Tag Archives: science fiction

Donna Mazza’s “The Exhibit”

18 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Series: Short Stories (2016)

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Post #6 in my Australian Short Story Festival series

I found Donna Mazza’s “The Exhibit” a terrifying story to read. It starts with a pregnant narrator, Stacey, in a troubled relationship – ripe drama for a short story – but before long we realise the full picture: as part of a de-extinction project, her baby has been spliced with neanderthal DNA. The ordinariness of Stacey’s concerns about things like an unfriendly radiographer makes the scenario feel so much more real. It happens as it would in real life: the person at the centre of it not being told the full picture, not in control, at the mercy of radiographers and doctors, and quite remote from the scientists driving it. I’ve recently been through the anxiety and hope of my wife’s pregnancy and this story conveyed much of that experience but amplified it so well. It’s great literary science fiction, inhabiting the same dark territory as the Black Mirror television series.

“The Exhibit” appeared in Westerly 60.1 last year, but you can read it online here. Donna’s the author of the TAG Hungerford Award winning novel The Albanian. I’ll be appearing alongside her on the Australian Short Story Festival panel, Voices From the West on Saturday.

Re-reading my first short story 20 years later; or, confessions of a coal-powered writer

01 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Short Stories (2016), writing

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Post #1 in my Australian Short Story Festival series

I have a confession to make: the beginning of my literary career was powered by coal company. The arts festival presented by Griffin Coal is a big event in the life of Collie, the coal-mining town in the south-west of WA where I grew up. Winning second-prize in the open category of the 1996 Griffin Festival Literary Awards at the age of fifteen – beaten by my drama teacher – made me think I could be a writer. Continue reading →

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

15 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in book review

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In Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014), a minister named Peter is sent to a distant planet, Oasis, as a missionary to humanoid aliens – the Oasans. The drama on the planet is muted – a proportion of the Oasans have become committed “Jesus Lovers” and require only pastoring and preaching; Peter’s job is not the stuff of nineteenth-century missionary adventure books in which the bearer of God’s word must endure cannibals. Life for the humans on Oasis is a little boring but not particularly dangerous or terrible. Yet Peter can communicate with his wife, Bea, through a kind of email system and from her he learns of the growing tide of disasters besetting his home planet. As the Earth fall apart, he feels disconnected from it and from his wife. Continue reading →

Book Review: Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg

09 Wednesday Jan 2008

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I remember Silverberg fondly from the days in my teens when I lived SF. He had ideas as good as Asimov but heaps more style and strong characters. I went back to him because it was late at night, I’d been reading a lot of theology and one of his books was sitting unread on my shelf.

In short

Kingdoms of the Wall is a competent SF novel that kept me reading but didn’t astound.

The Plot

Kingdoms of the Wall has an excellent setup: a massive mountain dominates the people who live at its bottom. Each year, the village sends up forty pilgrims to attempt to reach the summit and meet with the gods they believe live there. But only a couple ever return and these are either mad or silent. Yet still four thousand people compete each year for the privilege of being one of the pilgrims. The narrator, Poilar, is courageous and ambitious but not particularly intelligent. He wants to get to the summit and achieve glory without really knowing why.  His best friend wants to discover the meaning of it all.The climb toward the summit is a perfect narrative device. Reading a narrative can be so easily construed as climbing toward a summit. I expected, like the inhabitants of the village that there might be something special at the top…

Spoiler Alert

…Alas the summit was disappointing. It’s exactly as you thought it might be : the gods are humans who landed here long ago.

Silverberg is such an accomplished SF writer and I could feel him writing this in automatic, at least with the end.

I’m not disappointed I read it; Silverberg took me on an enchanting journey through strange lands where pilgrims have left their quest for the summit and made their new homes.

 6/10