Giant Squid Creations

Time to catch up with a few events of recent times. First off, Supanova . I went to this with Sam last Saturday at Olympic Park. There weren’t too many celebs we were that interested in so it was a good chance to enjoy the rest of the event properly. We started off with a publishing seminar where we heard some useful things from Garth Nix as a successful author with experience in the industry and from a couple of publishers. The bookseller representative I have to admit thought she had more useful info than she did and showed her distinct dislike of e-books a little too clearly. Anyway it was useful and we later had a chat with Caroline Lowry of D-Publishing who is likely to hear from me again when I finish something worth publishing. From there we met up with our good friend Erin, moseyed about the stores, listened to Christopher Lloyd answer some fairly inane questions (for the most part) and met a few more people. Artists’ Alley was of course home to some interesting and inspirin...

I wrote this a couple of days ago but I’m finally putting it up. I wasn’t sure whether to write a blog about the passing of Ray Bradbury but the Sydney Morning Herald online tipped my hand. Bradbury was without a doubt a master storyteller and a prolific one. He created worlds and ideas with clarity and precision. It’s not stretching anything to say he was one of the greats of SF – by which I mean Speculative Fiction, not just science fiction. What drives me to write this however is not simple memoriam but an element of disgust with SMH for its reporting of Bradbury’s death; a brief paragraph followed by a reprint of an opinion piece arguing that Bradbury was not a ‘literary’ SF author but the king of ‘pulp’. A simple short obituary would’ve sufficed but to spare the effort they rerun something that ends by saying “The king of pulp [Bradbury] lives.” I ask you, is that appropriate? Now, the piece was not disparaging of Bradbury overall but it did seem to argue against his skills ...