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Saturday, July 25, 2015

Re-discovering Alison Goodman

I get a lot of ebooks, including anthologies, which tend to be cheap and feature my favourite writers. I was looking on my cyber bookshelves for Charles De Lint material (to my delight, I've just discovered that a lot more of his work has come out in ebook since I last looked) when I found the anthology Firebirds Rising, which I had bought and forgotten about, though I had started reading it. A great little anthology, by the way, with some big names in it, not surprising since the editor commissioned the stories. I can't recall the price and iBooks doesn't tell you once you've bought it, but I wouldn't have spent a lot of money on an anthology unless it was by one author I loved already; mostly, I use these to sample work by authors I'm not familiar with,  before buying their books.

When I selected the book on my shelves, it turned to the story I was reading when I last opened the book and it wasn't Charles De Lint's contribution, but Alison Goodman's.

Alison, for those who don't know her, is a Melbourne writer, who has done mostly fantasy and some crime fiction. When I first met her, she had done one novel, Singing The Dogstar Blues. We both had a book out that year - mine was my book on astronauts from Omnibus(just closed down, alas!). I couldn't resist travelling to Canberra, on invitation, to hear the announcement of the CBCA shortlist at the home of the Governor General. Neither of us made it on to the list, alas. That was the year when I was chatting with one of the judges, who said, "Oh, yes, an entertaining book, well written, kids will love it, but that's not one of our criteria." Their response to Alison's book, which I mentioned, was pretty much the same(with a shrug included).

We shared our disappointment. Alison thought she had missed out on the shortlist because her book was SF. I suggested that no, it wasn't that - they did occasionally put SF on the shortlist - - but that it was funny. They didn't, at the time, care for funny books. "Not enough psychological depth," I was told by a judge whom I won't name, but who was well known in children's fiction fandom. (When I pointed out that the very funny Hating Alison Ashley, fairly new at the time, had plenty of psychological depth, she said that yes, it was good, but it was a paperback!)

Anyway, I started reading this story in Firebirds Rising and suddenly realised that it was a direct sequel to Singing The Dogstar Blues! It has been such a long time since I read the book, I'd forgotten everything about it except that it was funny, it was set in a future Melbourne, at a future Melbourne University, that there was music involved and adventure. I don't have it any more, as I donated it to my library(probably gone by now, since the senior campus library was closed down), but I can always get the ebook now.

The short story started to bring it all back. The heroine, Joss, is a first year student at Melbourne Uni, specialising in music and hoping to watch important events in music history when she does some time travel. She has a partner/room mate, Mav, the only alien student on Earth, of the Chorian race, who are born as twins, who are connected telepathically all their lives, though Mav has lost his twin and is trying to connect with Joss instead. In this story, he wants to be connected with Joss when she has a "mating ritual", something she is not happy about. And there are troubles between the "comp" kids, genetically engineered through appropriate donations, and the "noncomp" who aren't, but who all seem to be wealthy enough not to need to be engineered for intelligence or physical ability, because they have plenty of money already, without having to work for it.

It was an unexpected treat and, on my first trip outside the house in a few days(I've been lying in the warm, recovering from a nasty cold since Thursday), to get some groceries, I settled down to read it over lunch in my local bakery.

An enjoyable read on a cold Melbourne winter day! Now to read the rest of the stories in the anthology...

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