Looking for a great gift idea for Valentine's Day, something your spouse would like, or your lover ... or maybe both of them? Why not buy them a copy, or two, of Chained to the Alien: The Best of Australian Science Fiction Review, edited by Damien Broderick, published by the small-but-very-reputable Borgo Press, and featuring nearly 30,000 words of material by yours truly?
In fact, I've just signed the contract for my one of my pieces from the late 1980s or early 1990s to appear in Damien's follow-up volume, somewhat jokingly entitled Skiffy and Mimesis (I have to take the blame for this book title: it's the title of my own piece in the volume, "Skiffy and Mimesis: or, Critics in Costume"). This second volume of selected material from ASFR(2) will highlight shorter work that the zine published back in the halycon days, a couple of decades ago, including some of the battles that took place in its pages. See a multi-dog struggle, involving George Turner, Lucius Shepard, John Foyster, and, oh yes, Russell Blackford, fighting over the ambitions and achievement of modern science fiction. Elsewhere, Gregory Benford sternly critiques Ursula Le Guin, only to be critiqued just as sternly in turn.
Tempers flare. Relationships get tense. And Benford's candid reflection on these events, twenty years later, may surprise you ...
3 comments:
No, no, no, you don't advertise for a first book by talking about the follow-up one. People will wait to buy a matched set.
If I gave my husband "Chained to the Alien" for Valentine's Day, I think he might take it the wrong way. Don't you think?
I'm no great fan of postmodern Theory but I read Broderick's fascinating 'Reading by Starlight' some years back and enjoyed it immensely so I think I'll give this one a try too.
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