For March’s meeting our face to face meeting will be in the Creative Hub room at Kensington Town Hall. The meeting however will be a Zoom meeting, led from the Canberra wing of the Nova Mob – thanks Gillian! – and including a guest speaker from Hamburg or London.
Speakers for April and May also are known, both are Nova Mob members which is great to see the Mob tradition continuing.
Next 3 meetings
5 March – “Germans meet Australian Gothic” – Fifty years after “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and the translation into German of Australian Gothic. Gillian Polack/translation project manager or representative/ Mob discussion.
2 April – Alexandra Pierce on First Contact – Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Shroud” and other great SF novels
7 May – Perry Middlemiss – “The Novels of Robbie Arnott”
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Nova Mob meeting 5 March 2025 – Germans meet Australian Gothic
Did you know there’s a project under way to translate Australian Gothic novels and stories and novels into German?
Also that it’s fifty years since the film of Joan Lindsay’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was released?
A first step would be to define Australian Gothic. I’m sure the borders are porous but that there are core works. Is Lindsay’s one of them? Also the German understanding of Australian Gothic differs from the Australian version. There is nuance!
From Canberra, Gillian will be interviewing the translation program manager or their representative, prior to Mob general discussion of Picnic at Hanging Rock and other Australian Gothic.
German may be spoken from time to time.
Nova Mob 5 March “Germans meet Australian Gothic”
Face to face
You are invited to an in-person Nova Mob meeting on Wednesday, 5 March 2025 8.00pm – 9.00 Melbourne time, 7:30-8:30pm Adelaide, first floor Creative Hub room.
Zoom meeting closes about 9.20pm or so. Kensington Town Hall 30 – 34 Bellair St Kensington Melbourne VIC 3031
Last time for the pre-refurbishment pre-Mob pub meal in Newmarket
The Quiet Man, 271 Racecourse Road, Kensington, VIC 3031.
On the corner of Rankins Rd and Racecourse Rd. Enjoy it, the pub is closing for a swift refurbishment. The new owners perhaps have decided the Mexican tiled floors don’t go with the Irish pub fittings and fixtures.
Table for 8 booked under the name of the Nova Mob Book Discussion group also Murray, 6.00pm for 6.30, through to 8.00pm.
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Melbourne Fannish Drinks
Melbourne SF pub meetup. Second Wednesday of every month
Next meetup: Wednesday 12 March.
It’s an open invitation to all. The Nixon Hotel, 757 Bourke St, Docklands.
Time: 6pm+. Westwards towards the waters from the north end of Southern Cross Station. Nearest train station: Southern Cross (exit the Bourke Street end and turn left) There is a lift outside to the right of the Channel 9 building at concourse level, which takes you down to Bourke St level. Convenor: Perry Middlemiss
No RSVP required.
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Nova Mob About and Contact Us
Nova Mob on social media: We’re on Mastodon. Click the invite to follow
Face to face, the Kensington Town Hall has ample parking and excellent disability access. Newmarket Railway Station is 15 minutes travel from Flinders St Station on the Craigieburn line. By tram it’s via the Route 57 and by bus it’s the #83. Other bus routes via Metlink Journey Planner.
Please don’t attend if you have symptoms that could be COVID 19 or similar. Our COVID-safe Plan continues to apply and we remain mask-friendly for those who wear them.
Our guest this month is Karen J Carlisle, author of Victorian Steampunk & fantasy novels, including stories about the adventures of Viola Stewart, Homesian mysteries featuring Mrs Hudson, and Adelaide’s Aunt Enid, protector extraordinaire. Karen first fell in love with science fiction when she saw Doctor Who, as a four-year old. Her short stories have featured in the 2016 Adelaide Fringe exhibition, and the ‘A Trail of Tales’, ‘Where’s Holmes?’, ‘Deadsteam’ and ‘Sherlock is a Girl’s Name’ anthologies.
She writes full-time and can often be found plotting fantastical, piratical or airship adventures, and co-writing the occasional musical ditty. Karen has always loved dark chocolate and rarely refuses a cup of tea.
This meeting will feature the launch of the brand new Aunt Enid book, Twixtmas
It’s Twixtmas: the odd, dream-like time between Christmas and New Year when time slows, days blur, and the connections between the Otherworlds and ours are at their thinnest. Anything is possible. And accidents can happen. Join Sally as she’s transported to an Otherworld on a rescue mission – where Protectors are forbidden to tread.
Twixtmas is a portal fantasy with characters from The Aunt Enid Mysteries.
Critical Mass will meet at 6:30pm on Wednesday, February 19th at the Minor Works Building, 22 Stamford Court, Adelaide. [If you enter from Sturt Street, there’s an open path between 50 and 52 Sturt Street leading to the community centre] For those who can’t make it in person, they’re welcome to join us via zoom
If you have a science fiction nerd for a parent, then you know it is impossible to shop for them over the holidays. They have read every SF title from the ‘Best of’ lists and have a personal pulp collection from decades past. Locus magazine suggests “six recent science fiction titles reviewed by our experts that we think your dad hasn’t read yet“– see details here
Humans are returning to the moon—this time, to stay. Because our presence will be more permanent, NASA has selected a location that maximizes line-of-sight communication with Earth, solar visibility, and access to water ice: the Lunar South Pole (LSP).
While the sun is in the lunar sky more consistently at the poles, it never rises more than a few degrees above the horizon; in the target landing regions, the highest possible elevation is 7°. This presents a harsh lighting environment never experienced during the Apollo missions, or in fact, in any human spaceflight experience.
The ambient lighting will severely affect the crews’ ability to see hazards and to perform simple work. This is because the human vision system—which, despite having a high-dynamic range—cannot see well in bright light and cannot adapt quickly from bright to dark or vice versa.
Two days after a historic Christmas Eve sun flyby that flew closer to the star than any spacecraft in history — taking the car-sized spacecraft nearly a tenth as close to the sun than Mercury — the Parker Solar Probe phoned home for the first time since its solar encounter. The space probe sent a simple yet highly-anticipated beacon tone to Earth just before midnight late Thursday (Dec. 26).
Scientists on Earth were out of contact with the Parker Solar Probe since Dec. 20, when the spaceraft began its automated flyby of the sun, so the signal is a crucial confirmation that the spacecraft survived, and is in “good health and operating normally,” NASA shared in an update early Friday (Dec. 27).
Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland received the signal just before midnight ET on the night of Dec. 26, the statement read.
Parker Solar Probe has phoned home!After passing just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface on Dec. 24 — the closest solar flyby in history — we have received Parker Solar Probe’s beacon tone confirming the spacecraft is safe.
Reactor magazine recently published lists by their reviewers of best novels of 2024. Here are some of their suggestions:
The Tainted Cupby Robert Jackson Bennett—already one of my favorite authors for his Foundryside series—was everything I wanted from a fantasy murder mystery: a reclusive detective and a put-upon assistant reminiscent of the Nero Wolfe series; powerful biochemical magic; and all-too-realistic bureaucracy. And despite my love for vast, world-shattering stories like the two above, I enjoyed that The Tainted Cup wasn’t that; with this first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, Bennett threads the needle of setting the mystery in a sprawling world without raising the stakes too far. [Sasha Bonkowsky]
Kerstin Hall’s Asunder has slipped under a lot of radars. Written with precise and glittering prose and a deft eye for characterisation, its worldbuilding is complex and entertaining eldritch, while its protagonist keeps making terrible life choices on account of all the other ones are worse. Compelling, brilliant, weird: I will fight you for the sequel. [Liz Bourke]
Of courseMetal From Heaven by august clarke and The City in Glass by Nghi Vo are here. Their latest books were stunning literary achievements. The experience of reading these stories is as intense as the stories themselves. It felt like I was holding my breath the entire time. These books are gorgeous, lyrical, and relentless, and furious. [Alex Brown]
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time was an unexpected read that I enjoyed—I picked it up for the deft critique of colonialism explored via the trope of time travel and stayed for the steamy relationship between the narrator and the darkly sexy 19th-century arctic explorer who becomes her roommate. Not every book is both thoughtful and entertaining, but The Ministry of Time is one of those books that knocks both out of the park. [Vanessa Armstrong]
If someone asks for the definition of magic, hand them Kelly Link’s debut novel, The Book of Love. Tell them that by the end, you will not have THE definition of magic, but you will have so many beautiful definitions to choose from. Whimsical, sexy, unrelenting, oppressive, sorrowful, hilarious, real, unreal, quirky, joyous, stalwart, deadly, vicious, musical, romantic, all-powerful, quite small indeed, just a little to the right of what you’re looking at, Link lets us define magic how we want through one of my new favorite novels for life. [Martin Cahill]
Kaliane Bradley’s fantastic The Ministry of Time leans all the way into the weirdness of bringing people from the past into our current moment. Having reeled you in with the promise of time travel and kissing, it slowly reveals itself to be an immensely thoughtful story of complicity, power, and the function of individual choice within unjust systems. [Jenny Hamilton]
A few weeks ago, we asked dozens of authors about the speculative books they considered The Most Iconic SFF Books of the 21st Century. We loved their responses, from modern classics to translated works to graphic novels to hidden gems.
But of course, readers had opinions! What about this book? How could that author not be in the top 10? It’s part of what we love about this community: a group of people who share a love for science fiction, fantasy, and horror from thousands of different angles, and who feel passionate enough about declaring their love for those books to come together to debate them from across the globe. We anticipated that people might want an outlet for these thoughts outside of social media, so we opened a poll asking for your input. And readers, you delivered!
We received well over 500 responses in the short time the poll was open. While the selections below are just a slice of that enthusiasm, we hope they show the diversity and fervor of SFF fans. Maybe you spot some favorites here. Maybe you get a new stack of recommendations for your shelves. Maybe you just take a minute to think about what the word “iconic” means to you. Either way… we hope you enjoy.
Jeff Harris’ talk at Critical Mass will be an overview of Stableford’s oeuvre. We will be meeting at 7:30pm November 20th, at the Minor Works Building, 22 Stamford Court, Adelaide. (If you are coming via Sturt St, there’s a walkway between the cafés at 50 and 52 Sturt Street)
Stableford produced so much that it is worth looking at the bibliographies at the above sites. The Wikipedia entry has links to interviews with BMS. Because they are done at different times you get sketches of the development of his career at different stages. It also has an excellent bibliography.
Because there is so much, yes, I am suggesting you can do your own research.
E. PUBLISHERS:
Places where Stableford’s books can be found. Mainly e-books, some are only available in print formats.
Not the most easy access to find Stableford’s books. It’s a long way down to the letter ‘S’ and there are lots of other authors with names beginning with an ‘S’. This is where you can find Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity (2009). Only available in paperback. But it’s worth it.
It also lists his anthologies and translations (which they call ‘adaptations’).
Snuggly Books:
Again you have to work down to S for Stableford. The only place for some of his last books. Plus anthologies and translations. A curiosity publisher. A title like Snuggly Tales of Femme Fatales feels simultaneously wrong and yet so perversely right.
F. A note about BMS:
Brian Stableford has been writing for fifty years. His fiction includes include eleven novels and seven short story collections in a series of “tales of the biotech revolution”; a series of metaphysical fantasies set in Paris in the 1840s, featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin, most recently The Cthulhu Palimpsest; A Romance of Termination (2024); and a series of supernatural mysteries set in an artist’s colony, recently The Pool of Mnemosyne (2018). Recent novels independent of any series include Vampires of Atlantis (2016) and The Tangled Web of Time (2016). He also translates antique works from the French, with particular interests in the Symbolist and Decadent Movements, roman scientifique and the fantastique.
(Included to give a sense that Stableford was more than simply a science-fiction writer.)
G. Notes:
It is a quirk of my nature that give titles to talks like this; a way of putting things into one place conceptually. There are two jokes therein, well, sort of jokes. More like bits of irony. Another of my quirks.
Under the direction of HILOBROW editor Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series is reissuing notable proto-sf stories from the underappreciated era between 1900–1935.
“If we look at the volumes in the Radium Age series, we quickly see how relevant these books are, and continue to be. There’s dystopia, there’s totalitarianism, there’s nuclear war, there’s population control, there’s violent nationalism. But there’s also love, and resistance, and hope and humor. So we are very much in the same space as these books now in our present. And these books, if anything, often tell us more about where we are now in our current societal development compared to contemporary science fiction, which tries to imagine our far tomorrows.” — Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, interview with Strange Horizons (June 2024)
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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