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Snapshot 2012: Adam Browne

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoADAM Browne lives in Melbourne. He’s published 30 short stories, winning an Aurealis Award for best SF short story in 2002 and the Chronos in 2009. His first novel, Pyrotechnicon: Being the Further Adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac among the States and Empires of the Stars, by Himself (dec’d), is being released by coeur de lion in September this year — look for a launch at Canberra’s Conflux. Adam has also been working on the internal illustrations — one is available for sale as a print at Signed and Numbered, in Prahran. You can also see a few at his blog.


In ‘The End of Roentgen Rays’, the aptly concluding story of your Phantasmagoriana collection, reality unwinds as language collapses, a process begun with the loss of capital letters: is there a line to be drawn, currently perhaps, between the evolution and devolution of language, and should we privileged texters care as long as we can all understand each other’s tweets?
Yeah, that one’s less about the devolution than language than the idea that the world is made of language. Most of us can’t remember anything before we were two or three; it’s because language doesn’t colonise the mind until around then. Language is cloudware – it does a lot of our thinking for us – or, more than that, it does our perceiving for us.

I wrote the story as a lipogram, but was far too easy on myself: the only letter missing is X. In the end, all the letters unknot and fall apart, the story becoming a lipogram with the entire alphabet missing…

I was looking at the lipogrammatic novel A Void the other day, and suddenly realised it’s a double achievement – not only that it was written, but that it was translated from the French while also avoiding the letter E…

Your short stories often offer a blend of science, history and the fantastic: is there a particular advantage, say, in discussing certain themes, to this melding that more othordox narratives might not hold for you?
I didn’t start writing historical stuff until a friend, Barry Rome, sent an email with a beautiful little paragraph of what he’d like to see in SF; I can’t remember it very well, except that it was sumptuous, diseased – renaissancepunk – bewigged ancients with intelligent calipers, that sort of thing – transgenic peacocks… I wrote a story about Mozart as a hacker as a result. To be frank, I’ve long been driven by the need to impress. Historical science fiction offered opportunities along that line.

But I sometimes think that what we do is try on affectations to see which ones fit. This one fit me in a deep way. Historical SF dealt with my misgivings about fiction set in the future – the future was over, for me at least – and history provides atmosphere, which is so important in fantastical storytelling. The baroque period suits me best, as it suits my love of crammed, adjectival prose, and I think it feels rather like the present – the heedless headlong nature of it – the horror vacui – decadents dancing on the brink of the abyss.


In your forthcoming novel Pyrotechnicon, Cyrano de Bergerac takes us on space adventures. What made you choose Cyrano for this adventure?
Cyrano wrote two SF novels, Englished and republished as Other Worlds in the 1970s. I had the book for years without being all that interested, but then one day my eye just sort of lit on it – that’s all I remember – that moment I knew it was my novel. I was surprised someone hadn’t thought of it before: the third in the trilogy seemed an obvious project. I have to admit I didn’t start my research into the man himself until a year or so into the process. The most interesting detail for me was that Cyrano was gay – proudly, openly – his Trip to the Moon makes it obvious, for all that I assumed the affection between the male characters was just a French thing, or a 17th century thing. I began to wonder if Edmond Rostand, who wrote the eponymous play, was giving a sly nod to this when Cyrano’s love of Roxane is never consummated.

My Cyrano belongs more to Rostand than history. Manic, swashbuckling, epigrammatic, ingenious, madly inventive, a magnificent outsider. I got the same thrill from writing him as I do writing pirates – he’s at once real and fictional – a picture book character with heft, a commedia dell’arte character with depth. His energy and strength of character served to hold the novel together – he’s ridiculous, but he’s vulnerable and ferocious and engaging…

So to answer your question, I can’t really answer it. I don’t know why I started with him, but I think what I’ve said here goes to show why I stuck with him.

As for Pyrotechnicon: Being a True Account of the Further Adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac, by Himself (dec’d), I’m proud of it. I reckon it’s a goer. It’s a good sign when you read something and it feels like someone else wrote it. Like it’s come from on high, where all good art comes from. Maybe it’ll be for me as it was with Rostand, whose best work was also about Cyrano – he’s our muse, taking us to the peak of our art.


What Australian works have you loved recently?
Recently, I belatedly bought Anna Tambour’s Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales. It’s wonderful, full of wonder. Two stories in particular, ‘Temptation of the Seven Scientists’ and ‘Monterra’s Deliciosa’, gave me a feeling I find hard to describe – an airiness in the frontal lobes, as if the central crevice were opening out. Literally mind expanding, I suppose. I relish her naturalist’s approach to the world, her witty, transparent, rich but economical prose.

After Paul Haines died, I re-read The Last Days of Kali Yuga, and enjoyed it as much as ever — he’s not a horror writer, despite that was how he defined himself; like all of the most worthwhile artists, his writing is its own genre, unique to him alone.

I went through my old David Ireland books this year too. The Flesh Eaters, A Woman of the Future. What a writer. How shameful that he’s been out of print for so long – though I saw recently that someone else felt that lack, and is having them reissued.

I beta-read Lee Battersby‘s novel The Corpse-Rat King too – and I’m realising now that all these authors are the same in that they’re all different – all unique. Like the others, Lee’s writing was ostensibly of a genre I normally avoid, but I persisted, and was glad of it – it’s a romp, it’s grotesque and inventive; it’s peculiarly Battersbyesque…

What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
The biggest change was Paul Haines’s death. Without being too sentimental or eulogistic, he’d be king of the scene by now; with his Penguin deal, his novelisation of the Wolf Creek prequel, all the rest of it, he’d have been a Proper Writer, object of awe at the conventions. I’d have been jealous of his success, but his largesse was such that he would have shared it around, would have been admonishing me and my more insular contemporaries to keep ourselves out there; he would been sending this or that opportunity our way and encouraging us with his enthusiasm — all that stuff. Ah, he was such a fun guy. I’ll always miss him.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: Patrick O’Duffy

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoMELBOURNE-based writer Patrick O’Duffy has been writing since he was a little kid; he’s been writing stuff that’s good enough for others to read for, well, less time than that. He has been a freelance RPG writing for companies such as White Wolf and Green Ronin, where he got to work on the revival of Lynn Abbey’s Thieves’ World setting.

Since moving to Melbourne from Brisbane several years ago, he’s given up game writing and focused more on shorter-form fiction, which he publishes independently as e-books. They include the dark fantasy novella Hotel Flamingo and the horror anthology Godheads, plus his new crime novella The Obituarist. Upcoming work includes another anthology (this time of flash fiction), a sequel to The Obituarist, a YA fantasy novella and a serious literary novel that he’ll be trying to get published through the usual channels.

All this and more can be found at his website, www.patrickoduffy.com, where he also blogs about writing and reading and similar things. Sometimes there are pictures.


Your previous e-books have been genre-blurring horror-tinged tales. What influenced you to head into crime territory with The Obituarist?
I think every story has a core that can be expressed in a number of ways, and that the best way to find the right expression is to start with the core and work outwards to the story, rather than work from the story and try to find its core. So while I’ve done a lot of horror and fantasy writing – and I’m going to do more – I’m always read to follow an idea down a different path.

The Obituarist is a story about the way technology changes the way we live and in doing so changes some of the ways we think about death. You can write a story like that as speculative fiction, certainly, and I think there are some great paths it could take – in fact, some of my earliest thinking on the ‘social media undertaker’ concept was along spec-fic lines. But to write a story about how technology affects us right now, rather than how it might affect us in the future, I had to keep things grounded in the real and the modern day. And if I’m going to do that, well, a crime story lets me have some fun with the concept and include some chase scenes and gruesome deaths. That’s a win in my book.

What’s the most challenging or annoying element to publishing an e-book, and the greatest joy?
The challenging part is the part that comes after publishing – trying to get people to hear about it and to consider reading it. There’s so much out there at the moment and more every day, especially independently published ebooks. Some are very good and a lot more are very bad, but good and bad get just as much attention and seem pretty much the same to buyers. To stand out you need to spend as much or more time promoting your work than writing something new; you have to use word-of-mouth, push books at reviewers, monitor social media for opportunities.

I find that challenging. It turns me from a writer into a publisher, a publicist, a marketer. None of which are roles I particularly want to fill, but the alternative is having my books vanish without trace as soon as they’re released. Which I don’t really want, oddly enough. So I do my best to be honest about what I’m doing, to stop short of spamming people with constant ads for my stuff and to genuinely share the passion I have for writing with others.

As for joy, well, I think a lot of indie authors get great joy from maintaining control over their work, and not having to concede to the demands of publishers or editors. For me, though, it’s the immediacy and the freedom to experiment with extent, form or structure. I like the way that I can take a finished, edited manuscript and have it up on sale 10 minutes later. And, yes, then have to tweak the file to get it right and upload it again, but the principle is sound. I like writing novellas and short fiction and having an avenue to publish them even though they’re difficult to make financially viable in print. There’s room to try things in e-publishing, because even if you won’t make money you also won’t lose very much, and sometimes it’s acceptable to spend a few hundred dollars to do something you believe in.

How has your experience writing role-playing games informed your fiction writing?
Primarily it’s taught me about the importance of positioning the things that matter in a story – whether those are plot elements or core themes – at the centre of the story and making sure that the rest of the material revolves around those points. RPG settings tend to be filled with tiny little bits, like plot hooks and non-player characters and Sudden Looming Dangers. It can be a lot of fun to think up things like that, but it’s easy to make them too self-contained – to come up with, say, some kind of political intrigue that is all about three NPCs, or a terrifying dragon that stays in a cave scheming and never comes out. Things like that are interesting in concept but dead boring in play because they don’t contain a space for the players’ characters to become pivotal parts of the story. World building for its own sake can be fun, but a big part of successful RPG setting design is making sure that everything in that world can matter to the players, even if it doesn’t right away.

To extend that concept over to fiction writing, I always try to identify the important things in a story – the main characters, obviously, but also themes and motifs and the like – and make sure that every event and turn and additional character in the story connects directly to those things. The Obituarist, for instance, is a story about death and identity as well as a crime story. That’s the core – two themes and a set of genre markers. So everything starts from that basis, every scene needs to be relevant to at least part of that core, and everything has to have a hook or angle that directly draws in the main character, social media undertaker Kendall Barber.

That’s not exactly an insight that’s unique to RPGs. But writing those – and running and playing them – is what really drove it home to me.

What Australian works have you loved recently?
Most of the Australian work I like tends to be either literary fiction or crime fiction. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because the Australian voice lends itself well to both introspection on our place in the world and violence without proper thought of consequences. Or maybe it’s because I don’t spend enough time looking at Australian speculative fiction. That’s probably more likely.

In any event, the Australian books I’ve really loved of late include Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing, Nicki Greenberg’s Hamlet, Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore and Truth and Benjamin Law’s The Family Law.


What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
This is another point where I have to confess ignorance.

Actually, no, wait, there is something I’ve noticed – the degree to which Australian spec-fic is moving online. There are obvious changes like Aurealis becoming an e-book periodical, but I’m also seeing a lot more independent and small e-books coming, such as Alan Baxter’s Darkest Shade of Grey, which The Penny Red Papers published as both a free website and a cheap e-book.

The difficult part sometimes is knowing that these are Australian works, because the internet puts them right alongside American and British works and presents them as equals. Well, in theory. In practice, e-book readers still gravitate to writers they know, and Australian writers have to work hard to gain some visibility from international readers who might then recommend their books to their peers. It’s still not automatic, but it’s easier than it used to be.

And that’s something, right?

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

 

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Snapshot 2012: Garth Nix

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoGARTH Nix has been a full-time writer since 2001. He has worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. Garth’s books include the award-winning fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen and the science fiction novels Shade’s Children and A Confusion of Princes. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of The Seventh Tower sequence; The Keys to the Kingdom series; and the Troubletwisters books (with Sean Williams).

More than five million copies of Garth’s books have been sold around the world. His books have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian and The Australian, and his work has been translated into 40 languages.

Garth also produced the IF Award-winning and ACTAA-nominated short animated film The Missing Key, directed by Jonathan Nix; is a silent partner in the literary agency Curtis Brown (Australia); and is a co-founder of the online games developer Creative Enclave.

He lives in a Sydney beach suburb with his wife and two children. Find him online at www.garthnix.com.



You and Sean Williams looked to be having fun with the whiteboard when it came to plotting out your Troubletwisters series. How did the two of you go about collaborating on that series?
The whiteboard video you can see on YouTube is a kind of condensed version of how it actually works. Basically, we got together at various times to work out the story in considerable detail, building up a chapter outline for the first book, and a backgrounder for the characters, setting and so on. Then I wrote the first chapter, Sean took it away and wrote the first draft of the rest of the book, mostly following the chapter outline but varying where he wanted to or thought it necessary. Then he flicked it back to me, and I revised it, sent it back again and he revised it, and so on for a couple of iterations. We also discussed any major changes as we went along. The end result is that when we look at any given page, neither of us can remember who wrote what, it is a true joint effort. We’ve repeated this basic process in the next two books, including the one that is just out now, Troubletwisters: The Monster.


A Confusion of Princes is based on a computer game and you’ve done a great job of absorbing the game conventions such as respawning into the narrative. What were the challenges of this adaptation, if that’s a fair description of the process?
It would be more accurate to say that the game, Imperial Galaxy, shares a background with the book. I actually had started writing the book first, then when Phil Wallach and I began work on the game, I suggested we use the background of the galactic empire, the three teks and so on, for the game. I had intended to finish the book earlier, but got distracted, so a kind of limited subset of the game came out in a beta version before the book was finished. You can play that game at www.imperialgalaxy.com, but essentially the game is stalled at the moment for lack of funds, and has been frozen for about two years now. We do still hope to return to it at some stage.


You’ve been branching out and drawing on your family’s various skills as well: a very well received short film, self-publishing a collection of Sir Hereward stories, the computer game and the novel, and goodness knows what else. What have been the biggest pleasures you’ve found from exploring these diverse creative worlds?
The film, The Missing Key (trailers at www.themissingkey.com), is very much my brother Jonathan Nix’s work. I co-produced it, but had little creative input, just the business management and so on typical of a producer. It has won a bunch of awards, and I am pleased to be an IF Award-winning and ACTAA-nominated producer, but I can’t take much of the credit.

I self-published Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures as an experiment to test new digital waters. I like to keep up with and investigate publishing trends and changes were I can. I do like to be involved in various ventures and activities, and I like to use my business mind as well as my fiction-writing faculties.

What Australian works have you loved recently?
I was enthralled by Margo Lanagan‘s Sea Hearts and greatly enjoyed Dave Freer‘s Cuttlefish (not yet released), but in general I haven’t read much Australian (or in fact any) science fiction or fantasy. I’ve been mostly reading non-fiction, particularly history. I was kind of shocked at myself when I realised how little of the Aurealis shortlist I’d read at the awards ceremony last month, so I have picked up a bunch of books and stories to read when I get the chance.

What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
I’m not sure changes are obvious until much later, perhaps six, seven or even 10 years, when you can look back and point to things that have become significant or made an impact over time. That said, I think in general it is encouraging to see so many people involved in reading and writing speculative fiction, and to see more and more Australian authors getting a foothold in the USA and UK, and in translation.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

 

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Snapshot 2012: Andrew McGahan

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoANDREW McGahan is one of Australia’s finest and most varied writers. His first novel, Praise, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1992, and his third, Last Drinks, won a 2001 Ned Kelly award for crime writing. In 2004 his fourth novel, The White Earth, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Age Fiction Book of the Year, and The Courier Mail Book of the Year. His most recent adult novel is Wonders of a Godless World which won the 2009 Aurealis award for science fiction. In 2011 Andrew released the first volume of his young-adult fantasy Ship Kings series, The Coming of the Whirlpool, currently short-listed in the CBCA awards and the Australian Book Industry awards and an Aurealis finalist. The second volume in the series, The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice, will be published in late 2012.

Andrew lives in Melbourne with his partner of many years, Liesje.


Some writers use pen names when they write across disparate genres, but you haven’t. What have been the pros and cons of sticking with the one brand?

I did toy with using a pen name for Ship Kings, and I might indeed have elected to employ one if my previous books had been in a single non-fantasy genre. But as I’ve already strayed a little across the genres with the earlier novels, I didn’t think anyone would be too bothered if I ventured into yet another field under my own name. As for the pros and cons of it -– I’m not sure about either. I’ve never given much thought to myself as a ‘brand’, or better to say, by the time I realised that I should think about it, my brand was already too muddled to save.


What have been some of the biggest pleasures and perils for an avowed landlubber building a nautical fantasy world?

The perils are obvious enough -– that, in my descriptions of sailing, I make a technical error so obvious and outrageous that it snaps the reader out of the story. To that end, I’ve done as much research as I can on the basics of sail, but at the same time I’ve avoided full-on immersion in it, nor have I signed up for duty on a tall ship. Too much reality could actually become self defeating. For of course the Ship Kings series is not set in our world, or upon our oceans -– indeed, the Ship Kings ocean has quite different physical properties — so real sailing is only relevant up to a point. Therefore my premise has been that even though I’ll never fool experienced sailors, if I can reasonably convince fellow landlubbers that I know what I’m talking about, then that’s good enough.

The pleasures are manifold. Precisely because I have so little experience of the sea, it has remained a great unknown for me where imagination can roam as it likes, which no doubt is why I’ve always particularly loved seafaring stories — especially the more fantastic tales of whirlpools and sea monsters and baffling disappearances. The Ship Kings series is a gleeful chance to revisit and enlarge upon all those boyhood adventures I remember reading. I couldn’t be having more fun.


You’ve won an Aurealis award and been short-listed for another, and have some far more presitigious award credits to your name. Without necessarily buying into the recent fracas in your old home state, what have these various levels of accolade meant for you personally and your writing career?

I’ve been very fortunate with awards over the years and I’m always amazed by (and grateful for) the passion for writing that it takes to set up and run such things. The Queensland awards are a case in point. As you know, they’re going ahead anyway in community form –- and the lack of prize money aside (and ignoring the wider politics of their axing, and the whole question of the role of governments in supporting literature) they’ll actually be better awards for it in some ways, because they’ll be a product of ground level enthusiasm, rather than an obligation of government policy.

But to win any award, of course, feels fantastic, for all the obvious reasons –- the validation of your work, the increased sales of the book in question, and not least the raw cash, should prize money be included. There’s no doubt that all of it together gives you confidence to push on with your career, when royalty statements alone might make you question if it’s worth while -– and the bigger the award the better. But strangely it’s some of the smaller awards I’ve won or been shortlisted for that have stuck in my mind the most, because I’ve been aware that they exist only because a tight group of organisers, judges and fans care enough to make them exist. There’s something rather humbling about that.


What Australian works have you loved recently?
Of late, Scot Gardner’s The Dead I Know –- very interesting indeed. And far too belatedly, sadly, I finally cottoned on to Paul Haines, with The Last Days of Kali Yuga collection. Cracking stuff.


What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years?
I’m the last person to ask as I’m not very well read in any realm of Australian writing, speculative or otherwise, and I’ve struggled life-long with a deep-seated phobia for group activities such as conferences and literary festivals, so that I rarely meet or talk with other writers, or even readers. Which all means I’m pretty ignorant of trends in the local industry.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: Jenny Blackford

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoJENNY Blackford gave up her day job in 2001, and has been writing ever since, in between spoiling the cat, cooking and gardening. With husband Russell, she lived 30 years in Melbourne before returning to her hometown of Newcastle in 2009. In the same year, she was a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. She has had 20 stories published: eight for adults and 12 for children, and four poems, plus the historical novella The Priestess and the Slave.

Her latest publication is ‘The Dragon in the Tent’, a magical circus story, in The School Magazine, which has also recently accepted a cat poem, ‘Soft silk sack’.

Her latest publication specifically for grown-ups was ‘The Sacrifice’, in Aurealis 47. Jenny’s website is www.jennyblackford.com and she blogs at Living in the Past.


You’ve had some poetry published recently, after a long hiatus, and one ventures the new stuff is quite different to your first piece in Dolly all those years ago: what do you think has inspired you to not only return to poetry, but poetry of a decidedly darker (?) nature?
As to what has inspired me to return to poetry -– the real question is why I ever stopped writing it. Apparently, I just gave up quietly in my final dispiriting years of high school. The poetry writing asserted itself naturally a few years ago and took a while to nose its way out into the world.

And as to the alleged new darkness: not all my recent poems are dark. My poem forthcoming from The School Magazine is a fairly sweet little thing about a cat (though some might think ‘soft silk sack of bones’ has a slightly sinister edge). And my most recent poetry publication (in Star*Line 35.1 is another sweetish cat poem (though it does start with the potentially sinister ‘Gravity is stern as death’, and does ascribe uncanny powers to cats.) Hmmm…

I wish I could find my copy of ‘Ti-trees Rising’, the poem that was printed in Dolly back in the ’70s, but it seems to have disappeared from my filing system. It’s about ti-tree scrub, but I do distinctly remember the words ‘reptilian silver’ and ‘the cold moon in the dark’, so there’s at least a smidge of a sinister edge there as well.

Getting deeper: it’s true that the definitely dark ‘Mirror’ was my first poem for decades, but it’s based on memories from my teens. I was totally convinced that I saw someone else’s eyes looking back at me in the mirror, and I was terrified. Back then, I’m sure family and friends would have been horrified if I’d put all that fear and darkness into a poem. Now that I’m grown up, I’m allowed to.


What is your approach to reinvigorating the age-old story of Medea? Is that what made you pick it?
Modern people don’t tend to take Medea seriously as a Bronze Age priestess of Hekate, as a powerful sorceress, or as a goddess, grand-daughter of Helios, the Sun, but the ancient Greeks certainly did. She’s an amazing character, and the Bronze Age –- the era of the Mycenaean Greeks -– is my absolute favourite. Just imagine a glowing, golden-haired goddess-princess sitting on a throne carved out of rock crystal with golden monkeys inlaid on the back.

I’d loved the story ever since I studied the 5th century BC Euripides play Medea (in Ancient Greek) as part of my degree in Classics. After all the modern retellings that concentrate on how ‘heroic’ Jason was, and what a monster Medea was to kill her brother and her children, I was astonished to see Euripides rip into him so cuttingly, and so appallingly accurately. Jason could never have brought the Golden Fleece back to Greece without Medea’s help -– but a few years later, he wanted to trade her in for a younger, better-connected princess (not foreign witch), and expected Medea to be happy about him providing a better future for their children! Euripides converted me to Medea’s side, and I want to convert everyone else.


When you wrote The Priestess and the Slave, was your inner fantasist crying out to add fantasy elements or was 5BC fantastical enough?
When Eric Reynolds (the editor/publisher of Hadley Rille Books) asked me to write him a strictly historically accurate novella set in ancient Greece, my first two questions were whether I could use Bronze Age Greece (no – it had to be Classical Greece, 5th century BC), and whether I could add fantasy elements (no — it had to be purely historical).

I shrugged and got on with it. Once I started to write, it didn’t matter. Living inside the head of a slave girl in the plague years of Athens, or a Pythia in Delphi, was a strange and intense experience in its own right. And the characters believed totally in their gods, who are almost characters in their own right.


What Australian works have you loved recently?
So much -– but a few that come to mind are Tansy Rayner Roberts‘ Creature Court trilogy, Alison Goodman‘s Eon/Eona duology, Kim Wilkins‘ novella (‘Crown of Rowan: A Tale of Thrysland’) in Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan’s Legends anthology.

What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
Aussiecon 4 seems hardly any time ago! Wasn’t it only yesterday? One very sad change, though, is the deaths of Sara Douglass and Paul Haines, both from cancer. Valete.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: Stephen M Irwin

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logo
STEPHEN M Irwin’s debut novel, supernatural thriller The Dead Path, was published in the UK, the USA, Germany and China. It was named Top Horror Novel in the American Library Association’s RUSA Reading List (2011) and won the Book of the Month Club’s First Fiction Award (2010).

Stephen’s second novel, thriller The Broken Ones, was launched in Australia in 2011 to excellent reviews, including being named the Sydney Morning Herald Fiction Pick of the Week. It will be released in the USA by DoubleDay in August 2012, and has also been selected by the Book of the Month Club for its catalogues which service 8 million members.

Stephen’s short stories have won competitions nationally and internationally, with several published in notable anthologies. Stephen is also an award-winning filmmaker, and has written and directed television documentaries and short films. He is currently working with several Australian producers developing feature and television material, including a screen adaptation of The Dead Path.

Stephen lives in Brisbane’s inner-west with his wife and two young children. Find him online at stephenmirwin.com.

Two novels down, and twice you’ve brought some shudders to Brisbane town. What is it about the city that lends itself to a site for nightmare occurrences?
I hope that I’m able to write with a degree of veracity about lots of places, and certainly a bit of my first novel was set in London, and a recent screenplay I worked on had some scenes set in New York and Canada. However, Brisbane is home and I know certain of its suburbs well, some of its hiding places, how it feels through different seasons, where it feels authentic and where it feels like it’s wearing too much makeup. My first two books had to be set somewhere, and while I don’t live or die by the axiom ‘write what you know’, it made sense to set the books in a place that I know. I figured that I was asking the readers to suspend any disbelief they may have in magic and ghosts, so if the setting felt solid, I could buy a bit more latitude to explore the fantastical.
Even if it wasn’t home, though, Brisbane is a great setting because there is more to it than meets the eye. It is a pleasant and friendly place, but it was born essentially as a penal settlement, so it has some unpleasant bones. It is sunny and warm, and its winters are divine, but as we’ve seen in the recent past, it can turn nasty quickly with streets flooding and disaster unfolding in a matter of hours. As a setting, this contrast is appealing, and has worked well for other authors, too (Jeff Lindsay used Miami as a setting for the dark deeds of his killer, Dexter). Just because a house has fresh paint doesn’t mean it’s not haunted; just because a city is sun-drenched and ‘livable’ doesn’t mean horrible things can’t happen there. Let’s face it, the least expected and most horrific crimes are those performed in broad daylight.

What is it you’ve enjoyed most about the transition from writing screenplays to novels?
I think what’s enjoyable is the feeling that the transition continues. I’m still writing screenplays and television material while working on more long-form fiction. Each mode of writing enriches the other. Since writing a couple of novels, I feel I’m now able to bring to my screenplay writing a better understanding of character, because I’ve drilled so much more deeply into characters’ minds and motivations for the books. And for me, screenwriting helped make the novels more enjoyable because I’ve learned something about conventional story structure from screenwriting. Screenwriting has helped broaden my understanding about pacing scenes and building suspense; I learned through experience that a scene that lasts more than a few minutes on screen risks becoming deathly boring, and every scene has to help advance the story. These rules have a place in the kinds of books I write. Very importantly, screenwriting forced me to learn visual shorthand: how to paint a clear picture or mood very economically. In a screenplay of just 100 pages, you can’t devote a whole page describing a room or a person –- you get a sentence for that. The lessons about economical writing have been helpful, because if you know the essence of what you want to say, then it is more enjoyable to dress it up. Putting in is always more fun than taking out.

Another thing that surprises some people is that a significant amount of my screenwork has been comedic. Right now I am working on a comedy feature I’ve been commissioned to write for an Australian producer. I hope that a few sparks of levity have found their way into the novels.

There was a noirish feel to The Broken Ones — is crime writing something you’d like to explore further, or do you find the supernatural an irresistible attraction?
I am a sucker for good crime, in literature, film, and television, and I’ve been a fan of noir since seeing The Third Man in my first year at art college. I’m a dedicated fan of the gurus like Chandler, maestros like Cruz Smith, and seasoned experts like the late, great Robert B Parker. It’s delightful to think that some of my love for crime writing has rubbed off into The Broken Ones, which is ostensibly a detective story. I’m certainly continuing to work on more crime material –- my next novel, while not a police procedural, has strong crime elements, and I’m developing with a talented production company a new crime miniseries. It’s great fun. Chandler knew how to entertain, and he knew that everything had a dark side. ‘It is not a fragrant world.’

As for the supernatural, I can resist it -… but only for so long. My nightmares, when I have them, are inevitably about angry spirits. I think some writers write to exorcise, and it helps when I do.

What Australian works have you loved recently?
I really enjoyed The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoff McGeachin. It is set soon after the Second World War in country Victoria. My father was a serviceman in WWII, and no doubt his sensibilities were formed by his time as a young man, and remained with him for me to see and learn from. Geoff captured the spirit of the time beautifully, and had me almost nostalgic for an era I only knew about second hand. Apart from that, it was a great crime story with a smart, wounded protagonist. Right up my alley.

Claire Corbett’s futuristic novel When We Have Wings was highly inventive and very lovely.

And as a writer of stories with ghosts, I am a huge fan of Karina Machado’s non-fiction books about hauntings: Spirit Sisters and Where Spirits Dwell. The Australian spec fic scene is rich and varied right now, with some huge talents who are getting some well deserved recognition.

What have been some of the biggest changes in the Australian speculative fiction scene in the past two years?
I think the Australian market as a whole is responding to the same changes that the whole publishing world is facing with regard to digital books. While this new form is a phoenix to some and a spectre to others, I am delighted to see that it seems to have sparked a re-emerging interest from writers and readers in the novella. This is a form I’ve loved since adolescence when I first read seminal works like Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea. Given that a novella can be created in a third the time or less that it takes to craft a novel, the rich excitement of furious creation can often be sensed on the page. A story has a life of its own, and to be effectively told it needs to fill into its own body without constraint or artificial inflation –- some stories are simply too long for to be a ‘short’, and too contained to warrant novel length. I think since the 1980s, the bang-for-buck book purchasing mindset has made it increasingly difficult for publishers to justify the printing and marketing of the novella form, but the e-book format is making it much easier for publishers to price the form back into popularity, and also for self-publishers to get their works to market. I am delighted that a number of authors I know are working in this form right now. It is good news that this important middle sibling is coming back in force.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: Robert Hoge

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoBRISBANE writer Robert Hoge has never had a job that didn’t involve writing. His first job was working on a sports newspaper at the University of Queensland where he spent time interviewing future Olympic gold medallists before they were famous. Since then he’s worked as a full-time journalist, a speechwriter, a science communicator for the CSIRO and a political advisor. Robert has had a number of short stories, articles and interviews published in Australia and overseas. You can visit him at www.roberthoge.com.

You had a beautifully poetic short story in last year’s After the Rain anthology and there’s a similar atmosphere to other shorts: is that a preferred mode or just what best suited those yarns, a space you were in at the time…?
Glad you liked it.

I kind of hit on a series of shorts about the elements – especially water – almost by accident. I certainly didn’t plan it that way but I think I kept coming back to it because it was simple but brutally powerful at the same time.

I like taking the elements we’re so familiar with – water, rain, fire – and throwing them onto the page and seeing what happens.

You’ve got an autobiography occupying your time — where to after that, writing-wise?
Yep, I haven’t finished any new short stories in a while because I’m still really focussed on that. But by the end of the year, I want to knock a few new short stories out and get stuck into a novel about civil disobedience that keeps rattling around my head.

After the awards ceremony at Perth’s natcon last year, you wrote an open letter to the spec fic community about ensuring access to such ceremonies. What was the response?
The response was very heartening – especially from the event organisers themselves. Everyone seemed to immediately understand and acknowledge that we need to do better – as a community.

I think the community has a tremendous capacity to self-organise and self-correct when we need to. We can get an awful lot done when we put our mind to it.

What Australian works have you loved recently?
Well, if I keep it to the last year or so…

The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood; the collections by Paul Haines, Angela Slatter (2) and Lisa L. Hannett; and a lot of the really high quality stuff that’s coming out from Twelfth Planet Press.

I’ve also really been enjoying the artwork Kathleen Jennings has been producing – it’s great and you can tell almost immediately that it is a work produced by her.


What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
That’s a hard one. I think it’s so much easier for everyone to organise now, to communicate, that the changes seem – and probably are – less pronounced. And I think some of these things would have happened without Aussiecon 4 anyway, but I’m really impressed with the development of some of our independent presses. The people running them are doing great but I’m also really impressed with how much it is allowing other creatives like Amanda Rainey and Dion Hamill to develop as well.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: Sophie Masson

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoNEW South Wales writer Sophie Masson has written more than 50 books ranging from fantasy to history, mystery to graphic novels. In 2011 her historical novel, The Hunt for Ned Kelly, won the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, while her alternative history novel, The Hand of Glory, won the Young Adult category of the 2002 Aurealis Awards. She has also written several novels for adults, and four romantic thrillers for teenagers under the pen-name of Isabelle Merlin.

Her latest novels are The Boggle Hunters (Scholastic), a fantasy adventure for young readers 8-12, and My Brother Will (AchukaBooks), a novel for adults and young adults about a year in the Shakespeare family’s life, as told by William Shakespeare’s younger brother Gilbert. Forthcoming are the YA fairytale thriller Moonlight and Ashes (Random House) and the historical adventure novel for younger readers, Ned Kelly’s Secret (Scholastic).
www.sophiemasson.org


Your list of fairytale books is getting long! The latest, Moonlight and Ashes, is out this month. What was it about Cinderella that attracted you?
Well, I’ve always loved the story and been fascinated by it and how it’s probably the most common fairytale theme across all cultures and different times — the theme of the neglected, abused, oppressed young girl who is gifted a better life and love of her own. It is a common human longing. The versions of the story I know best are the classic French one, Cendrillon, as told by Perrault (with the fairy godmother); the English one, Tattercoats, collected by Joseph Jacobs (which has a flute-playing gooseherd as the magic-worker, and which I used for my earlier novel Cold Iron) and the German one collected by the Grimm brothers, Ashputtel , which has no fairy godmother or gooseherd but instead a magic tree which grows from a hazel twig that Ashputtel hears about in a dream sent to her by her dead mother. I always liked that version because the Cinderella figure there is much more active than many of the others, and a lot depends on her own strength of character. It’s that which drove the creation of my own Cinderella character, Selena — though I’ve pushed it even further with her. And I’ve made a complete setting for her too — a fully fleshed out world, which is actually an alternative-world version if you like of the late 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the main setting, Ashberg, based on Prague, which I visited a couple of years ago. Fairytales are extraordinary and always reveal so much when you work with them and this one was no exception. It was an intense emotional experience, writing it.


Your bibliography covers so many genres. In the recently published The Boggle Hunters, you seem to have mixed science fiction with fairy folk fantasy — did that pose any particular challenges?
Not really. What I’ve done is updated many fairytale and folklore motifs and given them a modern twist, so that the Fays and Grays, the rival faery tribes in The Boggle Hunters, invent all kinds of very science-fiction sounding gadgets and suchlike, but in truth they are jazzed-up versions of very traditional things: the IWish card is an update of three wishes, for instance; the ‘glammer’ which the boggle hunters carry with them is a cross between a magic wand, a computer, camera and many other things! It was immense fun to do!


With such a diverse back catalogue of genres and readerships, have you noticed any common themes? Or have you found that some genres suit different themes better than others?
Well there certainly are common themes — among them that Cinderella theme of the neglected and left behind winning through to love and happiness; also an examination of courage and its antithesis, which to me isn’t cowardice so much as cruelty; the world within the world rather than beyond it — I am firmly imbued with the idea of what the Welsh called Annfwn, the ‘In-World’ — the magic world is not outside of ours but living by it and behind it. I think my own experiences growing up as a child between two worlds — France and Australia — and two languages — French and English — have contributed to that. I am also very much interested in metamorphosis in all its forms, and dreams.

What Australian works have you loved recently?
Very recently, I’ve loved Kate Forsyth’s gorgeous riff on the Rapunzel story, Bitter Greens, which weaves three different stories within its historical and magical framework. Richard Harland’s extraordinary steampunk Worldshaker series is also a great recent favourite. And though it’s not brand new, I’ve just read Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier, which is a beautiful, suspenseful and unusual version of another of my favourite fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast, which Juliet has set in Ireland around the 12th century, I think — anyway, there are Norman invaders, so I thought probably that time. (Incidentally, I’m at present writing my own Beauty and the Beast novel , titled Scarlet in the Snow, which is inspired by the Russian version of the story, The Scarlet Flower and set in a country called Ruvenya, within the same basic world as Moonlight and Ashes.)

What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
I’m not sure — but perhaps the biggest change, and challenge, has come actually from general trends in publishing including the global financial crisis, which sort of made things harder for both writers and publishers, and the disruption but also opportunity afforded by e-publishing. Things are still shaking down from all that.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: Ian Irvine

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logoIAN Irvine, a marine scientist who has developed some of Australia’s national guidelines for protection of the marine environment and continues to work in this field, has written 28 novels. These include the internationally bestselling Three Worlds fantasy sequence (The View from the Mirror, The Well of Echoes and Song of the Tears), which has sold over a million copies, a trilogy of thrillers set in a world undergoing catastrophic climate change, Human Rites, and 12 books for younger readers, the most recent being the humorous fantasy quartet, Grim and Grimmer.

Ian’s latest fantasy novel is Vengeance, Book 1 of The Tainted Realm trilogy. He’s currently doing the final edits of the second book, Rebellion, which will be published in Australia in October 2012, and the US and UK in early 2013.

Keep up with Ian at his website www.ian-irvine.com and on Facebook.

Your eco-thrillers have been recently re-released: how has the market for such stories changed since they were first published?
I don’t know that it has, actually. As far as I can tell, the market for eco-thrillers has never been a huge one. Even at times when the public had a high level of concern about environmental issues, and has been flocking to eco-disaster movies such as The Day After Tomorrow, I’m told that sales of eco-thriller books have generally been modest. I’m not sure why – perhaps it’s a bit close to home.


Your latest novel is called Vengeance. What topics have you found that fantasy can talk about more easily or more effectively than other genres, if any?
I’ve long been fascinated by the ways that seizing or maintaining political power can undermine the legitimacy of a realm – it happens all the time in history. For instance in Australia, the current Gillard government is constantly being white-anted because of the way its previous prime minister was overthrown. Malcolm Fraser’s government 30 years ago also suffered from the way the previous Whitlam government was deposed.

This issue formed the germ of the idea behind The Tainted Realm – a nation, scarred by a deep sense of national guilt about its own origins, that now faces a resurgent enemy it has no idea how to fight.


Your recent releases include a series for younger readers and now this new, epic fantasy. What are the different joys and challenges you’ve experienced in writing for these two audiences?
One of the best things about being a writer is the ‘next-book dream’ – that the story I’m about to write will be original or provocative or funny or life-changing, or non-stop, edge-of-the-seat suspenseful. Sometimes, in moments of authorial madness, I imagine that it can be all of the above. And everything in my life: every snippet of research, every odd idea jotted down or moment of inspiration can go into the pot, get a good stir, simmer for weeks or years, then miraculously and effortlessly flow into the story. Ha!

One of the worst aspects is grinding out the first draft. It usually starts well, and sometimes runs well for as much as eight or 10 chapters. Vengeance did. And I was lulled, poor fool that I am. Yes, I thought, this book is going to be a snap.
Then suddenly I was in the writer’s ‘death zone’ where every word came with an effort, every sentence sounded banal, every character was done to death, every situation boring and repetitive. Nothing worked; nothing felt inspired. What had gone wrong? Had I used all my ideas up and burned myself out as a writer? I started to think that I’ll never write anything worth reading again.

Nearly every novel has this stage, which generally occurs about a quarter of the way in, and sometimes lasts until half-way. Of all my books, the only ones I’ve not been stuck on were the last two books of my humorous adventure stories for younger readers, Grim and Grimmer. They were written to such short deadlines and with such wild and wacky enthusiasm that there wasn’t time to get into the death zone. It was the first time I’d ever completely let go as a writer, and they were the most fun I’ve had writing.

Vengeance, on the other hand, was one of the worst because I had so many interruptions from other deadlines – pre-existing commitments for the last Runcible Jones YA novel plus the four Grim and Grimmers. Writing is hard work at the best of times, but doubly hard when I’m forced to jump back and forth between different kinds of books.

Also, because really big books present a writing challenge that doesn’t occur with small ones – it’s difficult to keep the whole vast canvas in mind at once. The only way to write such books (for me, anyway) is in long, uninterrupted slabs of time, otherwise every interruption hurls me out of the characters’ heads and I have to laboriously write my way back in again. And no matter how well yesterday’s writing went, each new day presents the same challenge.


What Australian works have you loved recently?
I’m a big fan of Richard Harland’s steampunk world, as exemplified in his terrific World Shaker and Liberator. I’ve also enjoyed Stephen Irwin’s dark thriller The Dead Path, and Trent Jamieson’s excellent trilogy The Business of Death. Apart from that, I’ve bought lots of Aussie speculative fiction recently but it’s still on the ever-growing unread pile.

What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
Sorry, I don’t have the faintest idea. I’m only now emerging from the busiest time of my writing life, and I rarely read short stories, so any emerging trends in Aussie speculative fiction have passed me by.

However, looking at the publishing and bookselling side of things, we face challenges we haven’t seen in the past decade and a half, since Aussie SF publishing, sales and international success exploded in the mid-to-late ’90s. From now on, due to the high dollar, the demise of book chains and the explosion in e-books and self-publication, it’s going to be a lot harder to get published by a traditional print publisher than it has been at any time since 1995, and sales, for the most part, are liable to be smaller because we’re also competing with a million self-published e-book titles. They might only sell a handful of copies individually, but because there’s so many of them, they add up to a significant chunk of the market. So, tough times ahead, but fantastic opportunities as well.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at:

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Snapshot 2012: MK Hume

australian speculative fiction snapshot 2012 logo
Queenslander MK (Marilyn) Hume worked as an English teacher for 40 years. She has studied art, English and ancient history and, armed with a doctorate, she has put this background to good use: the eight-book Arthuriad series, of which five have been released so far. The latest is Death of an Empire (Hachette). All up, she’s written 11 books, has another trilogy in negotiation and has a new series set in ancient Egypt underway. She is online at mkhume.com.au .

What do you think keeps readers, and writers, coming back to the Arthurian story?
The Arthuriad is a universal tale that encompasses every human emotion, trial and strength. The characters have flaws which allow us to find points of comparison and similarity with the feelings and ethics of the reader. The plots are exciting, but they are also life-changing and transcendent. The heroic ideal of Arthur, although weakened in some literary versions of the Arthuriad, still extol honour, bravery, courage, duty, sacrifice and love, characteristics which strike a chord in the human imagination.

Was it hard separating history from fantasy/myth when writing the Arthur and now Merlin series?
It was actually fun. After having studied the history carefully, and knowing that legend grows out of something that will last throughout the ages (although disguised in the mythic elements of the plot), I enjoyed finding the beginning of such elements of the tale as the Round Table.

Ironically, I conceived that the Round Table of the legends was not a table, per se, but was probably an old Roman building that had been roofed and walled and then adapted for use by Arthur as a meeting place for the leaders of the various tribes of Celtic Britain. It seemed reasonable to me that to travel to Cadbury all the time would put a huge strain on the northern tribes such as the Brigante and the Otadini. I considered it likely that a central location was likely and searched my charts for a suitable meeting place. My choice inserted in the Merlin novel was Chester.

Twelve months after inserting my educated guess in the novel, I was quite amazed to receive an e-mail from an historian friend in Glastonbury advising me of an article in the British press (Mail Online, July 11, 2010) stating that Arthur’s round table had been found during the excavation of a building site in Chester. The small arena was an ancient Roman Amphitheatre used for gladiatorial contests in the 4th and 5th centuries. The find occurred almost one year to the day after the manuscript of the novel was completed.

Guessing, using all available information, what created an element of the legend was a fascinating process. The Sword in the Stone, the Lady of the Lake, the oak tree that traps Merlin and the Rape of Ygerne were all aspects of the Arthuriad that provided me with the opportunity to think laterally and find a plausible explanation to tie the Arthurian strands together.

I found it easy to remove magic from the equation. Morgan is largely powerless in my stories, and so psychologically damaged that she is more to be pitied than feared. I really didn’t want to weaken the huge endeavour that Arthur/Arturius attempted (culture clash of huge destructive proportions) by placing any reliance on magic by my major characters. After all, if Merlin had the power to wave his hands and make the enemies of Arthur disappear, why didn’t he do so? Merlin’s contribution to the legend is for less heroic if he has magic at his disposal.

Second Sight, or prophecy, is another matter entirely. Many people experience such forms of paranormal intervention. My own mother, a Christian and an intelligent woman not prone to hysterical imaginings, always knew when a member of the family was under threat, a talent that she hated. Like her, I have experienced things that my rational mind can’t explain, so the Sight enters into my Arthuriad in much the same way as it is used in many novels and non-fiction works. But the Sight in my stories doesn’t give unnatural advantages to its bearers. It is very much the curse that my mother considered it to be.

You did a PhD on Charles Williams, who wrote ‘esoteric Arthurian literature’. Did that influence your fiction in any way?
Charles Williams, the flawed genius who wrote the Arthurian poems ‘The Region of the Summer Stars’ and ‘Taliessin Through Logres’, was a seriously troubled man. Like him, I included Constantinople into my story but so much of his content is unpleasant and he seemed to me to be as idiosyncratic as any other Arthurian writer. I enjoyed The Once and Future King by TH White, but I couldn’t bear the overly sensitive, weak and fragile Arthur. I did enjoy his sympathetic, almost comic view of some of the other characters. I found The Idylls of the King, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, to be sheer brilliance.p>Of course, something must have rubbed off among the melange of Arthurian sources, but I genuinely don’t recognise those influences. I had to read everything written in the Arthurian tradition while studying for my Masters’ degree and that exposure was of major significance in that I could place the legends against the historically accurate period of the Dark Ages and make something that is mine and quite valid, from my point of view.

What Australian works have you loved recently?
The Miss Fisher series is good fun and I really liked Tomorrow When the War Began <by John Marsden> and introduced it and its fellow titles into schools where I was the head of department for English. I am often frustrated by Australian literature which seems to have a point to make, for some reason known only to the perpetrators of these bullies. My favourite poet is the rebellious AD Hope with his attacks on the status quo. I can’t stand bush stories, although I grew up on them in my grandfather’s house and am still stirred by Banjo Paterson’s ballads. There are so many heroic possibilities in the Australian nature that I’m surprised that there aren’t many novels written in this genre (Except for Bryce Courtenay). I absolutely loved Colleen McCullough’s crime novels set in the 1960s in a forensic laboratory, but I loved her Caesar series as well, especially The Grass Crown.

Basically, I don’t see why Australian writers have to write about Australia!

What have been some of the biggest changes in Australian speculative fiction in the past two years since Aussiecon 4?
I can see more creativity battering down the walls of the literati. ‘Why not!’ is now a recognisable and valid answer to the unspoken accusation of not following the Australian model. Speculative fiction especially sets out to stir the imagination, prompt discussion and push the boundaries, so I feel very hopeful that young Australian writers won’t be crippled by the disasters of the past, such as the lionising of Darville/Demidenko because she followed this spurious model. I think those days are dead and speculative fiction can now thrive in a more creative landscape.

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THIS interview was conducted as part of the 2012 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’re blogging interviews from 1-8 June and archiving them at Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus. You can read interviews at: