Deborah Biancotti has written a gorgeous essay about how creepy, horrific, threatening and generally unfriendly she finds the Australian landscape. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, undercutting and at the same time contributing to a couple of centuries of problematic attempts by writers and artists to describe, capture and define something that is pretty damn alien.

I remember hearing a story of a “genius” English painter who came out to Australia to capture the landscape, only to discover that we had the wrong kind of green. Not in paint, you understand. The trees were the wrong kind of green. Traditionally, most 19th century Australian painters approached our landscape as if it was – well, England, only without the hedgehogs.

I’m sure every country and culture has an idealised literary tradition to rail against. (Have you read a Beatrix Potter lately? Jemima Puddleduck, for example, rivals Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a place on the list of “books that make you want to kill yourself.”) But there’s something about Australia – the combination of fear and dread and danger and shame… the fact that even someone my age was so swamped with British culture that I have struggled to understand or appreciate any of the Great Australian Authors.

I live in Tasmania, which is completely unlike most of the rest of Australia. The thing, though, about Australia, is that just about everywhere is unlike most of the rest of Australia. The idea of some kind of collective identity seems strange. I remember when I and the other ROR writers were putting our series bible and pitch for the Lost Shimmaron series – we all lived in different parts of Australia, but we needed a town to base all the stories in. For the sake of appealing to as wide a range of Australian kids as possible, we needed somewhere generic, but you know, there is no generic Australian town, or generic Australian experience. There’s a big difference between living in Queensland, or New South Wales, or Tasmania, and that’s even before you get to the great divide between the eastern and western states.

(more…)

I’ve been seeing the table of contents for upcoming Twelfth Planet Press anthology Sprawl pop up on various author blogs. I feel particularly invested in this anthology, not just because I’m in it (with the only short story I’ve written since Jem was born!) but because GJ was staying with us as she sifted through the stories, finding the ones that would fit together to form the anthology (or something like it) that she had in her head. And yes, I managed to peek at some of the other stories as she considered them, and talked about them.

The question that GJ seemed to chew over most often – and it was a question I had about my own story, back when I was writing it – was “is it suburban enough?” The idea of an Australian genre anthology that focuses on suburbia rather than the more often-seen country/bush/outback and even urban settings of Australian spec fic was an important one, worthy of being embraced rather than skirted around as a theme. We ended up having many conversations about Australian identity, and suburbia, as well as the kind of fantasy people are writing in Australia and internationally. The most interesting thing is that there is no single universal experience about suburbia – some are more urban, some more rural, some are stories about drugs and sharehouses, some are stories about families and maternity. Suburban fantasy, in other words, is not something that can be summed up in a single story, but the anthology is the perfect medium for it – building the idea through many stories, many characters, and many settings.

Australia is just so damned big – and so different, from place to place. There may be common themes in stories told about Brisbane suburbs, or Perth suburbs, or Hobart suburbs, but there’s a lot different too. It seems to me that one of the best ways to talk about cultural identity in a wider sense than just an individual’s experience is to gather a variety of stories and hope that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

(more…)

Paul Haines is offering his acclaimed novella Wives in free electronic copy for anyone who asks. This is an awesome, epic piece of Australian horror/post-apocalyptic science fiction from last year, and if you’d like to see some Australian content on the Hugo ballot, this would be a marvellous one to support.

Wives isn’t just a great piece of fiction, it’s an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that he writes stories I hate, about people I hate (and I don’t mean mild revulsion, I mean actual HATE), and yet I can’t pull my eyes away. “Wives” is his best work to date, an utterly hideous vision of the near future, exploring issues that are already very relevant to many people – the lack of women sticking around in country Australia, the sociological effect of preferring male children to female and, oh yes, the ingrained misogyny that hovers just out of sight in our culture. Haines exposes the ugliest sides of human nature in this epic story of “Bridal Services,” rape and slavery, told through the eyes of a narrator so utterly screwed up by his circumstances that it’s hard to blame him for the despicable, thoughtless way that he speaks, lives and acts. This is post-apocalyptic fiction at its best and worse, because there is no apocalypse. There’s just us.

(in discussion with my fellow LSSers about “Wives,” I said “I don’t know whether I want to nominate it for the Tiptree or BURN IT TO THE GROUND.” Yeah, that. Just that.)

(more…)

I’ve pretty much spent most of my twenties, resolutely avoiding anything to do with (comtemporary) Literature or ‘the literary scene’ as my few attempts to dip my toe into that particular puddle have only left me feeling befuddled and alienated. Or, you know, bored. There are some exceptions. I have occasionally been deeply moved/entertained by a poetry reading, or have found points in common with a fellow reader (such as, for instance, my Dad) whose literary preferences are mostly diametrically opposite to my own.

Oh yes, I have my biases. When it comes to literature with a capital L, I can be positively bigoted, and I keep telling myself that, whatever my past experiences, however much that Carmel Bird novel that was apparently “just like a fantasy novel” was in fact, not in any way like a fantasy novel, I should challenge myself on occasion, and get over it.

To this end, I bought a subscription to Overland Magazine in their last subscription drive, and my first issue arrived a few weeks ago. I’d heard vaguely about this particular publication over the years, because of its tangential relationship to the SF scene – they’ve published  benpeek, and Rjurik Davidson is one of their associate editors. Apparently they are also planning to review some specfic works this year…

(more…)