Nikka VanRy published a list of 100 Must-Read SF books by female writers at Bookriot. “From YA to adult lit, from magical realism to epic fantasy to post-apocalyptic sci-fi feminism, from short stories to series, there’s a book on this list for every single reader. Do note that I’ve only listed the first book in any given series, so expect that this list could easily give you ten times as much reading power (especially with those stick-to-your-gut epic fantasy series). I’ve also only included one book per writer to showcase the widest range of voices from sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors”
We invite you to choose one work on that list, or one which you think should be there, and come along to persuade us it is worth reading.
We meet at the Minor Works Building at 6:30pm Wednesday August 20th for the discussion. If you can’t make it in person, you can join us via zoom.
Paul Kincaid, our speaker on Wednesday 3 September, writes “The title of the talk is “Molly and Lemady and Keith”, but that’s really all that’s needed beforehand. I make passing reference to most of his books during the talk, especially Pavane and The Chalk Giants and Molly Zero, but there is no great need for people to rush out and read them first. (I’m rather hoping that people might be tempted to rush out and read them afterwards, but that is a different thing.)”
You know the deal. One of science fiction’s finest critics on one of science fiction’s most interesting writers, directly dialled in to the luxury of your own home or gathered with the fen as we cluster around a large screen in the pristine fashionable white-and-grey expanse of the Conference Room at the Kensington Town Hall, Melbourne.
Meeting details are below, closely followed by a report of last month’s discussion of the best Hugo candidates. The Hugos are announced tonight as I write this.
I’m travelling this month and so the usual second reminder email is unlikely to happen. If you rely on that nearer-the-night reminder, please set your social calendars and reminder alarms now to Paul Kincaid on Keith Roberts.
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Molly and Lemady and Keith
Paul Kincaid is our guest for September’s meeting, speaking about Keith Roberts via Zoom from the UK.
“Pavane (stories March-July 1966 Impulse; coll of linked stories 1968; rev with “The White Boat” [December 1966 New Worlds] added 1969) superbly depicts an Alternate History in which – Elizabeth I having been assassinated, the Spanish Armada victorious and no Protestant rise of capitalism in the offing – a technologically backward England survives under the sway of the Catholic Church Militant. The individual stories are moody, eloquent, elegiac and thoroughly convincing. The Inner Wheel (coll of linked stories 1970) deals with the kind of gestalt Superman-cum-Telepathy theme made familiar by Theodore Sturgeon‘s More Than Human (fixup 1953) and is similarly powerful.” — Science Fiction Encyclopedia, text by John Clute.
Please share this invitation with like-minded friends and fans
Face to face
You are invited to a Nova Mob meeting gathered near a big Zoom-related TV screen at the Kensington Town Hall: Wednesday 3 September 2025. 8.00pm – 9.00 (formal close), first floor Presentation Room. Lift access. Stairs access. Both available.
Zoom meeting closes about 9.20pm or so. Kensington Town Hall 30 – 34 Bellair St| Kensington Melbourne VIC 3031
By Zoom – simulcast You are invited to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Please join us on-line!
Wednesday 3 September 2025 8.00pm – 9.30 pm Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney time| 7.30pm – 9.00pm Adelaide time
Table for four under the name of the Nova Mob SF Discussion group also Murray, 6.00pm for 6.15, through to 8.00pm.
A short walk up the hill from the Kensington Railway Station. Not the Newmarket Station!
“At Rick’s Place, we’re more than just an Italian restaurant in Kensington; we’re an experience in the heart of Melbourne. Our culinary skills blend traditional Italian delicacies with innovative Australian flavours, offering a varied menu that appeals to coeliacs, halal-certified meat lovers, low FODMAP, lower carb, vegetarians, and vegans alike. Our dishes are meticulously crafted using only the freshest local ingredients, ensuring that each bite is a burst of unparalleled flavour.”
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Hugo Awards discussion at the Mob, August 6 2025 – results
With thanks to Joe Haldeman, marvellous friend to science fiction, for the photo.
The question on the night was “The Hugo Award ceremony is a focal point of Worldcon and a seminal event to celebrate the best SFF works and creators of 2024. It will be held on Saturday, August 16, 2025, in Ballroom 1 of the convention center. Who of the finalists should win?”
Rose Mitchell tackled the novelettes, Lucy Sussex the Short Stories, and Perry Middlemiss the Novellas. Scoring systems varied and a critical consensus arose. The classic thesis, antithesis, synthesis discussion.
Worth your time and ranked with first as best (but will it actually win?)
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher [SAMPLE]
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Great fannish hoaxes
Much tut-tutting back in 2020 when the bulk of the Scots-language wikipedia was found to have been written by someone who knew not of the language. Think of the Muppets’ version of the Swedish Chef, in text form.
“It’s not clear whether the Wikipedian – who identifies as a Christian furry living in the US – has spent the past near-decade creating thousands of fake posts as some kind of incredible practical joke, or that they honestly felt they were doing a good job. There have been occasional interactions with real Scottish folk taking exception to pages, and the administrator has responded in a dead-pan fashion.”
Here’s the lede. Alas no mention of the great fannish tradition of hoaxes. But mentioned here for the sheer scale and hutzpah of the wikipedian’s commitment.
“In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.
“The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”
“That’s right, someone doing a bad impression of a Scottish accent and then writing it down phonetically is the chief maintainer of the online encyclopedia’s Scots edition. And although this has been carrying on for the best part of a decade, the world was mostly oblivious to it all – until today, when one Redditor finally had enough of reading terrible Scots and decided to look behind the curtain.
Friends, out-of-town guests, and new arrivals – you are always welcome and have an open invitation to the Mob’s face-to-face and Zoom meetings. First time arrivals – free. Otherwise a $5 donation for expenses please. Donations can be made electronically using playgroups@aussiebb.com.au on Paypal.
Face-to-face meetings are at the Kensington Town Hall:
It’s Hugos time! Nova Mob’s next meeting is a group discussion about the Hugo nominees for the Seattle WorldCon 2025 Awards Ceremony. |We are meeting on Wednesday 6 August at 8.00pm Melbourne time. Who of the finalists should win? Should anyone?
To help you come to a decision here are some freely available nominees. Or ask someone who has received the Hugo pack.
Also in this email, James Cambias has invited us all to a webinar on Space Piracy! Inside me is a 9-year-old boy who is thrilled that I could actually write that phrase in all earnest seriousness!
Sean Williams theAdelaidean has released a new album. The MSFC has held its AGM and it did not drag on, lots of positivity and the new Committee is all set for the move to the new premises. Also some news from the Brisbane WorldCon bid.
Paul Kincaid is our guest for September’s meeting, speaking via Zoom about Keith Roberts of Pavane fame, perhaps the finest alternate history committed to literature.
Sadly and foremost for many is the news of Tess Williams’s passing. Van Ikin enumerates aspects of our loss: “intellectual acumen, her amazing determination and commitment to her work, and her graciousness as a person.”
And a final reddit comment: ““Also nominated for a Hugo (the “Best Related Work” category) and worth reading: Speculative Whiteness which gets into the rise and persistence of the Alt-Right in science fiction.”
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Nova Mob meeting 6 August – Hugo Nominees discussion
General all-of-Mob discussion
To help matters along for a couple of the categories, Mob members Rose Mitchell and Perry Middlemiss will provide lead-in comments to start these discussions –
Rose – Novelettes promised to be “not in any great detail nor academic style so no bibliographies nor footnotes, endnotes, or citations, about the Novelettes which I think are the strongest category this year”.
Perry – Novellas commitment is solid – “I’ll have read them all by then”.
Please share this invitation to this forthcoming meeting with like-minded friends and fans
Face to face
You are invited to a Nova Mob meeting gathered near a big Zoom-related TV screen at the Kensington Town Hall: Wednesday 6 August July 2025. 8.00pm – 9.00 (formal close), first floor Presentation Room. Lift access. Stairs access. Both available. Zoom meeting closes about 9.20pm or so. Kensington Town Hall. 30 – 34 Bellair St Kensington Melbourne VIC 3031
By Zoom – simulcast
You are invited to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Please join us on-line! Wednesday 6 August 2025. 8.00pm – 9.30 pm Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney time; 7.30pm – 9.00pm Adelaide time
Also brilliantly put together: Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance, which is for my money easily one of her most wondrous books. A novel about movies told in part in screenplays, it is also about mysteries, and space whales, and fathers and daughters, secrets, and endings. There are conversation transcripts, gossip columns, switching genres, radio plays—when I think of Radiance I think of narrative abundance. And also of cocktails. It’s glamorous, intimate, and emotional at once, which might be one of Valente’s specialties.
— from “Tell Me a Differently Shaped Story: SFF That Plays With Form” by Molly Templeton, Reactor magazine
Melbourne SF pub meetup. Second Wednesday of every month Next meetup: Wednesday 13 August.
The second Wednesday pub meeting open to all Melbourne fans of SF, fantasy, and horror, announces a change of venue. The time is the same, 6pm every second Wednesday.
Now in Melbourne Central, 6pm. Lion Hotel, Level 3, Melbourne Central, 211 La Trobe St. It’s the big sports bar. Happy Hour is 4pm to 7pm, i.e. 3 hours duration.
The shift is temporary, something to do with AFL and quiz nights.
“Very sad news, which you may have heard by now: Tess Williams died on the morning of Tuesday July 15, in Fiona Stanley Hospital, Perth.
“Tess had just turned 70 and has two sons.
“She was the author of two novels – Map of Power (Random House, 1996) and Sea as Mirror (HarperCollins, 2000) – as well as the anthology Women of Other Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism, co-edited with Helen Merrick (UWA Press, 1999).
“She suffered from kidney-failure during the 1990s, eventually receiving a transplanted kidney, but in recent years that kidney also began to fail and her life was increasingly hijacked by dialysis and other medical problems.
“Nevertheless, in the last 12-18 months she had made some progress toward writing All the Wild Children, the long-planned third novel in a thematic “trilogy”, and in a burst of renewed creativity she had produced the first few thousand words of an autobiography of herself as a cyborg. I’ve not seen anything of the new novel, but I have seen the earliest work on the autobiography and whilst it was still finding its voice and narrative rhythm, it involved some brilliantly intertextual “side-board” sequences.
“Having supervised her Masters degree and co-supervised her PhD (an as yet unpublished feminist approach to theories of evolution, with reference to several key sf novels), I can attest to Tess’s intellectual acumen, her amazing determination and commitment to her work, and her graciousness as a person. She was a friend and I will miss her greatly.”
Van Ikin, Perth, WA, July 2025.
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MSFC AGM results
Two Nova Mob members stepped down from their MSFC roles at last Friday 18 July’s AGM of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club. Alison Barton, President for 11 years – her second term in the role – had committed to staying on until the Club and its library found a new home. “It took longer than expected” she reported, revealing again her knack at understatement. LynC also stepped down from newsletter Editor. A tally reveals she is the longest-serving Editor of the club’s zine Ethel the Aardvark. The coming issue will be her last, for a total of 42. Craig Macbride was brief: “I have nothing new to report”. Report accepted.
This is a particularly well edited issue and well worth seeking out even if you are not a MSFC member.
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WorldCon Bid – Brisbane 2028
Real Soon Now. And so the bid needs funding. Last week the Australian Science Fiction Foundation arranged for several thousand dollars to go to the bid organisers. [Reported from Carey Handfield].
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Speculative Insight #19
Fresh from interviewing Adrian Tchaikovsky at Critical Mass, Alexandra Pierce delivers Speculative Insight 19 which “brings us back to Tansy Rayner Roberts’ essays about the men of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and we are finally looking at Sam Vibes – one of my very favourite characters. How do you take a man who’s a functioning drunk (he’s not rich enough to be an alcoholic), who believes in his job but can’t do it properly and has little else to live for – and then turn him into a fascinating, human and humane character whose development is worth following? You need to be Terry Pratchett, I think.
“This essay is free to read: please share it with anyone who might be interested.”
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TheAdelaidean – Distant Objects in Soft Focus
“Genres: Ambient Electronic, Atmospheric, Drone, Electronic, LoFi At Bandcamp now & at all streaming and download sites Friday. Name Your Price download for a limited time, includes Free!
“Suspended in slow stasis with frequent pauses for reflection, Distant Objects in Soft Focus is theAdelaidean’s 13th Projekt release of fractalized ambient electronics. Inspired by recent experiences composing for the stage and screen, theAdelaidean (AKA bestselling Australian author Sean Williams) weaves an intricate series of conceptual narratives into an album of densely layered sound. DOiSF imagines the world as a series of half-forgotten moments by means of impressionistic pad washes, looping field recordings, fragmented melodies, and wordless voices. Each complex arrangement leads the listener through forests of lo-fi textures and subconscious resonances of stillness and personal reflection.
“Sean says, “About the ‘Distant Objects’ in my title: my albums are frequently about connecting with things far-off. Whether I’m composing with collaborators who live in different parts of the world, such as Steve Roach and Mirko of Deepspace [Parallels, antigravity], about places like Antarctica [Hyperaurea], or using old field recordings I made when I was young [Isolation], there’s an element held at a remove that I’m trying to engage with. Growing up in Australia, a place so far from the rest of the world, will encourage that. I feel there’s a lot of yearning in my music for something just out of reach.” Track List: 1 Old Water 2 Cryptid Chorus 3 Dawn Fades | Video at YouTube 4 Hide Awake 5 Day Dreamt 6 Melted Memory 7 Gravitic Lens 8 Notion Blur 9 Uncanny Instants 10 Distant Objects in Soft Focus 11 E
The World Fantasy Awards ballot for works published in 2024 has been announced. The awards will be presented during the 2025 World Fantasy Convention, scheduled for October 30 – November 2, 2025 in Brighton, UK.
The Life Achievement Awards, presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field, will go to Juliet Marillier and Michael Whelan.
The World Fantasy Awards finalists are:
Best Novel
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape)
The Fox Wife, Yangsze Choo (Holt; Quercus UK)
The Bog Wife, Kay Chronister (Counterpoint; Titan UK)
The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman (Viking; Del Rey UK)
The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills (Tachyon)
Best Novella
Crypt of the Moon Spider, Nathan Ballingrud (Nightfire; Titan UK)
In the Shadow of Their Dying, Michael F. Fletcher & Anna Smith Spark (Grimdark Magazine)
Yoke of Stars, R.B. Lemberg (Tachyon)
The Woods All Black, Lee Mandelo (Tordotcom)
The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom; Titan UK)
For the July Meeting, we will look at early work of H G Wells.
In Person: 6:30 Minor Works Building, Wednesday 16th July
Visionary writer HG Wells (1866-1946) was both a wonderful storyteller as well as masterful at including his significant scientific knowledge and curiosity into his stories. While he is best known for his SF, he was a hugely prolific writer across wide areas of fiction and non-fiction.
Much like Jules Verne before him, he was ahead of his time, with many of his imaginings proving to be on track (pre-emptive descriptions of aeroplanes, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb, satellite television and the internet can be found in his works).
For the Critical Mass:
Read the 2 short stories below for group discussion
Nikka VanRy published a list of 100 Must-Read SF novels by female writers at Bookriot. hear are the first 20 in her list: 1. Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce 2. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia 3. Among Others by Jo Walton 4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie 5. Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam 6. The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich 7. Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey 8. Ash by Malinda Lo 9. Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb 10. The Pyramid Waltz by Barbara Wright 11. Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee 12. The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish 13. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter 14. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest 15. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson 16. Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara 17. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh 18. Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto 19. Cinder by Marissa Meyer 20. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart … see the link above for the rest of the list.
For the August meeting, please select one from the hundred you would like to talk about. Or, if you think there’s a work that they’ve overlooked, tell us about it.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation announced its shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction: a $25,000 cash award given each year to a work of fiction that best reflects ideas central to Le Guin’s work.
Here are the eight finalists selected by the foundation after a public nomination process:
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom Publishing)
Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston (Tordotcom Publishing)
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson (Saga Press)
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (Feminist Press)
The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (Tordotcom Publishing)
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom Publishing)
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher (Neon Hemlock)
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins (Sourcebooks Landmark)
Melbourne SF pub meetup. Second Wednesday of every month
Next meetup: Wednesday 9 July.
The second Wednesday pub meeting open to all Melbourne fans of SF, fantasy, and horror, announces a change of venue. The time is the same, 6pm every second Wednesday. It was the Nixon Hotel, in Docklands. Now in Melbourne Central, 9 July 2025, 6pm. Lion Hotel, Level 3, Melbourne Central, 211 La Trobe St. It’s the big sports bar. Happy Hour is 4pm to 7pm, i.e. 3 hours duration.The shift is temporary, something to do with AFL and quiz nights. Perhaps it’s AFL or quiz nights.
Nova Mob members, friends, and guests borged into Meta’s AI
Roll a dice to choose the next word to build a sentence. Keep doing that 50 times to build a paragraph or page. What are the chances that you will accurately reproduce a section of a Harry Potter novel? About 98%, if you are one particular AI model. But before naming that Artificial Intelligence model, and which novels are uncannily reproduced with no money going back to the writer, how do books get into the AI training set in the first place? If you are Meta, you use a database of pirated books and hoover it all up in its entirety, according to The Atlantic. Just like the Borg on Star Trek. Turns out almost all the Nova Mob’s published members, friends, and our guests, are part of the borged data set that Meta ate for its training set. Did LibGen have permission to reproduce the books of these writers? Did Meta have permission to borg them up into its maw, to train its AI with? Search for yourself:
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
“Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the LibGen collection’s current iteration.” Including novels, stories, and non-fiction by all these people, I’ve checked:
Eugen Bacon, Max Barry, John Birmingham, Jenny Blackford, Russell Blackford, Sue Bursztynski, James Cambias, Trudi Canavan, Paul Collins Jack Dann, Chris Flynn Rob Gerrand, Kerry Greenwood Lee Harding, Richard Harland, Robert Hood Van Ikin, George Ivanoff Paul Kincaid Vanessa Len, Ken Liu Sophie Masson, Bren MacDibble, Iain McIntyre, Sean McMullen, Andrew MacRae, Farah Mendlesohn, Meg Mundell Shelley Parker-Chan, Hoa Pham, Gillian Polack Jane Routley, Lucy Sussex Shaun Tan, Keith Taylor Kaaron Warren, Janeen Webb
AI, plagiarism, and Harry Potter – as reported on Ars Technica
“Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book
The research could have big implications for generative AI copyright lawsuits.”
“In its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories. In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behaviour” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”
“But is it actually a fringe behaviour? And have leading AI companies addressed it? New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights into this question.”
A May 2025 paper from Cornell, Stanford, and West Virginia University legal scholars and computer scientists investigated whether five AI models could reproduce text from Books3, a repository which is often used to train AI models and includes many works still under copyright.
I found it fascinating how tokens work. Timothy Lee’s article on Ars Technica – from which I’ve quoted here – describes how it’s done, using the example “peanut butter and.. “ where the next word could be jelly, sugar, cream, other. Each next word has a probability. The maths is applied to that, and in a 50 tokens example it’s a string of probabilities that multiply together (such as 0.83 x 0.32 x 0.27 x 0.56 and so on). Think of each number as a token, and each probability is the chance of selecting the right word. The equation is 50 numbers long.
“The study authors took 36 books and divided each of them into overlapping 100-token passages. Using the first 50 tokens as a prompt, they calculated the probability that the next 50 tokens would be identical to the original passage. They counted a passage as “memorised” if the model had a greater than 50 percent chance of reproducing it word for word.
This definition is quite strict. For a 50-token sequence to have a probability greater than 50 percent, the average [value for each] token in the passage needs [to be] a probability of at least 98 percent!”
One of the 36 books tested was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US title).
“The chart [see the article] shows how easy it is to get a model to generate 50-token excerpts from various parts of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The darker a line is, the easier it is to reproduce that portion of the book.
“Llama 3.1 70B—a mid-sized model Meta released in July 2024—is far more likely to reproduce Harry Potter text than any of the other four models.
“Specifically, the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorised 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time.
As one commenter said, “If I could be prompted with a paragraph from a book and give the next paragraph verbatim I think you would agree I had effectively memorised large swaths of the thing, why should an LLM be held to a different standard than a human? And again as the article states, if the standard had been relaxed to missing a few tokens (akin to getting a few words or punctuation wrong here and there) it likely would be a lot higher.”
Interestingly, best-sellers had more likelihood for being predictively reiterated verbatim by the AI – OK, let’s call it for what it is: reproduced – , than did work by less popular writers.
This is one of the best studies to unpack exactly how much has been stolen by the tech giants. It used to be that downloading a mp3 file illegally could get you a US $70,000 fine. What should Meta expect for stealing copyrighted works on an industrial scale?
This is why the Authors’ Societies have court cases under way.
“Date: Tue 1 July 2025 – 12:00 AM to Thu 9 October 2025 – 12:00 AM
With: Hoa Pham
Summary: Join a supportive community of fantasy writers and hone your craft under the guidance of award-winning author and editor Hoa Pham.”
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SF Commentary #120 arrives
This is a really well written and presented issue. The first part is devoted to Race Mathews, and for that alone it is a worthy magazine of record. Includes farewells from Iola Mathews and Gareth Evans, as well as letters of comment from those who attended the State Memorial Service for Race. Recommended.
Available from Bruce Gillespie, physical and email addresses and details at e-fanzines.com
Friends, out-of-town guests, and new arrivals – you are always welcome and have an open invitation to the Mob’s face-to-face and Zoom meetings. First time arrivals – free. Otherwise a $5 donation for expenses please. Face-to-face meetings are at the Kensington Town Hall:
Face to face, the Kensington Town Hall has ample parking and excellent disability access. Kensington Railway Station is 13 minutes travel from Flinders St Station on the Craigieburn line.
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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