This graphic novel is one of the freebies that was sent out with the Hugo packet to help those with voting rights become more informed about the shortlisted works. Can I just say, how awesome is reading comics in e-format? I need to digitise my JLA collection stat.

Girl Genius, written and drawn by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is a webcomic available free, which also releases the stories in graphic novel format each year. I’ve been interested in this one for some time and gone so far as to bookmark the site, but have never got around to actually finding the time to check it out properly. This fantastical steampunk (or gaslamp fantasy) tale of “Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!” has been running for ten years and I knew going into it that starting at Vol. 9 was asking for trouble.

Sure enough, it was hard to get into at first. I liked the artwork, which is bright and gorgeous and features some beautifully human-shaped women (by no means a common event in any comic art). I liked the steampunk/gaslamp iconography, but for the first several pages it seemed like it mostly consisted of young people in corsets and tight trousers shouting at each other.

Gradually, though, Girl Genius got under my skin. The slow dripfeed of backstory and worldbuilding meant that by the time I was halfway through, I pretty much knew most of the relevant things that had happened so far, and what was at stake. I was also very attached to many of the characters, mildly invested in the romances, and starting to laugh at the in jokes.

Agatha and her friends are stuck in a sentient castle that may or may not want some of them dead. One of her love interests is dying in any case, from a mysterious and extremely colourful ailment, and the other is wandering around with an Agatha-imposter, flexing his muscles and generally getting into trouble. As promised on the tin, there is adventure and romance and mad science. The worldbuilding is beautiful, especially the concepts of the Sparks, and the way that magic, science and engineering intersect with each other. The characters are appealling and I particularly loved the scenes where the two boys were forced to work together, acknowledging that they both care for Agatha and, it seems, have a secret past of their own.

Agatha Heterodyne is definitely worth your time, especially if you have a thing for strong, talented female heroes, snark, steampunk, love triangles and people building shiny things in dark laboratories. It has a feel of a particularly smart manga to it, and you can read it without paying a cent. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Ooh, and you can buy the collections in pdf form. I’m so there!

I can tell the end of The Creature Court is on the horizon, because I’ve spent the day being hit in the head by other books. Important, exciting future books which are not yet. The trouble is, now I’ve answered the last questions about Book 3, my brain is telling me that the job is all done, which is patently not true.

Also both the books smacking me over the head today are the Wrong Books and in no way the one I planned to write next. For which I have sensibly been applying for grants, and planning to use to put a proposal together for Voyager in the second half of the year.

Damn it. Work’s not done. Work’s not done. Could someone inform my brain of this important fact? I don’t have time to construct a lavish Shakespearian alternate universe right this second.

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The Hugo shortlist nominees went up on Twitter this morning, Australian time – luckily I had been woken up early by my adorable/dreadful children, so I was around to read them as they came in.

I haven’t been as excited about a Hugo shortlist in years – not just because I got to nominate and will get to vote in these particular ones, but because it does look as if there has been a bit of a demographic shift this year. There are lots of women, new writers and online publications represented across most of the categories. Many things I really liked and indeed nominated got up, which is rather nice.

Congratulations to all the nominees! Hope to see as many of you as possible at Aussiecon this September.

The shortlisted items/people I am most excited about are:
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor) [best novel nominee]
“Act One”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09) [best novella nominee]
“Eros, Philia, Agape”, Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09) [best novelette nominee]
“The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2) [best novelette nominee]
“It Takes Two”, Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three) [best novelette nominee]
“Spar”, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09) [best short story nominee]
On Joanna Russ, Farah Mendlesohn (ed.) (Wesleyan) [best related book nominee]
The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms, Helen Merrick (Aqueduct) [best related book nominee]
Jonathan Strahan [best editor, short form nominee]
Shaun Tan [best pro artist nominee]
StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith [best fanzine nominee]

And the works that have been added to or moved up to the top of my reading list are:
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra) [best novel nominee]
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade) [best novel nominee]
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean) [best novella nominee]
Soulless by Gail Carriger [The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominee]
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire [The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer nominee]

Ah yes, somehow it all comes down to more books for Tansy to read… funny, that.

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In honour of it being awards season, Twelfth Planet Press is offering free e-copies of Horn, A Book of Endings and SIREN BEAT through the month of February.

If you’re eligible to nominate in the Hugos or the Ditmars, obviously we’d love it if you thought any of the above works were worthy of your nomination. (not sure when the Ditmars are opening for nominations but it’s sure to happen eventually)

Even better, if you enjoy reading your free e-copies, consider buying a hard copy of your favourite Twelfth Planet Press book. Indie press appreciates your support!

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.)

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Some links on feminist issues, sexism & gender awareness.

Sarah Rees Brennan is writing awesomeness about women in fiction again, debunking all the dumb excuses people give for being more critical of female characters than male (features the big spoiler for The Demon’s Lexicon):

There are also issues with writing people with disabilities, people of colour, people who are gay. There are even issues with writing straight white guys, because they too live in a world where inequality exists, and this affects them too! All these issues! That’s why it is impossible to ever write any characters at all. And so all my writing goes like this ‘the void… BLANK PAGES … the void… BLANK PAGES.’ It’s very deep.

Cheryl Morgan talks about how to get women nominating for and appearing on the Hugo shortlists, and looks a bit at the psychology that means women usually don’t get fairly represented. In particular she suggests that women are more likely to disqualify themselves from being well-read enough to venture an opinion.

 coffeeandink on male privilege & perception of merit in comics – a beautiful illustration of the ways in which some men can unconsciously discount the work of women, particularly in geek-friendly arenas. This might be one to bookmark and point people to as a great example of invisible sexism at work.

A round-table discussion on how to define and redefine ‘strong’ when it comes to YA heroines.

Moving away from speculative fiction and geekery circles, here’s an interview with Natasha Walter about the return of sexism and the pressure on young girls who don’t feel they have a choice to opt out of porn culture.

 girliejones has posted about the Hugo eligibility of all the Twelfth Planet Press stories published in 2009. This includes my:

“Siren Beat” (novelette)
“Prosperine When it Sizzles,” New Ceres Nights (short story)
“Like Us,” Shiny (short story)

And that, because I’ve been a one-publisher woman for short fiction for the last couple of years (aka lazy) completely covers me as far as Hugo eligibility goes.

It would be awesome to see some Australian names on the Hugo ballot this year since there are a lot more of us eligible to nominate than most years – which should at least in theory mean that more people who read Aussie fiction are eligible to nominate! I’m ridiculously excited about getting to nominate, and keep going back as I think of new good ones to put in there.

My favourite Australian-written spec fic stories of the year were:

Paul Haines, “Wives,” x6 (novella)
Margo Lanagan, “Ferryman,” Firebirds Soaring (short story)
Peter M. Ball, “On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk,” Strange Horizons (short story)

and I also really liked:

Peter M. Ball, Horn, Twelfth Planet Press (novella)
Deborah Biancotti “This Time, Longing,” A Book of Endings (short story)
Thoraiya Dyer, “The Widow’s Seven Candles,” New Ceres Nights (novelette)
Dirk Flinthart, “Debutante,” New Ceres Nights (short story)
Trent Jamieson, “Iron Temple,” x6 (novella)
Margo Lanagan, “Sea-Hearts,” x6 (novella)
Cat Sparks, “Seventeen,” Masques (short story I think?)

Peter M Ball is also eligible for the John W. Campbell Award

You can see my whole list of great short stories published worldwide in 2009 over at Last Short Story, and the combined recommended reading list of all the Last Short Story readers here. If you have some reading to catch up with before you nominate, you might get some good ideas of where to start over at those lists.

What favourite stories of the year, Australian or otherwise, would you like to see on the Hugo ballot?