We have a world of news to catch up on since our last update, which only goes to show that life can move pretty fast if you’re not paying attention (or if you just neglect your blog for several months over a very hot summer!)

World’s Finest!

One of the big ticket items on the speculative fiction calendar is the end of year proliferation of year’s best anthologies. This year CSFG have had a probably-record two entries in international volumes recognising the best S&SF of 2016:

  • Ian McHugh’s ‘The Baby Eaters’, originally printed in Asimov’s January 2016, will appear in in The Year’s Best Science-Fiction, Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.
  • T.R. Napper (aka Tim)’s story ‘A Strange Loop’, originally printed in Interzone 262, will appear in Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 2.

Congratulations to Ian and Tim!

Australian Year’s Best

Ticonderoga Publications’ annual anthology of The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror is another highlight of the Australian speculative community’s year. An impressive lineup of CSFG members have made the Table of Contents this year, including Rivqa and Cat’s stories from CSFG’s most recent anthology The Never Never Land.

  • Alan Baxter, “The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner”
  • Kimberley Gaal, “In Sheep’s Clothing”
  • Rivqa Rafael, “Beyond the Factory Wall”
  • Cat Sparks, “Dragon Girl”
  • Kaaron Warren, “Mine Intercom”

Best of Midnight Echo

Australia’s premiere horror fiction magazine Midnight Echo, the journal of the Australian Horror Writers Association, recently published Dead of Night: Best of Midnight Echo. The anthology is “a showcase of Australia and New Zealand’s darkest imaginations”, and features stories by CSFG’s:

  • Alan Baxter, “Trawling the Void”
  • Shauna O’Meara, “Blood Lilies”
  • Zena Shapter, “Darker”

Recommended Reading

Early in the new year, a number of sites post recommended reading lists, summarising what they consider the best and most notable works of the past year – and again, CSFG members have made appearances.

Tangent Online’s Recommended Reading List mentions two CSFG’ers: “Flame Trees” by T. R. Napper (Asimov’s April-May 2016) and “Breathing” by Leife Shallcross (Aurealis #95)

If that list isn’t long enough for you, you might also want to check out the Locus Online Recommended Reading List. It doesn’t have any CSFG members on it, but is still a useful collection of links to some excellent stories).

Anthology

Rivqa Rafael is co-editing an intersectional feminist spec fic anthology called Problem Daughters. Problem Daughters will amplify the voices of women who are sometimes excluded from mainstream feminism. It will be an anthology of beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional speculative fiction and poetry around the theme of intersectional feminism, focusing on the lives and experiences of marginalized women, such as those who are of colour, QUILTBAG, disabled, sex workers, and all intersections of these.

Problem Daughters is crowdfunding until 14 February 2017, so hop on over if you would like to support this project.

Rivqa recently had a guest post on Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s blog regarding Problem Daughters and international differences in diversity. She’s also appeared in conversation with Gillian Polack at The History Girls blog: Two Jews, Three Opinions.

Other News

Satalyte Publishing

After all that good news, some bad: Satalyte Publishing went out of business early in the new year, which has sadly affected a number of CSFG members. Commiserations to Gillian Polack, Phill Berrie, Dawn Meredith and Chris Andrews, who all either had novels in print or were due to be published soon. (Especially Gillian, who has just had four books go out of print, including one that was only launched in September!)

Elizabeth Fitzgerald

Elizabeth is running a series of interviews with all the GUFF candidates. The first is with
Belle McQuattie, with others to follow. Don’t forget to cast your vote for a GUFF candidate, or just make a donation to support the cause, if you haven’t already!

Ross Hamilton

Ross has secured a semi-regular gig writing book reviews for The Big Issue. (The issue out this weekend contains one of his).

Gillian Polack

In better news for Gillian, her essay on James Tiptree Jr/Alice Sheldon was voted one of the top five columns in Strange Horizons’ 2016 Readers Poll.

Gillian has also become (as far as this post editor is aware) the first CSFG member to launch a Patreon page to solicit support for her ongoing writing. Please consider pledging if you want to help fund Gillian’s ongoing writing – there are recipes (and also a treasure trove of Gillian’s previously unpublished juvenilia, recently recovered from a box)!

And finally, Gillian will be presenting a paper at Worldcon. What will it be about? You might have to go to Worldcon in Helsinki in August to find out!

Zena Shapter

Zena has recently signed with the Donald Maass Agency in New York, which will hopefully lead to big things. The full announcement is on Zena’s blog.

Zena is also teaching her year-long course ‘The Year Your Book Gets Written’ at Mosman College. The Mosman Daily did a little article about it.

Workshops

This is probably an incomplete list (we will update the relevant part of the site soon!) but Gillian Polack has a range of short course and workshops coming up:

  • Writing: A Novel Approach (novel writing essential – 8 weeks starting Thursday 9 February)
  • How to Write a Game of Thrones (novel series writing – 8 weeks starting Tuesday 2 May)

(The latter is timed to coincide with a new collection of essays on Game of Thrones, in which Gillian gets the last word closing essay)