Just Been To See… Disclosure Day

 I went to my local cinema to see the newest Steven Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day. I hadn’t heard of it till a few days ago. But I enjoy SF films and Steven Spielberg is a director I respect. And the score is by John Williams. The music isn’t his usual symphonic type, though I hear it was done on purpose. 

There is a lot of action, with cars zooming along, attempts to kill the main characters, but there is much more to it than that.

Two couples, Margaret and her boyfriend Jackson, Daniel and his girlfriend Jane, are on the run and being chased by government agents led by villain Noah Scanlon, who is after a piece of alien technology Daniel has stolen with the intention of showing it and some vital videos to the world. Literally. The films have been there since Roswell in the 1940s. The aliens were not invaders and interrogators have tortured them, all there in the films. As a result, there is some alien technology controlled by Wardex, the agency led by Scanlon, who uses it to find and communicate with Jane and others. 

Margaret, a meteorologist working for a TV station, finds herself, the day before the main story, with powers she hadn’t known she had. She and Daniel, when they meet, feel as if they have met, but don’t know how or when.

Any more and there will be spoilers so that’s as far as I can go, but it’s well worth watching. Interesting that the villain - who thinks he is the good guy - is played by Colin Firth, who, in his time, was the sexiest Mr Darcy.

He is the only actor allowed to use his British accent, but there are others who have to be American for the film. Daniel is played by English actor Josh O’Connor. Emily Blunt plays Margaret. You might have seen her before, as Mary Poppins. Eve Hewson, who plays as Jane, is Irish, the daughter of U2 singer Bono.

I enjoyed it very much. I hope you do too. 

Juniper Wiles by Charles De Lint. Ottawa: Triskell Press 2021

This novel is one of the recent stories set in the world of Newford, that  delightful town somewhere in Canada , where  there  is  magic, music and craft.  The main characters casually practise magic  and  play music or write. There is an annual  festival of fairy themed music and art, and some of those  who attend are actual fairies. 

Juniper Wiles is a former actress who has returned to Newford after spending  several years in a TV series called Nora Constantine, playing as a  teenage detective. To her surprise, she finds people  calling her by the name of the character she played, including a ghost who wants her to solve a mystery for him before he can move on. She must do some mystery solving, reluctantly, with her friend July Coppercorn, who appears in other De Lintvnovels, and find the actual  Nora Constantine , who lives in another universe and has gone missing; the universe is based on an unpublished novel, and Nora  is probably a prisoner of the villain. 

 This novel was entertaining enough   For me  to buy the next book in the series.  I’m reading it now. 

It’s available in ebook and print, as well as audiobook .

Just Been To…The Melbourne Writers Festival!

 Many years ago, I used to attend the Melbourne Writers Festival every year. Those were the days when SF and fantasy were regular events, along with crime fiction and children’s book panels. I bought about ten tickets at a time, because they were cheaper and I got the chance to try writers and themes I hadn’t experienced before. After some years, speculative fiction was not a regular thing, very few panels were on crime fiction and children’s fiction was limited to school groups.

So, I looked every year, just in case. Once in a while, there was a panel about crime fiction. I even got to hear Sophie Hannah for free. I wasn’t complaining. She is the daughter of a children’s writer I like, and was writing a Hercule Poirot novel with the approval of the Christie estate. She has written more since then. Another year we had Kim Stanley Robinson, who had been at the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, so I suppose they figured they might as well invite him to the festival. But mostly, there wasn’t anything I wanted to see.

Still, I get their emails in hopes that there will be something I do want to see, and this year, finally, there was. I went along to the Capitol Theatre first, to hear a panel on mythical retellings. There were three writers who had written fiction on the theme of Greek mythology. They were Yann Martel(Son Of Nobody), Nikita Gill(Hekate: The Witch) and Zoe Terakes(Eros). I ended up buying all of them in ebook; my shelves are overflowing and it has been a long time since I bothered with autographs. After my second session, with R.F. Kuang, I was very glad I’m not into autographs; the queue went down the street! 

I’ve started reading Son Of Nobody, which is about a man in Oxford on a scholarship who discovers an epic poem nobody knows about. He has things in common with the main character of the poem, who isn’t a king or famous warrior, just an ordinary person. Yann was inspired by Thersites in the Iliad, though I have to say, as someone who has read Iliad, you aren’t supposed to sympathise with Thersites. 

Hekate is about the goddess, written sympathetically. She was the goddess of witchcraft and in this book she is shown learning from mortals and doing things like leading spirits to enjoy the feasts set out for them on the special night. Looking forward to reading that.

Finally, there was Zoe Terakes, whose book Eros is made up of short stories based on stories from the myths, interpreted by Zoe in … well, erotic ways, including what happens when you make love with the sun(Icarus) and the story of Hermaphroditus. Zoe was the only Aussie on the panel. 

The Capitol was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife and today I just learned that he also designed Klaatu’s spaceship in The Day The Earth Stood Still.

I had a quick meal and went on to the Atheneum, around the corner, where I heard Rebecca Kuang talk about her writing in general and her most recent book, Katabasis, published last year. It was only A$9.99 in ebook, so I thought what the heck and bought it. The audiobook was cheaper, but it would take  up more space on my iPad and I would fall asleep trying to listen to it. I prefer audiobooks I have already read. It’s one of those popular dark academia-themed books, with her characters visiting hell.

So, this was my first Melbourne Writers Festival in years! Only two panels, but two more than last year. 

Fingers crossed there will be more next year! 

A To Z Blogging Chsllenge 2026. Some final thoughts!

 So, yet another A to Z is over. It has been good to share my favourite authors and stories with you. I hope you have enjoyed them. 

I have actually bought some ebooks of books I haven’t read in a long time. It will be nice to catch up with them.

When writing this, I have realised just how many amazing  women spec fic writers there are and have been over the years. When I was growing up speculative fiction was mostly considered a thing for boys, but women were writing even then. Some were writing under male pen names, such as American writer James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon). She was born in1915, but she wasn’t outed as a woman till 1977. There is an award in her name.

Even J.K Rowling - Joanne Rowling - abbreviated her name, and she does write crime fiction under a male name, Robert Galbraith, though that slipped through till everyone knew who “he” was. But she is so famous that nobody worried about it. 

I am going to binge on some re reads now, and I hope some of you have found a new writer or book to try out.

Thanks to my “regulars” who have been commenting throughout this challenge and welcome to new readers who have discovered my blog. I hope you will consider joining. 

This is short, but I’m heading to the theatre tonight, to see Julius Caesar with the Bell Shakespeare Company. Tomorrow I have a ticket to a matinee at the Comedy Theatre. 

See you soon! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction. Z is for Zenna Henderson

And now we come to the final post for this year’s A to Z challenge. Well, apart from my thoughts on this year, anyway.

The author I’m going to discuss today is the late Zenna Henderson. She was also a teacher, which seems to have inspired her work. There were a lot of children and young people in her stories. 

She is best known for her stories of the People, though she wrote others. I admit I haven’t read anywhere near all of them, but you can get a volume of all of them collected, Ingathering. I bought it in print for my sister, who is a huge fan of the People stories, and have downloaded it in ebook form myself.

So, who are the People? They are aliens who fled from their planet when it was destroyed and came to live on Earth. They look completely human, and some of their stories are seen from their viewpoint. But they have powers humans don’t have, such as telepathy and telekinesis. However, they try not to use their powers, to avoid the chance of being noticed. That makes their lives difficult.  They are very healthy, though, and tend not to get sick at all.

The first story I read was “Pottage”. In it, a young teacher comes to a small town, Bendo, to take a new job. Her students are People. They are unhappy. They shuffle along. There is a reason for that - what if they fly? They talk to each other about the Home, which they can remember, despite never having been there. They aren’t supposed to, but they do. Anything that might get them noticed is absolutely forbidden. Not a way to enjoy life on their new world.

The teacher actually knows about the People, as she has a friend who was a member and was hoping to find others. She decides to help her students. 

There was a film called The People based on this story, with Kim Darby as the teacher and William Shatner as the local doctor, who has to make a living as a vet, because the humans never get sick. You can find it on YouTube if interested. 

In fact, Kim Darby and William Shatner had been together in a Star Trek episode, “Miri”. In that episode she was a child on a planet where there were only children. This is because adults had all died horribly in the course of an experiment to extend life. Children were unaffected till they reached puberty, but the experiment did work on them and these kids are about a hundred years old. Of course, Dr McCoy comes up with a vaccine for them, and Kirk tries persuading them, through Miri, to accept it. 

So, there, in this Trek episode is another - young - woman in speculative fiction. 

I do recommend anything by Zenna Henderson. The stories are so very gentle and thoughtful! You can buy them on Amazon in both print and Kindle format, but mostly in Kindle, as I suspect the print versions are out of print. Apple Books has all of them.

Well, that’s it for 2026. I hope you enjoyed reading my posts as much as I did writing them. Tomorrow I will write my thoughts. 

Good night!  

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women in Speculative Fiction. Y is for Jane Yolen!

 Jane Yolen is an award-winning American writer of fantasy, SF and children’s books. Usually, the children’s books are speculative fiction. She is known as “the Hans Christian Andersen of American children’s literature.”

Her son, Adam Stemple, is also a writer of spec fic, and they have written two books together so far. That might sound impressive, but Jane Yolen has written over 400 books! To be honest, I can’t think of a writer who has done anywhere near as many. And I am not even going to try to tell you about many of them. At the end of this post, I’ll add a link to her bibliography.

She is Jewish, so has written a fair bit on Jewish themes. The most famous is The Devil’s Arithmetic. I do have a copy, but it has been a while since I read it. 

A young Jewish girl, Hannah, is with her family at a Passover Seder. She is bored. The same stories are told every year. Family members are Holocaust survivors. 

It is traditional for children to open the door during the Seder, for the prophet Elijah. A cup of wine is kept for him. Hannah opens the doors but instead of the hallway of the apartment, she finds herself in a village in wartime Poland. The people she meets think she is a girl called Chaya, who has been sick.

She makes friends with some other girls there, but they are all dragged off to a concentration camp, where they do forced labour. She only manages to survive with the help of a girl called Rivka. When the Nazis take them to the gas chamber, leaving Hannah alone, she takes Rivka’s place. Hannah wakes up at the Seder, not long after. She finds out that her Aunt Eva is Rivka, the girl she saved. 

There was a film of this story. I found it on Daily Motion, a web site that has a lot of films you won’t find elsewhere. Here is a link.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9z8r4w

She wrote more Jewish themed books. Another one, Mapping The Bones, is Hansel And Gretel with the Holocaust. It isn’t the only one on that theme, but like anything Jane writes, it’s amazing.

A short story called “Granny Rumple” is based on another fairy tale, “Rumplestiltskin”. Jane wrote a note with it, saying that out of all the characters in that fairy tale, the only one who kept his word was Rumplestiltskin. 

In this story, set in the nineteenth century in a small town in Europe, the “dwarf” is a young Jewish moneylender. The girl wants to marry the mayor’s son, but her father has bragged she can do tapestries. She can’t. But the moneylender feels sorry for her and buys the tapestries to help her. He just wants what it cost. 

When she doesn’t pay the money back, his wife goes to ask for it, and she screams that he wants her baby. You can guess what happens next. Pogrom. 

I’ll leave it here and give you a link to all her works. You are unlikely to ever get through the lot, and she hasn’t stopped writing. But looking at the list, you might choose a few.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Yolen_bibliography

See you tomorrow for the final post in A to Z!

A To Z 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction. X is for extras!

 Every year, I use X to slip in bits I didn’t have room for earlier in the A to Z posts. This is because there aren’t too many words I can think of that start with X. I did manage it once, when writing about Greek mythology, because Greek has X words in it, so I chose Xanthus and Balius, the immortal horses of Achilles. 

And guess what? I can even start this year’s X post with an X character. 

I’m thinking of Xena, Warrior Princess. Xena first appeared in an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. I vaguely recall she was a villain that time, but not for long. She was so popular she got her own series. She was played by Kiwi actress Lucy Lawless. I remember having a hard time persuading my students that she was not American! 

In her own TV series Xena was not a villain. She was an impressive fighter who wandered ancient Greece having adventures, wearing the usual uncomfortable female armour we tend to find on the covers of heroic fantasy novels, though at least she didn’t have her boobs out where an enemy could stab them. She had a companion called Gabrielle, who didn’t wear armour, though her clothes were also short. I guess Greece is pretty warm. The show was very entertaining and often funny.

So, who else can I mention? 

The Handmaid’s Tale has become huge, especially with the current awful things happening in the world. The heroine, whose actual name isn’t mentioned in the book, is called Offred because she is the property of a man called Fred. In a dystopian future US, most women can no longer have children, so those who can are rounded up and delivered to men of importance and do the Biblical thing, being raped(monthly) on the knees of the man’s wife, to give birth to a child who will be the wife’s. When no longer of use, handmaids are sent off to do clean up labour in dangerous places. The irony is that the idea came from a woman, the wife of Offred’s master. It’s interesting how many real life women there are who make huge noises about how women should stay in the kitchen, but don’t do it themselves.

Finally I’ll share with you my favourite fairy tale Kate Crackernuts. It’s a Scottish fairy tale published by both folklorists Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs.

 It starts with the usual, a king marries a nasty woman who brings her own daughter, Kate, and wants to get rid of her beautiful stepdaughter, Anne, for Kate’s benefit.

But here is where it is different. The sisters love each other. Kate is not the usual evil stepsister. After the stepmother has made a number of attempts to ruin Anne’s beauty, she finally succeeds in giving her a sheep’s head. Kate wraps up her head and the sisters go off to seek their fortune together. 

They come to another kingdom, where the king’s son is very sick, and the king has offered a reward for anyone who can find a way to heal him. Kate stays up to watch him. The story has a Twelve Dancing Princesses vibe, except it’s a Prince and he is forced to dance to exhaustion. 

The second night Kate overhears fairies talking. A fairy baby is playing with a wand, which will cure Anne if she can get it. So Kate distracts the baby by rolling nuts. Anne is cured of her sheep’s head. 

The third night, she offers to heal the prince if she can marry him. The fairy baby is back, playing with a bird. Again, Kate distracts it with nuts. She cooks the bird and gives the prince three bites. He is cured. Kate marries him and Anne gets his brother. Happily ever after. I just love it as a story with a strong woman and a decent stepsister.

See you tomorrow for Jane Yolen!