Australian Women Writers Gen 5-SFF Week 15-22 Jan. 2023
Brona and Whispering Gums have contributed to this Week with reviews of short fiction, and WG further devoted a Monday Musings to discussing Indigenous SFF. I’ll provide links from here so that those (very few) of you who haven’t already seen them might do so. Bron says one of hers isn’t strictly SF but given that we have been discussing that problems we have been putting off dealing with – Climate! – are now upon us, I don’t think that matters.
WG: First Nations Australia Speculative Fiction
I have seen various terms applied to SF, or what I prefer, though Bill doesn’t, to call Speculative Fiction. Introducing their anthology, Unlimited futures, Ellen van Neerven and Rafeif Ismail speak of Visionary Fiction. Read on …
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WG: Ambelin Kwaymullina, “Fifteen days on Mars”
In 2014, Ambelin Kwaymullina, whose people are the Palyku of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, described herself in a Kill Your Darlings essay as writing “speculative fiction for young adults”. Three years later, in the 2017 Twelfth Planet Press anthology, Mother of invention, she said that she was “a Palyku author of Indigenous Futurisms”. Read on …
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Brona: Everything Feels Like the End of the World, Else Fitzgerald
[A] speculative fiction short story collection ‘exploring possible futures in an Australia not so different from our present day to one thousands of years into an unrecognisable future.’ The manuscript won the 2019 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. Read on …
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Brona: Before He Left the Family, Carrie Tiffany
[T]he story of a family breakdown told from the perspective of the teenage son, Kevin. Both boys know that their parents only married because their mum got pregnant on the first date. Read on …
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Brona: The Animals in that Country, Laura Jean McKay
What a mad, mad ride Laura Jean McKay takes you on … a flu virus – the ‘zoo flu’ as it becomes known in the book – causes the communication barrier between humans and other animals to disappear. Read on …
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Will there be more? I’m not sure. I was hopeful of another author interview. But, and this is the big but, today is my only day off work, though I may have another forced on me by, you know, 26 Jan and all that goes with it, including not being able to get loaded. We’ll see. Anyway, I hope to be home and unloaded by next Weds latest, when I undertake to take Milly to dinner (and to write up a Summary).
The Australian Legend 
Thanks Bill … this Gen was an interesting challenge, but was surprising to see how much we/contributors found in the end.
Good luck with your work arrangements, and safe driving.
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I probably went out on a limb making SFF the theme, but our circle of readers has made a tremendous effort both to address seriously the twin threads of dystopian/Cli.Fi and surrealism/fantasy running through this generation; and to find more works which fit the bill.
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It did feel a bit like that in a way but I think all or most of us like a challenge.
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I started first looking for SFF from the specified time period, and then I opened it up to anything from this time period, and still I struggled to find an appropriate book! I mentioned that I started a collection of short stories from Angela Slattery, but they were all fairy tale re-tellings that could have been written by anyone. She didn’t reconceptualize the familiar tales for an Australian reader, which I found…strange.
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Melanie, it’s a shame Australian books aren’t more widely available, at least from the last couple of years, but thanks for giving it a try. And of course we had your earlier review to kick off with.
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