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! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women In Speculative Fiction. W Is For Connie Willis

 Connie Willis is an American spec fic author and a favourite of mine, though I haven’t read all her books or short fiction. It’s kind of hard to read the lot, there is so much of it. But I love everything of hers I have read. She writes both funny and serious - and the funny fiction is really funny. 

There is a series of novels about time travel by students and staff of Oxford University in the future. They are in the same universe, but not always with the same characters.

The first of her novels I read, on recommendation of a friend, was Doomsday Book. The heroine, Kivrin Engle, has worked to learn everything she can about the lifestyle, culture and language of 14th century England before time travelling there. The language is Middle English, though she also has a chip that helps her understand the language anyway, but it takes time to kick in. She is hosted by a noble family as she has pretended to have been attacked on the road. Unfortunately, the year in which she turns up is the wrong one, and the plague is raging. She comes to care deeply about the family she is with. Meanwhile, there is also a plague in modern Oxford…

There was a very funny novel in the series, To Say Nothing Of The Dog, in which the Oxford time travellers are in Victorian England. In their own time a woman called Lady Schrapnell,  wants to restore Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed in World War II, and there is an artefact, the “bishop’s bird stump”, that went missing just before the cathedral was bombed. 

Look, the story is very involved, too much to describe, but it’s hilarious. Read it.

Others in the series, Blackout/All Clear and short story “Fire Watch”, which had time travel to World War II, are more serious. They all won Hugo Awards, and two, Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear also won the Nebula Award(voted on by fellow spec fic authors). 

Passage is about a scientist who is studying near-death experiences and has theories about it. She is able to reproduce them without actual near-death. When one of her test subjects can’t make it one day, she does it herself and finds herself on the Titanic… I loved this one. I have read it more than once, since discovering a copy at a second hand shop. I also bought it in e book. 

She also writes novellas and short stories, including a collection of Christmas themed stories. It has been a while since I read those, but I’m fairly sure one of the stories featured the ghost of Scrooge helping a boss who is a lot like he was before he changed.

I’m about to start reading Remake, a novel written in the 1990s in which the Hollywood film industry is creating films with long- dead actors. Sound familiar? We can do that now, but not when she wrote it.

I really do recommend anything written by Connie Willis; just about everything she writes ends up at least short listed for one award or more, and often winning. You should be able to get them in ebook or print, and some in audiobook.

See you tomorrow with X Is For Extras! 

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2026. Women in Fantasy And SF. V Is For Valkyries

 In Norse mythology the Valkyries, “choosers of the slain” go out on battlefields to bring brave dead warriors back to Valhalla, Odin’s hall where they will fight and booze and have a good time until Ragnarok, the end of the world. The Norse believed that one day they would fight to the end. They even knew which gods would be killed by whom. So Odin was collecting an army for that day. After picking up the warriors the Valkyries would become waitresses and serve mead.

They are mentioned in the Eddas - Poetic and Prose which were not written till the early Middle Ages, by Christians (the Prose by Snorri Sturluson). 

The first time I read the story of Brynhild, I was in my teens, and read it in the Volsunga Saga, a very old book found at a school fete. She was punished for sparing someone who was supposed to be killed, put to sleep and woke to be rescued by Sigurd(Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied and, of course, Wagner). They fall in love, but he travels on and forgets her, due to a potion. He marries someone else and fools Brynhild into marrying a man who isn’t impressive. At that point, she decides to kill him. 

Diana L. Paxson focused on the Germanic Nibelungenlied in a historical  fiction trilogy, starting with The Wolf And The Raven. Her heroine, Brunahild, is a relative of Attila the Hun. She is a Valkyrie, in this novel a priestess of Wotan. They are under orders to point their spears at warriors who have been chosen to be killed, only it’s not the Valkyries who get that choice. It’s all political. 

But there is plenty of fiction with fantastical Valkyries in it. They appear in two Terry Pratchett novels. In Soul Music, Susan, the granddaughter of Death, has to take over the rounds while Death leaves in hopes of learning how to forget, after his adopted daughter dies. One of the places she goes is a battlefield where Valkyries arrive and one asks her if she is a soprano and invites her to join.

In Interesting Times, a teacher gives it up to travel with the Silver Horde, led by Cohen the Barbarian. When he is killed, he is hoping for an afterlife in Valhalla, and he gets it, because usually people get the afterlife they believe in. 

In Tales Of Asgard, an animated feature, a spoiled teenage Thor loses his girlfriend Sif to the Valkyries, who are Odin’s elite female warriors. This is an MCU story; you may have seen the Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok.

My favourite Valkyrie, though, is Samirah, a Muslim girl and part time Valkyrie in Magnus Chase And The Sword Of Summer by Rick Riordan. Samirah’s mother, a doctor, fell in love with Loki when she was treating him, so Samirah is their daughter. In this novel, Valhalla is located in a five star hotel in Boston. 

What else do you expect from the author of Percy Jackson? 

All these books are available. The Volsunga Saga is free on Project Gutenberg.