standing
on the edge

light falls
……………….away

cry out
voice lost
……………….beneath
a white sky
shout downwards
count……….the silence

a single echo
…………………back
.

© Helen Lowe

—

A few weeks back, I featured Garden peas (Mendel’s Law, 1866), a poem by Helen Bascand. I noted Helen’s passing on April 27, and that I had been privileged to be a member of the same poetry group as Helen for a number of years. This was one of the first poems I worked on with Helen and the other members of the group, so it feels timely to share it with you today.

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.

Awards Celebration & Keynote Address

Christchurch had two winners and a further two finalists (in multiple categories) in the recent Sir Julius Vogel Awards, given annually by the Science Fiction (and) Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ) for excellence in New Zealand created Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror. There’s a fabulous trophy too, designed by the famous WETA Workshop.

SpecFicNZ Christchurch has decided the Christchurch writers’ success is more than worthy of celebration and is hosting an event at Fendalton Library this weekend (kick-off is at 1.30 pm.)

As a past Sir Julius Vogel Award winner, I am delighted to be giving the keynote address for the event and I understand the two Award winners will also be making speeches as well as reading from their work. Light refreshments are being provided and there will be the opportunity to meet and chat with all the writers afterward.

As you may recall, I launched Thornspell at Fendalton Library, way back in 2008, and since I understand this will be the first event there since the 2010-11 earthquakes, it feels doubly great to be going back on Saturday.

I’ll be specifically featuring both the finalists and winners later in the week, including excerpts and information about their work. In the meanwhile, here’s a larger version of the invite poster:

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Also This Week: Fantasy Heroines That Rock My World

I’ll have another guest post in the “Fantasy Heroines That Rock My World” series up on SF Signal — and this time I’m featuring a NZ heroine by a NZ author. There’ll be a spot prize for anyone who guesses the heroine and author correctly (in  a comment left on this post) ahead of the feature posting. 🙂

(Members of the SF Signal team excluded from the guessing and spot prize—sorry, Paul!)

David Mueller-Cajar

My friend, musician and composer David Mueller-Cajar, will be performing in concert at Christchurch’s Orange Studio on Tuesday 16 June at 7.30 pm.

David began learning the French Horn at Darfield High School and went on to graduate with a Bmus(hon)(1st class) in composition and performance from the University of Canterbury in 2009. From 2010-2012 he studied under world-famous Professor Michael Hoeltzel at the Rostock Conservatorie of Theatre and Music. In 2012 he had the opportunity of debuting at the Carnegie Hall with the Shen Yun Performing Arts Orchestra.

He has since done several solo concerts in New Zealand and is a casual player with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. This year David recorded an album at Orange Studios titled Diversity performing a collection of modern classical works and Klezmer music [Jewish traditional] for French Horn. This concert will be showcasing some of these pieces by composers such as Dave Tarras, and the orchestras of Harry Kandel and Abbe Schwartz. Renowned Christchurch-based pianist Tim Emerson, who also features on the live album, will be providing accompaniment.

If you enjoy classical music, like experiencing something new, and/or are keen to support emerging local artists, this event could be for you. To book, click on:

David Mueller-Cajar Live @ Orange

Yesterday I talked about my most recent “read and enjoyed”, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl In Coldtown.

With that out of the way, the books I have on the reading table for this weekend are:

Isabel Allende’s classic Of Love and Shadows, which has been on the table for some time but has now worked it’s way much closer to the top.

Joe Abercrombie’s Half A King, which will be my first Joe Abercrombie read (I know: shock, horror–but better late than never, right? Right!) and I believe may be his first foray into YA fiction. It’s also made it onto the recently announced Gemmell Legend Award shortlist for this year, so I note the “watch this space” for the outcome of the vote.

Also on the TBR table, although I’m not sure it’ll make it off the reading blocks this weekend, is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which I’ve been meaning to re-read for some time.

So how about you: what are you reading this weekend?

As I said recently in my post on Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven: “…it’s not the genre but how the genre is executed that really counts.”

It’s also relevant that I mentioned being a tad over vampire novels, particularly the YA variants.

Nonetheless, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl In Coldtown is a vampire novel and I enjoyed it all the same. It’s an entertaining, well-paced read, with a number of interesting and sympathetic characters (as well as a number of decidedly unsympathetic ones) and some excellent world-building. I also thought the romantic elements were well handled.

If I were one of those readers that demands that everything I read should be “the new, the new”, then I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to you. The Coldest Girl In Coldtown doesn’t do a whole lot new with the genre and if you’ve read Robin McKinley’s Sunshine or Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels you’ll find yourself on familiar ground. There were also echoes of books in related genres, such as Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and Max Brooks’ World War Z.

If you feel like a relatively light, well-crafted, YA vampire novel with romantic elements The Coldest Girl In Coldtown could be just the ticket. In addition to the other books already mentioned, if you’ve enjoyed the Mira Grant Newsflesh trilogy, Caitlin Tiernan’s Immortal Beloved, or Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely, I’m pretty sure you’ll like The Coldest Girl In Coldtown.

I was thrilled to receive an email from John De Nardo of SF Signal yesterday, advising that last month’s feature post on Dianora Di Certando—from Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel, Tigana—was one of the Signal’s Top 25 posts for May: w00t!

And although I’m not taking way from my own role in having written the article, I do think a great deal of the credit must go to Guy Gavriel Kay for having penned so memorable a character as Dianora, in such a compelling and enduring book as Tigana.

You can check out the Top 25 posts here:

The Top 25 SF Signal Posts For May

And read, or re-read, the Dianora post, here:

Helen Lowe On Fantasy Heroines That Rock Her World: Dianora Di Certando

Looking back, I realise it’s not the first time I’ve made the SF Signal Top 25. It has happened once before, way back in January 2012, for the post:

Do We Need To Make Epic Fantasy New?

As I said then, and would still echo now: “doin’ alright” for a gal from the far side of the world! 😉

~ by Rebecca Fisher

I was given one piece of advice before watching this film: that I would have to watch it twice, since it’s impossible to understand the first time around.

Written, directed, produced, edited, scored and starring Shane Carruth, Primer is a low budget sci-fi film that involves two long-time friends who invent a time travel machine in their garage. Their discovery is almost by accident and the device is about the size of a microwave, but soon plans are made to design a larger one. One that’s big enough for a person.

Shot to resemble a fly-on-the-wall documentary, with a budget of only seven thousand dollars, a crew of five and a cast made up of the director’s friends and family, Primer above all conveys the idea that if time-travel was possible, this is how it would occur. The technical jargon used by Aaron and Abe isn’t simplified for the audience, the locations are almost painfully mundane, and the time travel itself completely void of any flashy special-effects.

As seems to be the case with many indie films, Primer is just as interested in the ethical implications of its premise as its science-fiction subject matter. It asks not what would you do if you could time travel, but how long it would take before your good intentions gave way to greed and arrogance; how soon would your awe at the ability to re-experience the day wear off and be replaced with weariness at the endless permutations of time? Would you use foreknowledge for the common good? Or to accrue a fortune on the stock market?

Like a drug addiction, Abe and Aaron can’t stop meddling with the power they’ve discovered.

Be aware, though, that Primer is a tough watch. A lot of the scenes are just the characters talking to each other, and as the subject matter gets more complicated (with time paradoxes and past-present overlaps) and the men’s dabbling moves from simple experimentation to meddling with their personal relationships, the film also gets more and more confusing.

I’ve heard some say that the story would be utterly incomprehensible if it wasn’t for the voice-over narration, and that’s probably true – and I say that as someone who usually thinks voice-over narration is a lazy storytelling device. The plot is non-linear, with some scenes out of chronological order (at least, I think so!) and an ending that poses far more questions than answers.

Abe and Aaron prepare for their first time travel expedition

Primer has become a cult classic in the ten years since its release, with a multitude of theories and explanations and FAQs posted all across the internet. It’s certainly not for everyone, and it’s definitely not a movie you can watch casually. You have to pay close attention to what unfolds, to consider every turn of events, and – as I pass on the warning that was initially given to me – you can’t expect to fully understand it after just one viewing.
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Wrapping Up “Fantasy/Sci-Fi Films You’ve Probably Never Heard Of”:

So this brings us to the end of the sub-series “Fantasy/Sci-Fi Films You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.” I hope that it has brought some otherwise unheard of films to your attention – more than that, I hope that if you chose to seek any of them out, you end up enjoying what they have to offer. I’ve had a lot of fun revisiting some of my old favourites and discovering some new classics, though a part of me is looking forward to going back to my usual format.
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Next Time: The 100

Speaking of which, up next is a look at the relatively recent The 100, a sci-fi show that follows the current dystopian trend of throwing teenagers into a post-apocalyptical survival scenario. And yet there’s plenty of things to like about the delivery of this premise – not limited to its great female protagonist.
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About The Reviewer:

Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com and her They’re All Fictional blog.

To read Rebecca’s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, as well as preceding reviews, click on:

Big Worlds On Small Screens

Rebecca has recently won the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2015 for Best Fan Writer, for writing including Big Worlds On Small Screens.

Letter from Somewhere, 1932

In the unmapped centre of the uncut forest
before we came somewhere from Uhtua
happy workers hustled up the first buildings
……………in the fourth year of a five-year plan
……………time moves so fast whatever our purposes
restaurant sauna laundry-hut bakery shop
warehouse stables office red corner to hang
faces of leaders posters photographs banners
charts to drill this alphabet into our wooden heads
prepare us to work for the common good
……………as our leaders so often remind us but
……………our plans our wishes our feet go dragging
in a pair of weeks five more buildings perhaps
we will live in new houses the scheme is a grand one
a separate room for each family if only time can be found
to prepare the making-space-between-us-walls
……………I hope they hammer fast
……………slap the muddy backside of time
21 women live here now about 100 men
more will arrive I believe in carts and wagons
I keep busy with jobs chosen only for me
……………and 20 other women life is merry
……………the weather is nicer what else to say
berries for picking with fingers and buckets
fishes for cleaning with knives and thumbs
mosses for hands to grasp from the ground
potatoes to raise from the earth with hands
……………so many joyful tasks and little duties
……………but fate will soon blow in from the north
so many berries no jars to preserve alas
this blueberry heaven in rows of glass
two wooden vats of lingonberry mash
but the rains came even snow and frost
……………our great plans to amass one thousand
……………and five hundred litres all gone awash
elokuu the life moon of ripeness has turned
to syyskuu the reason moon of cause and effect
now it’s lokakuu the moon of frozen dirt
soon it will be marraskuu we always called it
……………moon of death
……………our cold fate

© Nancy Mattson

First published as part of the sequence, Lisi’s Letters From Karelia, in Cardinal Points, 2011; Reproduced here with permission.

Note on Finnish words:
 elokuu - August, syyskuu - September,
 lokakuu - October, marraskuu - November, kuu - moon

—

About the Poem:

Currently, I am refeaturing poems by ex-patriate Canadian poet, Nancy Mattson. The Lisi sequence forms part of Nancy’s 2012 collection, Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead), which celebrates early 20th century Russian women artists, such as Varvara Stepanova (the subject of Compasses, featured on Tuesday, May 19), who were featured in the exhibition Amazons of the Avant-Garde, eds. Bowlt & Drutt, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999. Many of these women towered above their age in artistic terms, but much of their work was lost, buried or overlooked until the 1990s.

The other woman who informs Finns and Amazons is Nancy’s (Great) Aunt Lisi who first emigrated from Finland to North America and later to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s; she was lost in 1939. A sequence of poems in the  Finns and Amazons collection is based on letters written by Lisi to her sister Anna, who remained in Canada.

—

About The Poet:

Nancy Mattson is an ex-patriate Canadian poet, now resident in London. Her third collection of poetry, Finns and Amazons, of which Compasses: A Triptych forms part, was published by Arrowhead Press, in 2012.Nancy began writing poetry in 1977 after completing her MA in English Literature at the University of Alberta. Her poetry, non-fiction and reviews have been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and Finland in magazines, anthologies, the odd scholarly journal, a printed encyclopaedia and a couple of parish newsletters.

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.

On the 1st of every month (US Eastern Standard Time), I post on the Supernatural Underground, which means my June post has just gone live.

As I say in the post:

“Last month I kicked off a new Supernatural Underground post series, looking at different aspects of romantic love, including examples from my own fiction where appropriate.

I started with that universal crowd pleaser, “star-crossed love” and “might have been’s.” This month, I’m checking out “childhood sweethearts” and “the gal, or guy, next door.”

…“

To read more, click on:

Love, Actually: Childhood Sweethearts & The Gal or Guy Next Door

Enjoy!

NZ Book Month was postponed indefinitely this year. So the wonderful Rachael King, author and Literary Director of the WORDChristchurch (Books & Writers’) Festival, kicked off the #NZBookMonthMay tag on Twitter, determined to celebrate NZ literature, readers and writers, regardless.

I “got in behind”, to use Kiwi parlance, by tweeting a speculative fiction publication—some current, some classic—by a NZ author every day throughout the month. I was also pretty sure I could get through the month without once repeating an author—and the list below proves my supposition was quite right. 😉

So here, now, is the full and unabridged list for May, from 1 through 31, of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror publications by NZ authors:

May 1:

Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck (Fantasy)
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May 2:

Margaret Mahy, The Changeover (YA; Fantasy)
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.
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May 3:

Editors Mark Pirie & Tim Jones, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry From New Zealand (Poetry Anthology; Science Fiction)
.

Monday 4:

Keri Hulme, The Bone People (Magic Realism)
.

Tuesday 5:

Russell Kirkpatrick, Across the Face of the World (Epic Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 6:

Karen Healey, Guardian Of The Dead (Fantasy; YA)
.

Thursday 7:

Tina Makereti, Once Upon A Time In Aotearoa (Fantasy; Short Story collection)
.

Friday 8:

Adam Christopher, Seven Wonders (Superhero Science Fiction)
.

Saturday 9:

Jane Higgins, The Bridge (Alternate dystopia; YA)
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Sunday 10:

Fredrik Brounéous The Prince Of Soul And The Lighthouse (Fantasy; YA)
.

Monday 11:

Rachael King, Red Rocks (Junior fiction; Urban Fantasy)
.

Tuesday 12:

Patricia Grace, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (Magic Realism)
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Wednesday 13:

Bernard Beckett, Genesis (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Thursday 14:

Fleur Beale, Juno Of Taris (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Friday 15:

Philip Mann, The Disestablishment Of Paradise (Science Fiction)
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Saturday 16:

editors Cassie Hart & Anna Caro, Tales for Canterbury (Speculative Fiction; short story collection)
.

Sunday 17:

Brian Falkner, Assault (Junior; Military Science Fiction)
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Monday 18:

Juliet Marillier, Prickle Moon (Short Fiction Anthology; Fantasy)
.

Tuesday 19:

James Norcliffe, The Loblolly Boy (Junior Fiction; Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 20:

Freya Robertson, Heartwood (Epic Fantasy)
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Thursday 21:

Kelly Ana Moray, Bloom (Magical Realism)
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Friday 22:

Nalini Singh, Angel’s Blood (Paranormal Urban Romance)
.

Saturday 23:

David Hair, The Bone Tiki (YA; Fantasy)
.

Sunday 24:

Philippa Ballantine, Geist (Fantasy)
.

Monday 25:

Rachel Craw, Spark (YA; Science Fiction)
.

Tuesday 26:

Anna Mackenzie, Cattra’s Legacy (YA; Fantasy)
.

Wednesday 27:

Debbie & Matt Cowens, Mansfield With Monsters (Mashup; Fantasy)
.

Thursday 28:

RL Stedman, A Necklace of Souls (YA; Fantasy)
.

Friday 29:

Anna Smaill, The Chimes (Fantasy)
.

Saturday 30:

Maurice Gee, Under The Mountain (Junior; Fantasy)
.

Sunday 31:

Helen Lowe, The Heir of Night (Epic; Fantasy)

—

I know I still haven’t included everyone, but this is still a very respectable array and one that I believe proves NZ speculative fiction writing is vibrant and an area to be proud of within the overall NZ literary scene.