10 Aussie Books To Read Before You Die.

Last night I watched a recording of the first Tuesday Night Book Club’s “10 Aussie Books to Read Before you Die.” For much of this year the show’s website asked people to select their choice from a list of 50 Australian authored books.

I voted a while back and I can’t remember if I went for The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey or Capricornia by Xavier Herbert. At the time I had read nine of the books on the list, I have since read one more.  

After the program had listed ten to five, I was thinking how well read I am, as I had read three of the six books (The Secret River, The Slap and The Power of One). I was very hopeful that The True History of the Kelly Gang would be number one. But I had forgotten about Cloudstreet by Tim Winton which consistently wins polls for favourite Aussie novel.  

The ten books people selected were:

1. Cloudstreet - Tim Winton

2. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

3. A Fortunate Life - A.B. Facey

4. The Harp in the South - Ruth Park

5. The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay

6. Jasper Jones - Craig Silvey

7. The Magic Pudding - Norman Lindsay

8. The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas

9. The Secret River - Kate Grenville

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock - Joan Lindsay

I had never heard of The Book Thief or Jasper Jones. I plan to one day read Cloudstreet and The Harp in the South.

My Ten Aussie Books.

If they opened the list up to all Australian authored books then my list of the ten Aussie books people should read before they die would look like this:

1. The Sea and Summer - George Turner

2. The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

3. Capricornia – Xavier Herbert

4. The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes

5. The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

6. Power Without  Glory – Frank Hardy

7. Genetic Soldier – George Turner

8. Blood – Tony Birch

9. Things We Didn’t See Coming – Steve Amsterdam

10. The Waterboys  – Peter Docker.

My list is of books that I think say something about Australia and what is to be an Australian, unlike a few of the books in the First Tuesday list. My selections cover our past, present and future, whereas the future is not touched in the First Tuesday list. My list would be different if I was just selecting my favourite Aussie Books.

About a third of the books I read are written by Australians. I worry that a lot of Australian writers and wannabe authors appear not to read Australian authored books and somehow find more relevance in books written overseas.

Review of George Turner's A Pursuit of Miracles

A Pursuit of Miracles is a fabulously entertaining and thought provoking collection of science fiction short stories. It maintains the exceptionally high standards of George Turner’s many novels. Turner is arguably Australia’s best ever science fiction writer and this collection shows why. 

There are only eight stories in the collections 207 pages, so they are mostly long stories. All but one of Turner’s nine published short stories are in the collection. Turner preferred to write novels. Indeed, at least two of the stories in this collection were later turned into novels.

Turner was obviously a proud Australian as most of the stories are set in a future Australia. He seemed to be fascinated with telepathy which is the main theme, or in the background, of a number of the stories. Turner also seemed very much concerned with humanity’s destruction of the environment. The collection was published in 1990 and the stories have not dated.     

The collection begins with the title story A Pursuit of Miracles. It’s a story that snuck on me as I wondered about the emotional intelligence of the scientists involved. It is set in a world were very few animals live. In a research lab, scientists are attempting to see if the animals that remain can be controlled by telepathy. But one of the co-workers, a damaged clone, shows that empathy with animals would have been a much better option to explore.

The second story, Not in Front of the Children, is a story about arrogance and ignorance. A privileged teenage girl, who lives in a world were aging has been slowed, rebels against her parents as she tries to discover what death is.  

Feedback is a rather strange story, with a very unexpected and weird ending. A hypnotist and a telepath are brought together by a rich pastoralist on an outback property. The pastoralist believes that together they might be able to enter his mind and go back to the beginning of creation. This experiment is watched over by a solipsistic cultist who believes that the universe is his own imagined creation.  

Shut the Door When You Go Out later became the brilliant novel Genetic Soldier. It is one of the shorter pieces in the collection and is set thousands of years into the future. Most of humanity had deserted Earth, leaving it to its former indigenous tribes. A ship returns, its crew wanting to resettle what used to be Australia. But this time, the genetically altered Aborigines, object to be colonised.

In On the Nursery Floor a reporter tries to find out what happened at a laboratory years earlier.  The laboratory was used to genetic engineer super intelligent children, who escaped. The reporter tries to track them down.

In the Petri Dish Upstairs an orbiting community sends the “perfect” man down to earth to marry a rich heiress. He takes her back to his community’s huge space station that collects solar power and transmits it to an earth they no longer feel part of and are sick of being subservient too.

The collection finishes with The Fittest, which is the best story of the collection. It is set in a Melbourne slowly being inundated by the sea. Society is split into the Sweet, the 10% of people who have jobs, and the Swill, the 90% who survive on government handouts.The story revolves around a sweet family whose father loses his job, forcing them to move to the swill’s slums. But one child is brilliant with numbers, a talent that makes him valuable to those who don’t want to leave records on computers. The Fittest later became The Sea and Summer, which is the best Australian science fiction novel I have read. It was nominated for a Nebula Award and won that years Arthur C. Clarke award. 

A Pursuit of Miracles is an extremely strong collection that would appeal to most readers of science fiction. If you are an Australian science fiction reader, you simply have to read it and discover how good Australian science fiction can be.

Fifty Shade of Bad Writing. George Turner's Books to be Reissued.

Fifty Shades of Bad Writing.

Seems everywhere I look someone has written an article about the mega-selling, publishing-game-changing, super- duper, must-read-before-you die (or at least dis) Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James.

As a result, I am sure publishers are looking forward to reading thousands of manuscripts full of badly written bondage scenes. Publisher’s assistants will all be rushing home to watch porn on the web to get sex back into some sort of normal perspective. But then again, the flood of bad erotica might make up for those manuscripts full of teenagers in love with vampires who refuse to give out.   

Many of the articles I have read about Fifty Shades of Grey have been about how badly written it is.  An article I read in the Age today about its awfully written sex scenes made me laugh, especially its imagined ocker sex scene.

There was even an article about the book in today’s Chronicle, the local newspaper. Fifty Shades has been selling very well locally. With one farmer reportedly buying it because he wanted to see what all the hype was about (very sad). An elderly woman who returned it to the library said it was just porn and rubbish – WTF did she expect?

I have also read a few reviews on Goodreads and other sites of Fifty Shades that have said it is badly written. But this badly written book is allegedly making the author 1.36 million a week. There seems to be one supposedly well hung ram leading a huge flock of erotically hopeful ewes.

George Turner’s Books to be Reissued.

In my last post I mentioned having just read A Pursuit of Miracles, by George Turner. Bruce Richard Gillespie commented on that post on facebook saying he had control over the books of George Turner. He said that there are plans for Gollancz to bring out a new version of Turner’s The Sea and Summer, so you will all have the chance to go out and buy the best Australian science fiction novel ever written.

Bruce also said he was trying to get Turner’s other novels out as ebooks, which I would very much welcome as I am still to obtain copies of Beloved Son, Transit of Cassidy, Vaneglory, Yesterday's Men, and Down There in Darkness.

If you want to read some of the many articles Turner wrote on writing and science fiction, issue 76 of SF Commentary, edited by Bruce Gillespie, has 100,000 words devoted to the writing of George Turner. 

Turned started off writing non-genre mainstream novels in the late 1950’s. He won a Miles Franklin award in 1962 for The Cupboard Under the Stairs. The Lame Dog Man won the Commonwealth Literary Fund Award in 1967. Turner quit writing after five mainstream novels because there wasn’t any money in it. 

I have read that he was asked to review science fiction for a magazine. Which he did. He thought that he could write better science fiction than what he was reviewing. Which he went on and did. The above mentioned The Sea and Summer was nominated for the Nebula Award and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in1988.

My Writing Week: Issue 26, Year 5

Turning Short Stories into Novels.

It seems I am not the only writer with an inability to keep a short-story short. I have just finished reading Aussie science fiction legend George Turner’s collection of longish short- stories A Pursuit of Miracles. The book’s 207 pages contain only eight stories, most of them novella length, three of which Turner later turned into novels. One of the stories went on to become Genetic Soldiers, which I mentioned in my last post. Another became his Arthur C. Clarke award winner The Sea and Summer. 

One of the two novel manuscripts I have written started off as a novella. Recently I managed to keep a short story to 7,000 words, but my previous attempt blew out to 15,000 words. I think part of the difficulty with writing short science fiction stories is creating a compelling world within limited words. When I critiqued stories on critters.org I was always asking for more detail about the world a writer was attempting to create.

The brilliant collection The Locus Awards – Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction - has only 18 stories, most of them novella length, in its 674 pages.  In contrast I have lost interest in magazines that are full of 2,000 – 5,000 word stories.

New Divine Articles.

I have been busy this week writing  an article for Divine Magazine. It is about how various organisations define disability. It required a far bit of research of a pretty dry subject. I have been trying to figure out how to write it in an interesting and enjoyable way. I am not sure whether I have succeeded with the draft I completed on Thursday.  

Meanwhile, the editor of Divine is happy with my next two ideas for articles. And happily for me, both will involve minimal research, as one is a review of a book that I have already read and the other is from personal experience.

ReGenesis 

Regenesis, a new to Australia science fiction series, started on FX on Foxtel last week.  I thought its writers must have watched the movie Contagion as the opening of the first episode mirrored the movie’s enthralling opening sequence showing how easily a virus can be spread. But when I checked, Regenesis went to air in 2004, well before Contagion was made. Regenesis is set in a Canadian bio-terrorism unit. Four seasons of the series were made.

Falling Skies is Improving.

I have been wondering whether the writers of Falling Skies have been watching the brilliant zombie series The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead is notable for the absence of gung-ho characters and rebellious teenagers. I think its writers reckon that such foolish characters would quickly be killed by zombies. In the last episode of Falling Skies screened on Foxtel, one teenager died and one gung-ho character, whose antics invited death, was expelled from the group of survivors.