Although Sheri S. Tepper became best known for her eco-feminist SF writing, her first published trilogy, The True Game, can be read as a more traditional fantasy with SF elements. Two subsequent trilogies continue exploring this world. Over the nine novels set on this world, many of her future themes can be found which lift it out of the traditional fantasy genre into something more interesting. Consisting of the Peter Trilogy (collected as The True Game in 1985), the Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped, and the Jinian Trilogy, the nine novels explore themes of ecology, feminism and colonialism.
Zoom Details: Critical Mass July Time: Jun 26, 2024 6:30pm Adelaide, 7pm Melbourne/Sydney, 5pm Perth
In person: in June and July, we are meeting at the Community Room at Christie Walk, 101 Sturt Street, as Kappy’s will not be open in the evenings. Turn up at Christie Walk at 6:15 for a 6:30pm start on Wednesday, June 26th.
We are delighted to announce that Dr Janeen Webb, author, critic, critic, editor, World Fantasy Award winner, is our speaker at June’s Nova Mob meeting on Wednesday 5 June!
Janeen’s recent published works have explored alternate histories to great effect, receiving recognition in overseas markets that her home Australian market would do well to meet. Comment from critics are that her novels and stories are strong additions to the subgenre of alternate history (counterfactuals), a realm of the science fiction landscape where it’s hard to tell stories well but when you do get it right, you wield large enduring narrative power which stays with the reader and achieves that conceptual breakthrough and reframing of perception which is at the heart of successful science fiction.
Excellent memorable powerful stories.
What makes for excellence in alternate history? What makes special this particular realm of sf? You are invited to a fireside chat on these and similar questions.
If you’ve not encountered Janeen’s fiction over the past decade, now is your opportunity.
You may know Janeen Webb’s work from many perspectives. Perhaps the award-winning anthologies of Australian SF she co-edited, Dreaming Down Under and Dreaming Again, or the republication of Kenneth MacKay’s 1895 Yellow Peril novel The Yellow Wave (co-edited with Andrew Enstice). Or as a critic, including as a member of the ASFR (Australian Science Fiction Review) collective. Perhaps as an academic, “I spent way too many years as a professor, and I’ve recently been lecturing on counterfactuals for a post-grad College in Canberra”. Or as author of the nonfiction work of note Aliens & Savages: Fiction, Politics, and Prejudice in Australia (1998, 2023) with Andrew Enstice. Maybe by way of her short stories. Or maybe as author of the young adult fantasy Sinbad Chronicles series, of Sailing to Atlantis (2001) and The Silken Road to Samarkand (2003). Or novelist of the fantasy satires The Gold-Jade Dragon and The Dragon’s Child, or the alternate history author of The City of the Sun series (also co-authored with Andrew Enstice).
It is these latter works to which Janeen will be talking in particular. In the best tradition of fannish discourse however it’s likely all these various aspects will be touched on.
“The date is 1854. The place is the Australian goldfields in the British colony of Victoria—the richest prize on earth. The story begins with a stockade. The flag of independence is unfurled. Men driven beyond endurance take arms against British redcoats. At their forefront are two hundred Colt-wielding Americans, the California Rangers, led by the charismatic and idealistic Captain James McGill. The stockade falls. The Rangers are scattered.
But from the ashes will rise a new revolution—a revolution powered by the sun. And this one will not fail. In the 19th century, just how close did we come to a world run on solar power? The Five Star Republic is history with a twist, the story of a world that might easily have been—the future you’ll wish we’d had. For more information visit the publisher’s page.” Link to video of the book launch
Introduction by Andrew Enstice & Janeen Webb “He was a mate of Banjo Paterson, and hailed as a possible poetic successor to Henry Kendall. He was a champion jockey, a prospector, a station owner. He sat for thirty-five years in the New South Wales parliament. He was a friend of Churchill, of Cecil Rhodes, and a champion of the rights of the ordinary soldier. He founded the Australian Light Horse, and led them into battle in South Africa. And yet you’ve probably never heard of Kenneth Mackay. But the themes of The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia resonate as much today as they did a century and a quarter ago: nationalism, racism, and fear of a resurgent China.”
“Janeen Webb holds a PhD in literature from the University of Newcastle. A lecturer in literature at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Janeen is also co-editor, with Jack Dann, of the anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which won the 1999 international World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, as well as the 1999 Ditmar (Australian Science Fiction Award). She has won both the Aurealis and the Ditmar awards for her short stories. She splits her time between Melbourne and her country retreat in Foster in South Gippsland.” https://www.harpercollins.com.au/cr-107969/janeen-webb/
Malka Older’s SF mystery novella The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023) is a current Nebula Award nominee and started a new series, The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, with second book The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles (2024) published earlier this year and a third volume forthcoming.She hosts the Science Fiction Sparkle Salon video conversation series with Arkady Martine, Annalee Newitz, Amal El-Mohtar, Karen Lord, and Katie Mack.
“I honestly didn’t realize until halfway into The Mimicking of Known Successes that it’s actually a postapocalyptic story. There’s a lot that’s melancholy in it, and this terrible yearning for an Earth that these characters have never known, and for nature, and all these things they know they’re missing because they still have all this literature and art from Earth. But at the same time, they got a pretty sweet setup – it’s not that bad where they’re living, and they have a lot of good things going on. They have really rich lives: friends and concerts and academic research in a comfortable setting. They’ve got little cities that are interesting, and that people can go to see for fun. It’s kind of that contradiction of something that I really wanted to make really cozy and sweet, but it’s got this doom, too; this melancholy base note under it. Fortunately, by the time I figured that out, I was already very in the story and I was comfortable with things. I didn’t get too depressed in early 2021 trying to finish writing this. It was really a comforting thing for me to write, and I hope it becomes that for people reading it, too.
“I did consciously base it on Sherlock Holmes, to an extent, but more, really, on Sherlock Holmes reboots, because those are like catnip for me. I see Sherlock retellings and I’m like, ‘Yes, smash that button.’ I was really analyzing why that is, beyond the standard murder-mystery thing that I already mentioned. In addition to imprinting a little bit, young, on the Laurie King & Mary Russell Sherlock Holmes series – the first three books especially are really great – it also has a lot to do with the dynamic of a duo that’s working together, who have brains that work in very different ways. And yet, they come to a way of working together that makes sense for both of them.
Christine Pyman looks at the New Doctor Who with a critical eye. She is a long-time fan of Dr Who, and as an admin of a couple of Doctor Who groups, and a member of many more, has seen some of the best and worst of the Who world’s reactions to a new Doctor.
You might want to have a look at some of the behind the scenes snippets on youtube:
The second episode, The Devil’s Chord, features The Maestro, Abbey road, the Beatles and more…
Please join us for a discussion about the new Doctor Who, at 6:30, Thursday May 30th. We’re meeting a bit later in the month, so you’ll have the chance to watch the first four episodes of the new Doctor Who, screening on BBC on Sunday the 12th (2 episodes), 19th and 26th. [Doctor Who‘s next season will officially air on Disney Plus from Friday, May 10 at 10 AM AEDT in Australia. ]
In person at Kappy’s Tea & Coffee, 1/22 Compton St, Adelaide — 6:15 for a 6:30 start, or zoom in at 6:30
With the third volume of his Lightspeed trilogy due to be released this month, here’s what Ken Macleod had to say about the trilogy:
“Various ideas went into the Lightspeed series: one of them was what I called ‘socialism with European characteristics,’ a play off, obviously, Chinese socialism, and how that might tie into anticipatory algorithms. I was at the point of frantically trying to think of ideas for my next book to pitch to my agent and editor, and I looked through some old notebooks that I had written when I was a student – probably when I was in my teens and early twenties – and this was the idea: a very near future with faster-than-light travel, which is: ‘What if FTL was discovered last year? What if FTL travel was discovered, like, now? Or in 2018, along with Trump, Putin, all the rest of it?’ “I had all these ideas from my past notes about near-future FTL and near-future politics, so I threw them into the mix, and the way the AI thing came into it was that, eventually, you end up with three superpowers: the Union, the Coordinated States, and the Alliance. Each of them has its own AI descendant of Alexa, essentially. The Union is, roughly, the present European Union plus Scotland, and minus England. Both Scotland and Ireland are in it, but England isn’t. England is in the Alliance, which is the Anglosphere, including India. The Coordinated States are something like a development of present-day China, with Russia sort of tagged on. The Union is this very self-righteous, supposedly democratic socialist society that has emerged at what is called the Rising, two decades in the past; I guess it’s the 2030s in the timeline. They’re attempting a very slow transformation away from capitalism, in a gradual transition which they call the Cold Revolution. They have their own friendly AI, called Iskander. The Coordinated States have WeThink, and the Alliance have Smart-Alec. These AI sort of follow in the background. I don’t think the books necessarily take the serious conversation of artificial intelligence very far forward. from Ken MacLeod: So Many Shocks, Locus magazine
Copies of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four have been arriving at an artist’s studio in Edinburgh for months. Every shape and size, posted from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Peru, Germany, Cape Cod and Sarajevo. Some are in mint condition, others are dog-eared, tea-stained, heavily annotated or turned into graffitied art works. One is a water-stained first edition; one is a secret love letter from a married woman to her first love; another, a graphic novel version, came from Orwell’s son Richard Blair. Each has been donated to a unique installation in the community hall of Jura, the Hebridean island where Orwell, in dire poverty and desperately ill, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the late 1940s, to mark its publication 75 years ago. Hans K Clausen, a sculptor based in Edinburgh, is collecting 1,984 copies of the book to exhibit on Jura for three days in early June. It will be an interactive, “living” sculpture where visitors are invited to open and read every volume. Many have arrived, often with overseas postmarks and customs stamps, addressed to “Winston Smith, care of Hans K Clausen”. full story here
May’s Nova Mob is just days away, Wednesday 1 May, which entails cries of May Day and shouts of pure joy as David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss resolve that knottiest of questions, which novel is the best science fiction novel of the 1960’s?
Apparently a shortlist or two has been shortlisted (ahem) with the evening’s discussion to involve deeper, more rigorous scrutiny. Forensics, post-mortems, that sort of thing. Says David: “My cunning plan is that Perry and I will take turns in picking a novel for our “draft” of the 10 best SF novels of the 1960s.”
Audience participation is encouraged; indeed it may well be requested by our two lead debaters. Mob members whose preferred style of engagement is to observe should feel free to continue to do so, of course.
Nova Mob 1 May 2024
Perry Middlemiss and David Grigg argue or agree.
Please share this invitation to this forthcoming meeting with like-minded friends and fans
Face to face
You are invited to an in-person Nova Mob meeting at: Wednesday 1 May 2024 8.00pm – 9.15pm or so (Melbourne), first floor Conference Room. Kensington Town Hall 30 – 34 Bellair St, Kensington Melbourne VIC 3031
By Zoom – simulcast
For those who prefer not to travel or are unable to attend face-to-face. Zoom session broadcast from the Kensington Town Hall. Questions or comments typed into the Zoom chat will be discussed as the opportunity permits, and you’ll have as much airtime as the other Mob members at the venue. Wednesday 1 May 2024 8.00pm – 9.30 pm Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney time; 7.30pm – 9.00pm Adelaide time Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4177583193?pwd=VjdPL1BhSTBNclN2YnRsejN3Y1hlUT09
Passcode: nova Meeting ID: 417 758 3193
Pre-Mob dining – at the Doutta Galla Hotel The usual pre-Mob location in Newmarket Doutta Galla Hotel, 339 Racecourse Road, Melbourne, Victoria 3031, Australia 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. https://douttagallahotel.com
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Nova Mob email change of address
Please change your address book because of autocomplete.
Please update your address book so your autocomplete doesn’t send you to the old address in error. That address, now out of date, had been scraped by nefarious types and added to some spam lists. The last straw was some phishing attempts, and last month’s email bouncing because the good guys now block those spam lists.
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The Cupboard under the Stairs
Sighted at Dymocks, new edition of George Turner’s award-winner
George Turner’s Miles Franklin Award-winning novel “The Cupboard Under the Stairs” has been sighted at Dymocks in a new edition and (how does this happen?) remaindered at the nifty price of $10.00. (Reported by Rob Gerrand).
As mentioned at his Nova Mob talk, John Clute’s investigation into the cultural legacy of dustwrappers has entered print. At Norstrilia Press!
“The first known dust-jacket to appear on a book in the UK dates from 1819.
Sadly, almost none of these jackets have survived. The one institution primarily responsible for this vandalism is the British Library, which removed dust-jackets from every book it accessioned, and destroyed almost all of them.
In The Book Blinders, distinguished critic, editor and novelist John Clute looks at 115 books whose jackets have survived out here in the real world. They escaped the burning. Each has a story to tell.”
Does anyone want to represent or publicise the Nova Mob at Continuum? And congrats to Vanessa Len!
Continuum 16: Reboot – and 62nd NatCon
After a germ-induced hiatus, we are delighted to announce that Continuum is returning to Melbourne, bigger and brighter than ever.
Continuum 16: Reboot will be held 17-19 May, 2024 at Hotel Jasper, 489 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.”
Guests are Shannon Chakraborty, Nova Mob guest Vanessa Len, and Cienan Muir. Congratulations Vanessa!
Vanessa Len
“Vanessa Len is an internationally bestselling Australian author and educational editor. Her first novel, Only a Monster, won the 2022 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel, and has been translated into nine languages. The sequel, Never a Hero, is out now.”
Last month we farewelled several noteworthy authors and friends in an illuminating and at times joyously celebratory send-off. Without turning this newsletter into Ansible, wherein Dave Langford has lamented the size of the list of departeds, we must note two recent losses. John Barth’s works at one time took centre stage at the Nova Mob, and Wikipedia’s entry on The Sot Weed Factor provides a plot synopsis of that picaresque novel which is almost as enervating as the novel itself. Trina Robbins shifted the American comix culture to something more welcoming and less misogynist.
John Simmons Barth May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland’s colonial history; Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world; and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
Trina Robbins (néePerlson; August 17, 1938 – April 10, 2024) was an American cartoonist. She was an early participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the first women in the movement. She co-produced the 1970 underground comic It Ain’t Me, Babe, which was the first comic book entirely created by women. She co-founded the Wimmen’s Comix collective, wrote for Wonder Woman, and produced adaptations of Dope and [Tanith Lee’s] The Silver Metal Lover. She was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and received Eisner Awards in 2017 and 2021.
Robbins was an active member of science fiction fandom in the 1950s and 1960s and attended sf conventions. Her illustrations appeared in science fiction fanzines like the Hugo–nominatedHabakkuk. In New York in 1966 she lived in Manhattan’s East Village, where she worked as a stylist and ran a clothing boutique called “Broccoli”. Robbins’ first comics were printed in the East Village Other in 1966. In the late 1960s, she designed clothes for Mama Cass,Donovan, David Crosby, among others. She was intimately involved in the 1960s rock scene, where she was close friends with Jim Morrison and members of The Byrds. Robbins was the first of the three “Ladies of the Canyon” in Joni Mitchell‘s classic song from the album of the same name.
Robbins spoke out against the misogyny and “boy’s club” of comics creators, criticizing underground comix artist Robert Crumb for the perceived misogyny of many of his comics. As a scholar and historian, Robbins researched the history of women in cartooning. She wrote several nonfiction books including Women and the Comics (1985), A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), The Great Women Superheroes (1996), From Girls to Grrrlz (1999), Pretty In Ink (2013), and Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age (2020).
Roundtable with Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik
Locus recently hosted a virtual roundable discussion with leading SF/F writers Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Usman T. Malik, who sat down for a wide-ranging and lively conversation about the art, craft, and business of short fiction, and the impact of the form on their creative work and lives.
Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, £20)In 2016 Hao became the first Chinese woman to win a Hugo. Her second novel is set in 2080, when three young scientists conclude that changing emission patterns of pulsars indicate an alien vessel is on its way towards Earth, and that it has been here before. The world is split between two warmongering rivals, the Pacific League and the Atlantic Alliance. If either makes first contact while bristling with weapons, it could be a disaster; so the well-connected friends borrow a private ship to go into space themselves.
More reviews of recent SF by Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian
Last year, Denis Villeneuve said he only wanted to do one more Dune movie, making Dune Messiah to close out a trilogy. A wise man, he told Empire, “After that, the books become more… esoteric.”
A third Dune movie wasn’t official until now, in the wake of Dune 2 doing exceedingly well at the box office.
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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