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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 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?

I’ve really been enjoying Rachel Swirsky’s guest posts over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Her latest piece is a review of Cat Rambo’s collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Midnight (Paper Golem Press, 2009) which engages directly with another review of the collection from Publisher’s Weekly. Swirsky moves fluidly between defending Rambo from the scathing remarks of the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer to agreeing with aspects of what they say, and it makes for a very dynamic review.

One of the points Swirsky makes is that a collection can be weakened by extra material. Or, to be perhaps more accurate, a collection can be made stronger by leaving out some of the material. Her belief is that Rambo’s collection would have benefited from containing the twelve stories she considers excellent, and not the other eight stories she sees as less-excellent padding.

This is something that I’ve been harping on about for some time, whenever I can pin people down long enough to listen. There’s a tendency in small press (and not only in small press, it has to be said) to try to offer “value” for money through sheer quantity of words, or number of stories. But the older I get and the higher my reading pile teeters, the less interested I am in books that feel the need to be completionist, to pack in lots of material at the expense of the overall vibe.

I’ve read a lot of anthologies over the course of the last few years, thanks to Last Short Story as well as my own interest in short fiction. Apart from ‘best ofs’ which are another thing again, it’s hard to think of any that couldn’t have been improved by having fewer stories. This is particularly the case of theme anthologies, where 8-10 excellent stories exploring variations on a theme works much better than 20 stories that do the same. Even if the second 10 are *almost* as excellent as the best 10, the theme becomes diluted and well and can easily wear out its welcome.

I love it when publishers big and small go with a small, intense selection rather than an overpadded one. The Twelfth Planet Press books tend to do this. I also like the X6 novella anthology (yes I hear the book is huge, but it’s only 6 actual stories, which is a really good number of stopping and starting points). I’ve also been enjoying several anthos-packaged-for teens which include between three and six long-short stories from very recognisable name authors, and come in as slender volumes.

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I recently put up my Best of the Year short story list up at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. (Alisa, Ben, Alex and Sarah have all put their lists up too) This also meant that I got to deal with my annual ‘is it okay that most of the stories I like are by women, and does that make me a hypocrite?’ qualms.

I have, on occasion, been rather scathing of Best Of lists, shortlists, and collected works which skew towards celebrating the work of male authors over and above the work of female authors. I frequently challenge the idea that “taste” matters in these cases. I do continue to believe that it is a problem when the majority of people who tell us where to find the best fiction of year have “taste” that skews towards the male. Because it ceases to become a matter of personal taste and starts to be a matter of politics when the pattern is so wide, so all-encompassing that it is considered the default.

My cards on the table: I skew towards the celebration of the female. This isn’t a political decision on my part. I don’t set out to ’see’ the value of women’s art over that of the male. I just do. I was raised by a very feminist single mother who made sure that I was exposed to female artists and themes. I was very aware from a very young age about how this stuff works – how themes preferred by female artists are often treated differently to those preferred by men. I saw my mother and other women at the Art School (especially the very male-oriented Sculpture Department) risk failing grades for making art about motherhood. So there is that political edge there, and it has informed the construction of my personal taste, in that I was never taught to not value women’s art.

When I make a list of stuff I liked, it’s exactly that. Stuff I liked. And generally speaking, when it comes to short stories, I come up roughly 75% stuff I liked by women, and 25% by men. My lists with novels skewer much higher, because unlike short fiction, I often self-select male authors out of the equation. Male writers have to be very, very good and come recommended by people I trust for me to spend time on them. My current tally for 2009 is 12 – 2 non fiction, 4 fiction and 6 anthologies written, edited or co-edited by men. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Though it is out of a total of books read of 108…

I’m okay with my reading choices. I read for several reasons: enjoyment, to increase awareness of what’s going on currently in the fields of literature I’m most interested in (children’s, YA, fantasy, some crime, some SF), to educate myself about the classics, and to find good books to recommend to others. The aspects of my current reading I feel most guilty about lately are: not reading enough classics (particularly those by female authors) and not reading enough “grown up books” (YA tastes so gooood). Not reading enough books by men doesn’t actually bother me at all.

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It feels sooooo strange to be posting without a word count bar at the top. It’s going to be March now before I’m back to writing first draft stuff. Straaange. But like everything else, I’m sure it will be here pretty damned fast.

Despite NaNo commitments and all the Last Short Storying, I managed to read 8 books in the last month, which is only two short of my monthly target.

The three I loved best were Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer and Rampant by Diana Peterfreund (I’ll link to my review of that one when ASif posts it).

I also very much enjoyed Luv Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle and I’m afraid rather dragged myself through Vacations From Hell, a YA short story collection which was not nearly as diverting as Prom Nights From Hell.

I really liked The It Girl: Adored, one of the Gossip Girl spin off Jenny-Humphrey-goes-to-boarding-school books, though I’ll admit I don’t remember much about it. This is my favourite Gossip Girl series. I also went back to the classics by reading the second of the ‘real’ Gossip Girl books, You Know You Love Me, which is kind of… weird to be reading now, after seeing the series. Alternate history!

Yes, I’m hoping to get to more crunchy books in future months as my post-baby fatigue ebbs away but I do love my YA…

I read The New Space Opera II, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, as part of my final round up of stories for LSS (favourite stories recced here) and that totally counts toward my book total even though the 200,000 odd words of Shadow Unit doesn’t… sigh. I enjoyed TNSOII though overall the stories were less exciting/inventive/generally wondrous than in Eclipse 3, also edited by Jonathan, which I did not read this month, but which may well be my anthology of the year… I’ll let you know on Dec 31st!

TNSOII does have the distinction of being the first entire book I read on the iPod, via Stanza, which may well change the way I read in the future. Considering the wealth of e-material we receive for LSS can I just say… YAY! The iPod touch is remarkably easy to read even in a sunny playground, and I love the page turny facility of Stanza even if it does turn docs into random chapters. Also it makes reading while a) breastfeeding, b) babyjoggling, c) big girl cuddling, d) cooking, e) driving (KIDDING) awfully easy.

Finally I have a reason to develop a love affair with Project Gutenberg!

As a final note, Glenda Larke is guest blogging over at Ripping Ozzie Reads, about her experience as a pro writer tackling NaNoWriMo for the first time. Go check it out!