian landscape dominated by free-wheeling cyborgs, a young man goes in search of his lost lover who has been kidnapped by a rogue AI truck – the Brumby King. Along the way, he teams with Sinnerman, an independent truck with its own reasons for hating the Brumby King. Before his final confrontation with the brumbies, he must learn more about the broken-down world and his own place in it, and face his worst fears.

What are the cultural touchstones?

This genre-bending work of literary biopunk mixes the mad fun of Mad Max II with the idiosyncratic testimony of works like Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.- (source: lifted from the TPP webstore)

 

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Trucksong cover reveal

Here it is, the cover of the new Andrew Macrae novel Trucksong, published by Twelfth Planet Press, cover art by Kenkichi Tai.

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Diversity in Specultive Fiction – more than lip service

Earlier this week I reviewed the wonderful We See a Different Frontier and I mentioned that it was one of those books that you really need to read if you are paying more than mere lip service to the concept of diversity.  So when Twelfth Planet Press gears itself up to provide us with diverse YA Fantasy and they convince Julia Rios to co-edit you know you are in for something special.

So go on pledge, lets get this thing off the ground.

And authors who feel they don’t get support for diverse stories they have already received original stories from Sofia Samatar, Ken Liu, Vylar Kaftan, and Jim Hines. But they want yours too.

Click the badge above, check out the rewards.

Make a difference.

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Book Release – Trucksong by Andrew Macrae

What's Trucksong?

In a post-apocalyptic Australian landscape dominated by free-wheeling cyborgs, a young man goes in search of his lost lover who has been kidnapped by a rogue AI truck – the Brumby King. Along the way, he teams with Sinnerman, an independent truck with its own reasons for hating the Brumby King. Before his final confrontation with the brumbies, he must learn more about the broken-down world and his own place in it, and face his worst fears.

The strange and playful voice of the first-person narrator keeps the story kicking along as he comes to his final realisation that the only meaning to be found in a world in slow decay is that which you make for yourself. This genre-bending work of literary biopunk mixes the mad fun of Mad Max II with the idiosyncratic testimony of works like Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. [Courtesy of Twelfth Planet Press]

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A Trifle Dead Book Trailer plus ebook on Sale

The trailer below was produced by Curtain University Students

You can purchase the paperback book from Twelfth Planet Press but if you want to pick up a cheaper ebook version to test the waters see their sale page here.

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Twelfth Planet Press News – Ebooks and Anthologies

TPP have released A Trifle Dead by Livia Day as an ebook.  You can find it at their website, Wizard’s Tower Books, Weightless Books, Kobo(shortly) and Amazon. 

If you have a local library with its finger on the pulse of the Australian genre scene, you might see the paperback copy on a New Book shelf near you.

But not to be content with that TPP have also announced a Young Adult anthology called Kaleidoscope. It will be released in late  2014.  It will be edited by Alisa Krasnostein  and Julia Rios ( of Strange Horizons and Outer Alliance Podcast Fame).

As befits the name, the editors are:

“… not simply looking for cookie-cutter vampire or urban fantasy stories, but for things that transport us and subvert our expectations. We particularly want to see characters of color, disabled, neurodiverse, and mentally ill characters, QUILTBAG content, and non-western cultural elements.”

Eager writers can check out the specific submission details here.

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eBook Review – Asymmetry by Thoraiya Dyer

Asymmetry is the latest of the top shelf Twelve Planets series to emerge from Twelve Planet Press.  It continues what I have found to be an outstanding showcase of Australian women writers in the speculative fiction field.

Thoraiya has been well supported by the team at Twelfth Planet Press for some time; she appeared in the anthologies, New Ceres Nights and Sprawl(her short, Yowie, won an Aurealis), had a novella, The Company Articles of Edward Teach (which won the Ditmar Novella Category in 2011) published as part of a double with Matthew Chrulew and now she’s produced Asymmetry.  Thoraiya also picked up a Ditmar this year for her The Wisdom of Ants published published in Clarkesworld.

So as you would expect this collection of shorts is worthy of someone who is generating a lot of good work.  There’s four stories, that showcase Thoraiya’s versatility within the genre and I would be stretched to find a less than brilliant one amongst them:

I fell into After Hours, a story of a young vet attached to a practice that has a special relationship with the nearby military base. They house and train “special” dogs.  It’s a sign of very good writing that a novel, let alone a short can draw you in and immerse you when you are tired. I had a distinct yearning for more of the interesting the world and characters Thoraiya has delivered here.  Very smooth and subtle writing, great characterization and a tantalizing idea. It’s hard to pull off a werewolf tale and make it fresh but Thoraiya does.

Zadie, Scythe of the West, could not be further from the setting of After Hours.  Thoraiya gives us a female dominated warrior society where to participate in battle a woman must have given birth for every life she takes.  This set up is not as desirous as some might think though and the emotional core of this story comes from the tension that this society creates around relationships and that despite having to give a life before you take one, war and killing is still horrendous and perhaps unjustified.  This short could I think spawn an entirely original Dark Fantasy series if Thoraiya were so inclined.

Wish Me Luck somehow manages to fuse a  steampunk-ish future with trans-dimensional travel where you pay your way with physically manifesting luck. It felt very Final Fantasy to me a fusion of science and magic, with pseudo-victorian trappings. Again entirely different to the preceding stories.

And rounding out the quartet is Seven Days in Paris, which is partly about counter terrorism and partly about human cloning.  It raises questions about the acceleration of organisms (tips its hat toward current issues on GMO) and what boundaries governments will cross when they think it necessary to save lives.  Somewhat evocative of the questions raised by Blade Runner.

I would be very surprised if this weren’t on the awards list next year.  The only regret I have after reading it was that it was so easily consumed. For a collection that is thematically about imbalance, Twelfth Planet Press has produced one of the most balanced collections I have come across in recent times.

 

Kudos to Amanda Rainey for cover design and Charles A. Tan for the eBook layout.

This review copy was made available by the publisher at no cost.

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Other Twelve Planet Reviews:

eBook Review–Through Splintered Walls by Kaaron Warren

Book Review–Showtime by Narrelle M Harris

Book Review–Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti

Book Review–Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex

Book Review–Nightsiders by Sue Isle

eBook Review–Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Book Review–Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan

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This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.  Please check out this page for more great writing from Australian women.

 

 

 

 

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A Trifle Dead launched

Twelfth Planet Press’ new crime imprint officially launched yesterday in Perth and Hobart,  A Trifle Dead by Livia Day, combines two great Australian loves; food and crime.

In Perth A Trifle Dead was launched by Dr Helen Merrick, snapped here by Twelfth Planet Press Director, Alisa Krasnostein. I believe that the author appeared at the Hobart launch, but shots of the elusive Ms Day are …um ..eluding me.

You can check out Ms Day’s website here.  And follow her on Twitter as @liviadaysleuth.

If you want to get a sneak peak at Australia’s best kept Crime fiction secret check out the first chapter below:

Chapter 1.

You can tell a lot about a person from their coffee order. I play a game with the girls who work in my café—guess the order before the customer opens their mouth. It’s fun because half the time you’re spot on—the bloke who would rather die than add anything to his long black, the girl who doesn’t want to admit how weak she likes her latté, the woman who’ll deliberate for twenty minutes as to whether or not she wants a piece of cake (she does), the mocha freak, the decaf junkie.

The rest of the time, you’re completely wrong. An old age pensioner requests a soy macchiato, a gang of pink- haired school girls want serious espresso shots, a lawyer in a designer suit stops to chat for half an hour about free trade… The best thing about people is how often they surprise you.

Ever wondered what kind of coffee a murderer drinks? Yeah, me neither.

I tumbled into the kitchen of Café La Femme, arms full of bakery boxes, a vintage mint-green sundress swirling around my knees. Late as usual, but at least I was wearing my favourite sandals.

A gal can cope with anything when her shoes match her bra.

Nin paused in the middle of kneading focaccia dough to stare at me from under her expressive eyebrows. I love her eyebrows. They make Frida Kahlo’s look meek. ‘They’re here again,’ she said, and went back to kneading. [read on…]

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Asymmetry give away

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