Catching Up On Two ConZealand Panels: Aussie SF And A Radio Play!

“Australian SF and Fantasy”, with Sean McMullen, Helen Stubbs, Angela Meyer and Jack Dann is a very enjoyable panel I missed on the first day because it started so late I had no idea what was going on and wandered off to another panel. There were some glitches and at first only Helen and Sean. Then Jack joined them and finally Angela. There was a missing moderator somewhere and they ended up having Jack do the moderation. Goodness knows, he has a lot of experience. Jack was the only American on the panel, but he has lived here so long, and contributed so much to Aussie SF/F, he is one of us.

I have met Jack - and his partner, writer and academic Janeen Webb - at many conventions and I know Sean personally from well before he had sold his first story. He set up a writers’ group  which I joined and we were in the Society for Creative Anachronism together, where he taught me some sword moves(I wasn’t much good). I confess I couldn’t really get into his adult books, but he has become a very good children’s and YA writer. 

I only know Helen and Angela by name, from online. 

All of them had a background in either publishing or being published here or both.

When the panel finally got started, it was fascinating stuff. Sean had prepared a brief  PowerPoint presentation about the history of Australian SF and fantasy. I already knew about the fact that during World War II there was a ban of anything from outside the Empire, due to paper shortages, so that was when local SF and fantasy finally got a chance. Some of it, as Sean said, was wonderful, some dreadful, but that was, after all, the pulp fiction era, so the same could be said of American speculative fiction. 

I had assumed the panel would be mentioning titles but mostly the panellists talked about publication in Australia, which was fine with me. Jack said that when he had first come to Australia, he had been amazed at the amount of talent here, so had published an anthology with Janeen, Dreaming Down Under(I have a copy). The thing is, the market is smaller here than overseas and when he first arrived there wasn’t as much chance to sell as there is now, when there are several hundred stories and books published every yearw. 

In fact, during the course of the panel there was a lot of discussion about small press(a subject dear to my heart, as I have had far more support from small press publishers than the big ones), which really publishes more SF here than the big ones. It takes more chances, for a start - and this is me speaking, not the panellists. Paul Collins and Ford Street have published some stuff that bigger presses wouldn’t dare, such as a novel by Dianne Bates on the subject of self harm, and very good it was too. I think it may have published Australia’s first YA novel with a transgender protagonist, F2M: The Boy Within, by Hazel Edwards and Ryan Kennedy, a young trans man. I’ve reviewed it on this site if you are interested.  https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2010/01/f2m-boy-within-by-hazel-edwards-and.html

Helen had a list of Aussie small presses on her web site. Angela said there were some literary magazines that considered spec fic. 

There was also discussion of the advantages of meeting editors, fellow writers, etc, in person rather then on line, although Angela said she had started off blogging, in a small town, and people who read her blog had become her friends when she came to Melbourne.

I watched this panel on my balcony, as I ate my lunch. 

Afterwards, I listened with great delight to a performance by the Atlanta Radio Theatre of some SF stories, mostly a play version of H. Beam Piper’s story Omnilingual, which is available free on Project Gutenberg. They have a web site, so I signed up for the newsletter. 

Hopefully I can catch one more panel tonight before bedtime.