Kerry Greenwood (author of the Phryne Fisher Mysteries) will be Launching the Twelve Planets Series this Sunday 26 August at the Yarra Building, Federation square, Melbourne.
You’ll also get a chance to meet some of the Twelve Planets Series authors( lovely people all)
It’s free. Yes free.
Check the postcard below:
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.↩
Galactic Suburbanites Hugo & Ditmar nominated Galactic Suburbanites cover the Ditmar shortlist which features quite a lot of Tansy in both the Professional and Fan Categories. Indeed this year’s Ditmars feature projects by all three of the show’s hosts.
There’s also mention of Deb Biancotti making the Shirley Jackson shortlist for a work that’s being considered for both a Ditmar and an Aurealis award. It’s always good to see different awards structures come to the same conclusion.
There was also a good discussion on writers or creatives changing direction or mediums and how they can be damned if the do and damned if they don’t. Case in point Stephenie Meyer who’d be labelled as a one trick pony if she stayed writing vampire fiction and labelled as a failure when she moves into making movies.
As always, worth a listen.
As always you can download here (about 30 mb) or stream from the thingywhatsit below
I had actually gone out and purchased the ebook version from Smashwords owing, I contend, to subliminal messaging in Deb Biancotti’s post.
Ishtar is edited by Aussie editor Amanda Pillar, and contains three novellas written by Australian women writers.
Here’s the description lifted from Smashwords:
This novella collection is powerful, sexy and very, very deadly.
'The Five Loves of Ishtar': Kaaron Warren
Follow the path that the goddess Ishtar takes through the eyes of her most devoted worshippers, her washerwomen. Sharokin, Atur, Ninlil, Shamiran, Ninevah and Ashurina share in their goddess' loves, losses and triumphs, as kingdoms rise and fall in the Land of Rivers.'And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living': Deborah Biancotti
In modern-day Sydney, male prostitutes are dying. Their bones have turned to paste and their bodies are jelly. As Detective Adrienne Garner investigates the deaths, she finds rumours of strange cults and old gods whose powers threaten her city and, ultimately, her world.
'The Sleeping and the Dead': Cat Sparks
Dr. Anna remembers little of her life before the war, merely traces of the man she used to love. When three desperate travellers rekindle slumbering memories, she begins a search that takes her to Hell and beyond. A search for love and, ultimately, enlightenment.
The collection has been nominated for an Aurealis Award. If you’re keen on reading good speculative fiction, or you are at a loss for works to read for the AWW2012 challenge you can:
Enter in the Goodreads giveaway here or if you simply can’t wait, shoot over to Smashwords and pick it up. Ishtar is only $5.95
“I sing for my supper, cause it makes me feel so good”
I have been nominated to run in this years fan fund for the National Science Fiction Convention to be held in Melbourne.
If you appreciate the work that I do in Australian Speculative Fiction Fandom and you have a spare $5, you can vote for me here and help send me to the National Conference.
Monies raised go towards this and subsequent years funding.
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.
We’re very pleased to announce that with the conversion of our backlist to EBook form, the following titles are now available for just $5.95 from the Kindle Store at Amazon:
- Above/Below by Stephanie Campisi and Ben Peek
- Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti
- Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex
- Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts
We will be adding more books to the Kindle Store, and of course to our other online suppliers as the year progresses.
You can of course get them directly from Twelfth Planet Press store, or a number of other online independent and non-predatory outlets.
Here’s hoping this leads to a larger audience for TPP and its stable of writers.
I reviewed Bad Power as part of the Australian Women’s Writing challenge at this post
If you really like the sound of the book and can’t wait to win it. It is available from Twelfth Planet Press in paperback and will soon be available as an ebook. is now available as an ebook in epub format.
Bad Power paperback link
Bad Power Epub link
Bad Power is the Twelfth Planet collection featuring the work of Crawford award nominee1 Deborah Biancotti.
The jacket copy says “If you like Haven or heroes, you’ll love Bad power.” While I think Heroes suffers from the American propensity to drag successful ideas out to the point where they lose dramatic tension, I really like Haven.
Bad power is more akin to the later, more subdued, and understated. It also makes me think of Misfits, in the sense that having powers is never quite the as good asit might seem.
With Bad Power Biancotti has given us 5 stories2 that connect very smoothly with one another through the theme of power, the setting and the characters. It’s more in line with previous Twelve Planet releases like Love and Romanpunk and Nightsiders but I would argue that Bad Power touches on becoming novella such is the smooth flow of the narrative between each of the stories.
The Stories
Biancotti has done such a wonderful job with character and setting that I would gleefully return to the world of Bad Power. I love speculative fiction books set in Australia, in places where I have walked the streets. Fingers crossed Biancotti has something longer in the works based on her ideas presented here.
I think that Bad Power deserves some close reading once you get past the sheer enjoyment of reading what are very engaging stories. She raises questions subtly - about power and its use.
I also love the skilful play with words, evident most obviously in the tiles of the above pieces. Tight layered writing.
1. Click here for award information ]↩
2. 1 more story than usual for the 12 planets series, the book is similar in page count to Nightsiders which comes in at 138 pages↩
Go here to enter.
The Blurb
Hate superheroes?
Yeah. They probably hate you, too.
‘There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.’
‘Thank you.’
‘For implying you’re powerful?’
‘For imagining those are two different groups.’
From Crawford Award nominee Deborah Biancotti comes this sinister short story suite, a pocketbook police procedural, set in a world where the victories are only relative, and the defeats are absolute. Bad Power celebrates the worst kind of powers both supernatural and otherwise, in the interlinked tales of five people — and how far they’ll go.
If you like Haven and Heroes, you’ll love Bad Power
That’s right Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti, the fourth in Twelfth Planet Press’ Twelve Planets series has gone to the printers and should be available to salivating TPP fans everywhere very soon.
