{"id":3303,"date":"2011-01-27T06:30:39","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T17:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=3303"},"modified":"2011-01-27T22:27:58","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T09:27:58","slug":"speculative-fiction-in-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/01\/27\/speculative-fiction-in-new-zealand\/","title":{"rendered":"Speculative Fiction in New Zealand"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 <\/em>know him\/her anyway) wrote: ” … a few years ago …\u00a0 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.”<\/em><\/p>\n

* (scifi-fantasy\/ speculative fiction)<\/pre>\n
Humph, thought I—and then, but is it true? Is it really<\/em> true that there’s not much adult SFF worthy of publication being produced in NZ?<\/p>\n
My observation and anecdotal evidence suggest\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n
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<\/em> and Twilight<\/em> books, and the Lord of the Rings<\/em> films, have simply made SFF more, well, respectable<\/em>. (I certainly received the impression that it wasn’t <\/em>respectable when I first started writing in earnest, eleven years ago!) I was\u00a0 intrigued, for example, when Interactive Press brought out Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand<\/em> (edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones) in 2009, to see how many mainstream New Zealand poets had written poetry, over\u00a0 a considerable period of years, that qualified for inclusion in a “science fiction” anthology.<\/p>\n
In terms of some of that activity out there now, the newly formed SpecFicNZ<\/a>—which is for writers (and editors et al) as opposed to readers—has gotten off to a flying start.\u00a0 And the recently published A Foreign Country: NZ Speculative Fiction <\/em>(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<\/a> and James Norcliffe<\/a>, while also featuring newer voices such as Ripley Patton<\/a> and Miriam Hurst<\/strong>. So plenty of activity there!<\/p>\n
You may also recall, from my January 13 post<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n
But of those 5 Adult titles, all five<\/span> <\/em>were published overseas, four in the USA and one in Australia, which does rather make it seem as though the lack of activity arises,\u00a0 not from a lack\u00a0 of publishable material being produced in New Zealand, but rather from a\u00a0 lack of interest in publishing it … To make my point, Voyagers: <\/em>Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand<\/em> was published by an Australian<\/span> press.<\/p>\n
Which does rather beg the question: why?<\/p>\n
So waddya reckon? Why do you<\/em> think NZ publishers aren’t interested in NZ speculative fiction?\u00a0 And are those reasons valid?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 …\u00a0 I spoke with some NZ publishers and asked them for their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3303"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3326,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303\/revisions\/3326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}