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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 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 collect...

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...

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 b...