I’ve just finished reading A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, ed. Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan, Random Static 2010, which is a collection of short fiction by NZ/NZ-resident writers around the theme of the LP Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Only in this case, it’s the future, so this truly is speculative fiction.

As those of you who read my Thursday 27 post may already have guessed, I really enjoyed the anthology and see it as  a very good indicator of the strength and diversity of contemporary NZ speculative fiction writing. I didn’t love every story, but I liked a great many of them rather a lot and really wanted to keep reading—which to be honest, is unusual for me with collected short fiction. (The last time was in 2008 when I read Charlotte Grimshaw’s Opportunity, which I found very difficult to put down.)

And I’m about halfway through Mary Victoria’s Samiha’s Song, the second in her Chronicles of the Tree series, which began with Tymon’s Flight. And so far, I’m loving it and really looking forward to finishing and then getting organised for our interview—right here—on 15 February.

So how about you? What are you reading?

Well, I’m a little late because the actual release day was Tuesday 25 January in the US (our Wednesday 26 here and in Australia), but anyway—congratulations to my friend and fellow Supernatural Underground author, Tracey O’Hara, whose second novel, Death’s Sweet Embrace launched on the 25th.

Death’s Sweet Embrace is the second in Tracey’s Dark Brethren paranormal urban Fantasy series, which began with Night’s Cold Kiss (2009). I haven’t read Death’s Sweet Embrace yet, but I did read Kiss and if you like butt-kicking chicks taking on vampires and weres, and worse, with a touch of humour and some sizzling paranormal romantic action thrown in—well, pour yourself a coffee (or something stronger) and put up your feet, because I suspect you’re going to have fun with Death’s Sweet Embrace!

And you can read an early review, here.

Can stars run away? Well, apparently so and Zeta Ophiuchi is doing just that! To find out how and why, visit the NASA website here where there’s a great article explaining the how and why.

And it’s cool, I tell you—awesomely cool!

But meanwhile, I just had to share the pretty picture: I hope you like it enough to want to find out more.  Fiind out, I say, find out–just click here! Or check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy website for another take on the Zeta Ophiuchi phenomenon.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

From time to time I receive emails through my website, on a range of topics. One I found interesting, from a correspondent who shall remain anonymous (and no, in all likelihood you wouldn’t know him/her anyway) wrote: ” … a few years ago …  I spoke with some NZ publishers and asked them for their opinion of non-YA SFF* publishing in NZ. They told me they doubted there would ever be much activity in that area.”

* (scifi-fantasy/ speculative fiction)

Humph, thought I—and then, but is it true? Is it really true that there’s not much adult SFF worthy of publication being produced in NZ?

My observation and anecdotal evidence suggest  that it isn’t true and that there are in fact a large number of people out there now who are either writing or aspiring to write SFF—far more than I realised when I started down this road myself. So has something changed dramatically over the past few years, or has an enduring reality of New Zealanders reading and writing SFF simply become more visible?

I would be interested to know your thoughts, but my feeling is that the latter is probably the case and that recent phenomena like the Harry Potter and Twilight books, and the Lord of the Rings films, have simply made SFF more, well, respectable. (I certainly received the impression that it wasn’t respectable when I first started writing in earnest, eleven years ago!) I was  intrigued, for example, when Interactive Press brought out Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones) in 2009, to see how many mainstream New Zealand poets had written poetry, over  a considerable period of years, that qualified for inclusion in a “science fiction” anthology.

In terms of some of that activity out there now, the newly formed SpecFicNZ—which is for writers (and editors et al) as opposed to readers—has gotten off to a flying start.  And the recently published A Foreign Country: NZ Speculative Fiction (edited by Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan, Random Static, 2010) contains twenty two short stories by New Zealand authors, some as well established as Juliet Marillier and James Norcliffe, while also featuring newer voices such as Ripley Patton and Miriam Hurst. So plenty of activity there!

You may also recall, from my January 13 post about the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, that I could readily list 5 Adult and 4 YA titles from 2010—so again, no shortage of activity by New Zealand writers in the speculative fiction field.

But of those 5 Adult titles, all five were published overseas, four in the USA and one in Australia, which does rather make it seem as though the lack of activity arises,  not from a lack  of publishable material being produced in New Zealand, but rather from a  lack of interest in publishing it … To make my point, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand was published by an Australian press.

Which does rather beg the question: why?

So waddya reckon? Why do you think NZ publishers aren’t interested in NZ speculative fiction?  And are those reasons valid?

Yesterday was Tuesday Poem day and that always gets me thinking about “the best words in their best order”, which was what Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834; he of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Xanadu fame) said about poetry.

I suppose poets and prose writers, if they so choose, may argue forever about which group may lay claim to the best words and better order, but there is no doubt in my mind that poetry often provides very apt words.

Shortly before Christmas I was (legitimately, I hasten to add) sent a series of black and white images of Scott’s last and ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. Wonderful photographs of the stark, white world that is Antarctica and of the men, and also the ponies and the dog teams brought to the frozen continent for the expedition.

Coming right on the celebration of Christmas, which is traditionally a festival of life and renewal—and of course in NZ is all about light and summer, as well—these photographs struck me hard. Perhaps because the last, ill-fated Scott expedition left from New Zealand—and Christchurch, in fact—I had grown up with the sad and terribly moving story, which is mainly about death in that white, unforgiving world. I knew, for example, that the ponies had died and the dogs been shot, and that many of the men in those beautiful photographs would also have died.

So to me, the photos, despite their austere beauty, spoke of sorrow and loss and death—and sent me to poetry for the ‘apt words’ that could encompass those emotions.  In this case, the “best words in their best order” came from poems in Bernadette Hall’s 2007 collection The Ponies (Victoria University Press), produced in part from her time in Antarctica as the 2004 Antarctic Arts Award recipient:

“That’s when the blizzard struck. Now it’s white-out.
Our faces grow black from burning blubber, our eyes
weep, our lips split. Jofe says we have to keep calm,
keep on talking to each other. Our rations run low.

Outside, the ponies lying dead in the snow.”

[from the title poem, The Ponies, pp 23-4.]

and

“When there is white only,
when everything is coloured white,
the land, the sky, the ice and the horizon,

the heroes as they walk away
you’d say were climbing a white wall to heaven.”

[from the poem Heaven, p 30]

spring rain
a rat laps
the Sumida river

Kobayashi Issa 1763-1827

—

Last week Jeffrey Paparoa Holman posted another haiku by Issa, one of the great Japanese haijin, while Janis Freegard shared a poem by Japanese poet, Taigyu Ryokan: “You Do Not Need Many Things.”  They put me in the mode for more haiku and this one, by Issa, is one of my favorites.  For me, it epitomises the juxtaposition of images that “cut” each other and (and in so doing create something greater), that is the essence of haiku.

As with all the best haiku, it can also be read equally well in reverse order:

the Sumida river
a rat laps
spring rain

But read either way, I love the simplicity and power of the image: the freshness of the rain juxtaposed with the rat, which is vermin—and yet the rat, too, laps the river/spring rain: it is part of the whole, with no judgement as to merit.

Head on over to The Realm if you have a moment, where my guest post on finishing The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two, and looking at the year ahead has just posted.

And if you have any questions or queries about the new book, feel free to leave a comment. 😉

A few new reviews have come through for The Heir of Night, from the USA, UK and Australia respectively:

—The newest, as of 17 January, from the USA here

—from The Bookbag Blog, UK, here; and

—a little older, from 10 November 2010 on The Road Well Travelled blog in Australia, here.

Enjoy—and I should have a guest post featuring on The Realm later today; I’ll post again when it’s “live.”

In terms of what’s coming up over the next few weeks-to-months, both here on “… Anything, Really” and in other places, I’ve got a few things on the go.

Blog Interviews:

On 1 February I’ll be interviewing my friend and debut Romance author, Beth Anne Miller, on the Supernatural Underground and discussing her about-to-be released first novel, Into the Scottish Mist, with a follow-up interview here on 4 February.

On 15 February, I’ll be doing another “… on Anything, Really” author interview with Mary Victoria, discussing (the again soon-to-be-released) Samiha’s Song, which is the second in her Chronicles of the Tree series, which started with Tymon’s Flight.

When I started blogging, interviews with other authors was one of the things I was keen to do, so it’s good to be kicking off the new year with a few.

—

Guest Blog Post

As part of the celebrations around the launch of Samiha’s Song, Mary Victoria has asked a some fellow SFF authors to guest post on her blog in a series on the theme of “Writing Strong Female Characters.” (Just as a ‘sneak preview’, I am currently reading Samiha’s Song and can tell you that Mary has an impressive representation of strong female characters in her story! 😉 )

My fellow guests will be (in alphabetical order, not necessarily order of appearance):

Saladin Ahmed; Blake Charlton; Kim Falconer; Tim Jones; Glenda Larke; Nicole Murphy; Gillian Polack and Karon Warren

I’ll also have a series of guest posts coming up on the Orbit blog, ahead of the UK launch of The Heir of Night on 11 March.

—

NZ Book Month—Dan Davin Literary Foundation Guest:

I have been invited to present a series of workshops for high school students and an evening event as the NZ Book Month guest of the Dan Davin Literary Foundation, during the week of 21-27 March. The workshops will be held in Queenstown, Gore and Invercargill; the evening event will also be in Invercargill. I have long-standing ties to the Southland region and am delighted to be going back and to have the opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with aspiring writers there. I will post more details as these are finalised, both here and on the News page on my website.

—

Last But Never Least–UK Launch of The Heir of Night on 11 March!

Yup, it’s finally almost here, the UK launch of the The Heir of Night (Orbit) on 11 March—so watch this space for more details of celebratory fun and goodness! 🙂

Over on the Supernatural Underground, my fellow Supe Nicole Murphy has just posted about her two week writing retreat with fellow Fantasy writers in Australia (although New Zealander Russell Kirkpatrick is mentioned in dispatches, so we know there was at least one Kiwi there.) It sounds divine, two uninterrupted weeks just to focus on writing—and I’m not surprised that Nicole’s usual weekly word count doubled during her time there.

On January 18, fellow Tuesday Poet, Janis Freegard, posted Taigyu Ryokan’s (1758-1831) wonderful poem, You Do Not need Many Things, which begins with the line:

My house is buried in the deepest recess of the forest …

and concludes with:

… To enjoy life’s immensity, you do not need many things.”

Perhaps, in order to enjoy an immensity of writing, or any creative endeavour, we do not need many things either, except the space in which to create. Virginia Woolf famously said that in order to write one needed “a room of one’s own” and the Finnish composer, Sibelius, is said to have built his country home, Ainola–which was also “buried in the … recess of the forest” in order to compose more productively. And I know that the thing I felt most in need of this past year while writing The Gathering of the Lost was uninterrupted time.

Yet, although the drive to produce a creative work may push toward withdrawal and retreat, I believe that the heart and fire of writing is also very much about being involved in life and “Mankind” (to paraphrase John Donne.)  So it may be that the essential nature of the writing life must always be to teeter on the tightrope between total immersion in life’s  hustle and bustle  (where little or nothing gets written), and total seclusion, which if maintained or long enough, will also result in nothing being written …

Not always a comfortable tightrope on which to try and maintain one’s balance. But what do my fellow writers say: Do you agree? Disagree? What is your most productive writing environment?