I was linked by @preciousthings on Twitter to this great article which introduced me to comicbookGRRRL.  Here, she blogs about the criticism that female bloggers receive when tackling issues to do with women on any geeky subject, and why blogging about comics is important to her.  From there I also found her massive “Women in New 52” review which I enjoyed because she had some refreshingly different opinions on some of the comics than I’ve read elsewhere. In particular, her discussion of the bits she liked about the new Catwoman comic (such as the way the expression of Selena’s personality through action, and especially her friend/fence Lola) and her later comparison between how sexuality is portrayed in Catwoman vs. how it is portrayed with Starfire in Red Hood and the Outlaws.  She also loved some comics I hated, was indifferent to some I really liked, and so on. Good stuff!

Which reminded me that I have forgotten to update reviews on the other #2s I have read in the last two weeks.  Ooops!

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Big Finish has a huge back catalogue of plays – more than 12 years worth – and it’s hard for people to know how and where to jump on board. I recently discovered the Little Finish podcast, which is great, but probably of limited value to casual listeners, as they review that month’s plays, spoilers and all. If you’re not keeping up with the latest ones, you’re likely to not get much out of it, which is a shame because it’s a very fun podcast! Anyone wanting to check it out might want to pick the Nicholas Courtney memorial episode, which reviews every Courtney appearance in Big Finish, and has some lovely recommendations and clips.

Anyway, in listening to Little Finish I came to the (not overly shocking) realisation that I actually am one of those listeners now – I subscribe to multiple streams of plays, and have caught up so substantially that I’m in a pretty good position to review, say, the Doctor Who releases for the entire first half of this year.

So here we go!

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The splendid review of Love and Romanpunk in the last Locus Magazine is now available on their website.

Among other lovely things, Adrienne Martini says:

The obvious comparison for Rayner Roberts’ work here is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They both have vampires, slayers, and meaty relationships. But Love and Romanpunk is its own, self-contained vision, one that turns the wit and heart up as much as any story could sustain. Rayner Roberts’ lean prose draws you in from the first few paragraphs and keeps that pace going straight through.

You can of course buy this manticore-slaying little volume at Twelfth Planet Press.

The Shattering, by Karen Healey
Thyla, by Kate Gordon
Will Supervillains Be On The Final? Vol. One, by Naomi Novik & Yishan Li

I haven’t been reading nearly as much as I want to lately, but I have made some great YA discoveries.

Guardian of the Dead, by Karen Healey, was one of the most interesting YA debut novels last year, with its mixture of serial killer horror and Maori mythology, featuring contemporary New Zealand teenagers with both snark and substance. I was delighted to receive an early copy of Karen Healey’s follow up novel, The Shattering – so much so that I took it as my in flight entertainment for the Aurealis Awards weekend, at which Guardian of the Dead ended up winning Best Novel!

Set in an idyllic New Zealand tourist town, this book has a very simple premise at the heart of it – teenagers uncovering supernatural wrongdoings – but it becomes something far more crunchy and intriguing thanks to the complex, diverse protagonists and Healey’s sensitive handling of some pretty major issues, including teen suicide, grief response, mental health, bullying and coming out to your parents. The absolute heart of the novel is the friendship between the three main characters, who all bond over the shared grief of losing an elder brother to suicide, and decide to investigate whether there is a more sinister reason behind their loss. I loved each of these characters deeply and enjoyed how flawed they are as well as how strong. I also *adored* the fact that, while there is romance here, the novel took a very pragmatic attitude towards teenage love stories, and that the central triad (two girls and a boy) was about as far from a love triangle as it is possible to get.

Original, fast paced and richly detailed, The Shattering is a powerful second novel from a writer whose narrative choices are never dull.

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There have been some lovely reviews (and sort of not reviews) of my work around this week. I am grateful for all of them! Having books which are talked about is an utterly joyful thing. Feel free to skip if any mention of my books is making you roll your eyes at this point. I promise plenty of Xena, Agatha Christie and gender politics blogging to come!

Over at Salon Futura, Cheryl Morgan says some excellent things about Power and Majesty. I was astonished to hear she was reading and reviewing it at all, since it’s not a book generally available outside Australia and New Zealand. (an email this week made me crazy happy, from a US reader who heard about me from a guest blog I wrote last year, asked his parents who were travelling through NZ to pick up a copy of P&M for me, and they did so after visiting 3 different shops to find it – how awesome is that? Luckily he liked the book, otherwise that would have been embarrassing) Cheryl calls me brave in my writing choices, and has some beautiful explanation of what my books actually do. She also provides some very grabbable quotes:

“Fans of Storm Constantine might find a lot to interest them in this collection of fashionable, sexy, dangerous misfits.”

“As fans of the Galactic Suburbia podcast might expect, it is also a feminist book. “

Publishers are always complaining that they can’t find anything new, fresh and interesting to offer their audiences, and yet this book is not available in the UK or USA. I cannot for the life of me understand why.

I always feel guilty when people overseas want to get hold of my work and can’t, at least not easily. Here’s hoping Creature Court is snapped up by one of those lovely US or UK publishers who agree with Cheryl that it should be more widely available!

A little closer to home, Random Alex has reviewed (or rather, not-reviewed) Love and Romanpunk – I’m glad she did write up her thoughts about this book, given that I dedicated it to her and all, but completely understand her hesitation to claim it as a real review. Still, at least she declares her biases! I think my favourite bit in the post is her response to what I did with Caligula in “Julia Agrippina’s Secret Family Bestiary,” which I will quote here because the other review of this book I’m going to quote from didn’t like that story at all (YES, BEN, LOOKING AT YOU):

“The first story in this collection is “Julia Agrippina’s Secret Bestiary.” It gives a potted history of the Caesar family… with added monsters. I really enjoyed Tansy’s characterisation of the various members of this crazy family. She captures an essence, I think, of the various emperors and their wives/sisters/mothers that actually rings quite true. I particularly liked that although Gaius – Caligula – is shown to be a bit nuts eventually, he’s handled much more sensitively than most other fictional representations bother. Of course. And the monsters made a bizarre sort of sense; they fit in delightfully well with the overall vibe of the story.”

Then there’s Ben Payne’s review – and all teasing aside, Ben is one of those people whom I absolutely rely on to be honest about what he likes and doesn’t like about my work. He’s also been reading me & paying attention to my short fiction for a lot longer than most people – having edited my work before he even knew me, back in the old Andromeda Spaceways days!

Which is why this bit, in particular, bowled me over:

“I have been thinking for a while about how to best sum up Love and Romanpunk. In some ways it delivered what I expected, but in others it surprised me. I expected this book to be smart, to know its history, to have a sense of fun, and some laughs, and some steamy romance. Those things are almost Tansy trademarks. And it does have all those things, but in the end, all of those things felt almost peripheral to the things I liked most about the collection.

What’s not often talked about, with Tansy’s writing, is the fact that there is a real emotional courage to her best works, a sense that she is ready to get into her gumboots and rubber gloves and muck about in the messiest, ugliest, most confusing of human emotions and relationships, and to try to find a path through them. It’s that depth of emotion, sometimes sweet, but just as often brutal and painful, that drives the best of these stories into being something a cut above the majority of works out there. The fact that they are also smart, and fun, is just the icing on the cake.”

With comments like that, I can totally forgive him for not liking my Agrippina story!

There haven’t been many reviews for The Shattered City yet, though it is interesting to note how many people are reading and reviewing P&M now that the second book is out. I have been eyeing the responses on Goodreads, though. Would it be far too self-indulgent to put up a post where people who have read Book #2 could comment about the surprisey bits without worrying about spoiling anyone?

I’ve been slammed by edits the last few days and feeling a bit at a low ebb – the pretty book plates went a long way to cheering me up, as did this long and thoughtful review essay by Alexandra Pierce.

Alex unpacks a lot of things I have been hoping people would notice about Power and Majesty – some I’ve talked about publicly and some I haven’t. I’m delighted she got so much out of it and was particularly pleased to see her discuss it in relation to the urban fantasy genre – I always intended P&M to bridge urban & otherworld fantasy, and in fact spent a chunk of this afternoon discussing that on what will be my next episode of the CreatureCourtCast!

Here’s a few good quotes:

“The thing about Roberts is that her style is deceptive: descriptions of clothes and setting are so lovingly detailed and not scary that when a nasty thing happens it feels totally unexpected. And she doesn’t hesitate to use those finely-honed descriptions for fights, injuries, and other nastiness.”

“If the next two books fulfil the promise of Power and Majesty, the Creature Court looks set to win a definite place in my heart. More importantly, it sets out new directions for urban fantasy in its construction of magic and in its genuinely ensemble cast that I think and hope will have implications for the whole genre.”

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Hard to get used to the idea that the book is actually out there in the wild, even though I won’t be seeing a copy of it myself for at least a month (wow it is way closer to the beginning of June than I had allowed for).

But today brought the first official review, which has sparked much happiness and rejoicing. Stefen Brazulaitis, whom you might recall (if you remember such finicky details) said something so clever about Siren Beat that we put his quote on the cover, has done it again, this time with a lovely review in the upcoming May issue of Bookseller + Publisher Magazine, which I came across for the first time in my library a year ago, and is a beautifully detailed industry publication here in Australia. (it also has a great web presence including the ability to read every page – how awesome)

Stefen says:

Power and Majesty ticks all the boxes for great dark fantasy and a few more for good measure. Roberts evokes an exotic, renaissance-tinged city full of stylish and decadent characters. Charming, mysterious and occasionally grim, this is a silky and sophisticated new entry to Australian fantasy. I would recommend this to anyone who likes the darker end of the genre, particularly fans of Anne Bishop or Jacqueline Carey.

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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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The irrepressible Dirk Flinthart (he always needs a descriptor when I mention him, don’t ask me why) has reviewed Siren Beat/Roadkill up at CoolShite on the Tube, one of my favourite podcasting sites which also has lots of print reviews.

It’s a great review – Dirk has been reading my work for a long time and vice versa, and he really gets me:

Anyone familiar with Roberts will recognize some of her favourite tropes: pretty clothes, prettier men, and the Right Shoes For The Occasion. And why not? It’s a story set in and around nightclubs, drawing on a classical myth of lethal sexuality and fatal attraction. Roberts’ enjoyment of the material serves only to strengthen the characterisation and give an all-important human dimension to the otherwise inexplicable and unhuman Guardians and their ilk. As for the rest of the tale — the bad guys are more than sufficiently bad. The good guys are bad enough to be interesting and sympathetic, but good enough for us to cheer for them. There’s plenty of action, a dose or two of hot, sweaty sex, a fillip of something like romance, and a good time to be had by all.

He also has some great things to say about the publisher who brought Siren Beat/Roadkill into being:

Twelfth Planet Press is taking risks here — risks which big, well-heeled publishers have long since stopped taking. With stories of this quality as a result, we need to move fast to show that big goddam fat-assed fantasy trilogies about princes on horseback, or brainless tales about pretty glittery vegan vampires are not the mainstay of modern fantastic fiction.

Oh and speaking of my publisher, Girlie Jones AKA Alisa Krasnostein has put up an essay over at Last Short Story discussing Sara Genge, and the intriguing question of whether it’s still science fiction if a character gets her period…

I’m also excited to see a reviewer giving some attention to Roadkill! Any story that can fill Mr Flinthart with “a bleak, shuddersome dread” is worth taking a look at, believe me. It’s worth going over there to read the whole review, and check out what else CoolShite is loving this week.

In other news I bit the bullet and went to the optometrist today – first time in five years (gulp) and first time EVER with someone who is not my childhood optometrist. I do think that the suckiest thing about getting older is how all your reliable heath professionals go and retire on you, leaving you to find new ones. This one was very nice and female, and I picked out a new pair of frames with the minimum of trauma, which is awesome – my past experiences with choosing glasses frames have been about as hideous as my experiences buying shoes. I’ve decided I will wait to pick them up before doing my author photos for La Voyager, thereby bestowing my new face upon the world. Sadly I think my new haircut will have worn off by next week, but you can’t have everything.

There’s a lovely review of Siren Beat/Roadkill over at Bibliophile Stalker, which is rapidly becoming one of my favourite blogs to stalk because of its interesting links round-ups.

If Roadkill is the deviant of the urban fantasy label, Siren Beat feels right at home with the paranormal romance genre it’s usually mistaken for. Roberts follows the tropes of the sub-genre: the angsty heroine, seemingly unbeatable odds, and tantalizing sex. Siren Beat is all about kicking ass and teasing you with sensuality, make no mistake about that. What makes this piece unique is its length–other writers might need a novel to draw out their entire story but Roberts accomplish everything and much more in the span of a novelette. Is this a groundbreaking piece? Hell no. But it accomplishes what it sets out to do, without milking readers for all their time and money.

I like that He also discusses the effect of the cover and the presentation of the double-novelette format with great humour and energy.

As always, remember that you can purchase Siren Beat/Roadkill from Twelfth Planet Press for a mere AUS$12/$15 depending on which part of the world you live in.