Episode 3 is available for download/live play here, or subscribe to us through iTunes. I’m posting the show notes here as well as some versions of Firefox struggle to load them on the GS page…

Galactic Suburbia Episode 3 – 2 April

News:

Alisa’s live report from Swancon!

Tiptree winners & Honours List including Wives Wives Wives

Arthur C Clarke shortlist

Hugos – largest number of votes ever received. Shortlist out Easter Sunday, UK time:

Launch of new Asif website

Stephenie Meyer to release a novella for free to fans online followed by the hard copy version from June 5.

Shaun Tan’s Eric

k9 to screen on Australian tv tomorrow on Channel 10! [heh this is officially old news now]

Garth Nix and Sean Williams, teaming up with Troubletwisters

What have we been reading?

Tansy - Lifelode, by Jo Walton & Chicks Dig Time Lords

Alisa – The Women Men Don’t See/ What I Didn’t see and commentary, Alice Sheldon’s Biography

Alex – Lord of the Rings, also “To Write like a Woman,” collected essays by Joanna Russ.

Pet Subject: Media Tie-Ins

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, talking about Star Wars – initially in Star Wars on Trial, a BenBella collection

See also http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2010/03/guest-blogger-ari-marmell-on-writing.html

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If you have any feedback or comments for us, please email galacticsuburbia@gmail.com

2 April 2010

Just some late breaking news here. The Tiptree winners and honours list have been released. I love the fact that they do it this way, so the shortlisted people get to appreciate that honour without getting distracted about whether or not they won…

It really is an honour to be shortlisted, you know.

Jonathan Strahan’s well received anthology Eclipse 3, which is full of awesome stories, many of them by women, had two individual stories honoured by this year’s Tiptree, which is pretty extraordinary. Congratulations to Caitlin Kiernan & Maureen McHugh. McHugh’s story in particular was one of my favourites last year.

The other super supremely exciting news for Australians is that Paul Haines’ extraordinary novella “Wives” is on the honour list. It’s really rare for Australians to be noticed in awards like this – and it’s wonderful that this brilliant story about grotesque gender politics has been recognised internationally for what it is.

EDIT: Quote from the judge’s report grabbed from  papersky’s LJ – “Wives” by Paul Haines (in X6 edited by Keith Stevenson, coeur de lion 2009) —A sharp and powerful but deeply ugly look at white working class Australian masculinity in a world where women are scarce.

SECOND EDIT: Finally found a link to the real judge’s report/press release!

So after my thwarted attempt to have a no buying books for myself month in December (I swear, feminist tomes kept hurling themselves at my head, it was a moral imperative to take them home) and because my bank balance is looking somewhat sickly, I decided that I was going to refrain from buying books for the months of February AND March.

This is a very big deal.

What this means is nothing that gives me the ‘hit’ that comes from purchasing a book – which includes clicking pre-order buttons. So far what I have learned from the exercise is that yes, I am an addict.

I thought I would track the experiment (and keep myself from clicking ‘buy’ buttons) by keeping track of all the books I had more than a fleeting impulse to buy – ones that I definitely wanted for at least three moments. I should add that it is unlikely I would have bought all the books on the list without the pledge holding me back – at least, I really hope not.

So far I’m ten days in and I have 17 books on the list.

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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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