This weekend I went to the Buddha's Birthday festival at Southbank.

It's something I've been meaning to go to for years but have never gotten around to before. There were a bunch of stalls all serving vegetarian food, which was awesome, although of course you can only eat one lunch! I had some tofu dim sims, some fried rice, a "vegetarian cake" (a kind of herbed flat bread), and my favourite - mung bean patties! They were very delicious!

I went to a couple of the seminars, which were both free and interesting. My only regret is that I didn't see get to see any of the bands.

Anyway, it was a good day out! And I picked up bonus bookmarks...

Music: I Don't Know… Kat Edmonson

Look, I was fairly sure that a couple of years ago I explained to somebody the exact final answer to the male/female debate, in clear and unarguable terms. I didn't keep a copy of the email though.

Despite this, some people are still arguing about it. And as I am a human still, living among you all, I sometimes have to read and think about these issues too.

In particular, Ian "Mondy" Mond wrote a blog postage wherein he added up numbers. The culmination of all this was that apparently women are now given awards in even greater numbers than they were in the days when they were oppressed! Good for them.

Ian "Mond" Mond attributes this graphic to the rise of Alisa's Twelve Planets Press and its associated womanly pursuits.

There is no doubt some truth to this, and kudos has to go to Alisa for not only manipulating the Ditmar results in an underhanded manner, but also, occasionally, also working quite hard and getting genuinely deserved results. When we talk about gender in this country in regard to publishing, I would argue that there are a number of baseline concepts that we take for granted now that we didn't before, and that is at least partly attributable to the work of Alisa, Tansy and their coaterie, the work they've done in creating awareness and conversation around gender imbalances.

I would also say that Alisa has managed to harness and focus an energy which has been developing for a while, prior to TPP coming along. I would hazard a guess that it began in the growth of fantasy as a genre in the nineties, for which Harper Collins deserve some credit. To the best of my knowledge (I wasn't a regular con-goer at the time) this led to an increase in the number of female fans attending cons, and a subsequent increase in new writers of the female variety.

The "small press explosion" as it was known to its friends in the early "zeroties" saw a large increase in the number of local women writers, and a lot of the publications around that time have a much more gender-equal contents page than what we saw prior to that time. I think people like Cat Sparks, ASIM, the CSFG and others all helped to provide this impetus in their publications. To my mind, Alisa and TPP have always been a high-end kind of publisher, less interested in grass roots encouragement and more interested in publishing the top notch material, and I think it was good timing that Alisa turned up on the scene around about the time a lot of the writers who emerged during the small press boom were really starting to develop.

All of which is not to play down the influence of Twelfth Planet and Alisa, so much as to say that nothing happens in a vacuum. Except for dustmites dancing and playing the dust mite-bagpipes, of course.

Alan Baxter, over at Ian "The Mond" Mond's blog, notes that the percentages of award nominations have now skewed substantially toward women writers, and asks whether we are not seeing a new inequality. And clearly, it is true that the scene at the moment has become somewhat female-author-dominated. Of course, equally clearly, as Alisa points out on her own "Blog", three years of numbers skewed toward women does not necessarily bespeak a broader inequality the way that twenty or thirty years of awards skewed toward men does.

Perhaps women are just writing better stuff right now. (or is that the personal taste argument - "I just buy the stories I like" - reversed? see why this stuff is so hard?)

Should we feel sorry for men who feel threatened by the new status quo? Well, I am sure most people would say "no". I am quite happy to share my sympathy and empathy with people in that situation, personally, as I have always found that arguing against feeling for somebody else to be a somewhat graceless thing to do. But does my sympathy or empathy mean that I think the current imbalance is a bad thing? Absolutely not. On the contrary, it's an excellent thing, for both our scene and for our society as a whole.

Does it mean that we now have gender equality? Well, I think that would be a preposterously over simplistic reduction of the situation. I don't doubt that many inequalities continue to exist, and that we will have to remain vigilant. It is worth celebrating, however, small victories.

Where does that leave me, as a male writer, of sorts, in the current state? Is it threatening to me to face this kind of statistical force? I asked myself that question, trying to see where people like Alan (who I don't mean to single out, as I think his arguments are probably held by a lot of other writers, both male and occasionally female) are coming from.

I don't find it threatening to think that I might not get nominated for Ditmars, but that may be purely due to the good fortune of not having written anything of the slightest merit.

As a male writer, as part of the scene at the moment, I guess I do find it somewhat alienating. Whereas in the early 2000s, we were all running around saying "yay for us, for we are all Australian, and we shall support each other!", in the second decade this national pride seems to have become replaced largely by gender identity, and the enthusiasm is all directed at women and their work. Is that threatening to a male writer? I don't know if threatening is the right word, but I do miss feeling like part of the centre of things. I do feel less like I belong, as part of the small press subculture. And as I'm not the sort of male to go off into the woods with other men and wear animal skins and reclaim my masculinity, I don't really feel any sense of belonging in place of that.

Does any of that matter? Not compared to the broader issues and the good work being done, no.

Should people feel sympathy for me? Well obviously they should, for I am after all the protagonist, the central character. Would I like to undo the new imbalance, restore men to their rightful heirdom? No, I wouldn't. Would I like to believe that I can still have a career as an author and people will still read my work even though I don't sit within this framework? Well obviously. Does that mean I wish the framework wasn't there? No.

You get the picture.

Look, I don't have time right now to answer every single gender-related question that might come up, so I'll simply say briefly that the answers are: Yes, no, sometimes, last week, yes, we don't know, the person on the left was correct, and never.

I hope that clears things up.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

You pretty much know what you're gonna get when you pick up a book called "Eating Animals". And to a certain extent Eating Animals delivers just what I expected; we're taken through the moral and logical arguments regarding eating animals, and we're taken through the realities of factory farming in the US, how the animals are treated, and the alternatives.

I don't know if there's much in the factory segments that haven't been covered elsewhere, but Foer writes really well and manages to evoke the plight of animals in all of its sickening detail. I found some of the segments really harrowing and I must admit the descriptions of chicken and pork farming, in particular, really put me off eating meat. It is just awful how terribly we treat these animals.

Foer doesn't argue against eating meat, as such. But he does argue quite convincingly against the system by which our meat is currently produced. And unfortunately, there are few alternatives.

As harrowing as some of the factory farming sections of the book are, I think my favourite sections were the sections where Foer analyses the moral arguments and talks about his own personal feelings about eating meat. He does not come into the argument as one-sidedly as you might expect, and he is willing to look at differing sides of the argument, just as he is willing to give voice to the various voices from the industry who disagree with him. In that regard, while Eating Animals makes its point quite clearly, it comes across as quite an open-minded analysis of the subject.

Recommended for anybody interested in the subject.

Doesn't get much more basic than tonight's dinner! Just stir-fried some veges and some soba noodles.

We didn't have any sauce in the cupboard so I just chopped up some garlic for flavour. And it was delicious!! Yummo!

It was nice getting out of the city on the weakend.

The woman in the art shop in Kalbar said how quiet it was because the weather was wet, and hardly anyone comes out when it rains.

And I can understand that, because we were in two minds as to whether it was worth going out in the wet.

It's strange though, really, because driving back I thought to myself that the countryside in the wet has its own beauty, a kind of misty, green charm.

This weekend's adventure was a road trip for grandma's birthday.

Jen and I were picked up by Jen's mum, Lorraine, and we all drove to Ipswich to meet my mum and her mum.

Then we all drove out to Kalbar, a country town outside Ipswich, for lunch. I had a pumpkin salad, which was delicious. And we enjoyed checking out the small town of Kalbar, with its craft stores and cute old buildings.

Lunch crew

Grandma opening her presents

And posing for the camera

Jen and her mum

Kalbar civic centre

This shop sells "computers and websites"!

Church. I love the little hanging cross out the front….

Fire station.

It was a nice trip and well worth checking out if you are in the area….

Tonight's dish was Ethiopian Chickpea Wat. First time I've tried it; it was pretty similar to the chickpea curry I made last week, but delicious nevertheless! I varied the recipe with some spare cannelini beans I had lying around...

The Ditmar nominees have been released!

Congratulations to everybody who made the list! In a way, you're all winners, already……………. (but some of you will be losers later).

The list is:

Best Novel
----------------------------------------------------------
* The Shattered City (Creature Court 2), Tansy Rayner Roberts
(HarperCollins)
* Burn Bright, Marianne de Pierres (Random House Australia)
* Mistification, Kaaron Warren (Angry Robot Books)
* The Courier's New Bicycle, Kim Westwood (HarperCollins)
* Debris (The Veiled Worlds 1), Jo Anderton (Angry Robot Books)

Best Novella or Novelette
----------------------------------------------------------
* "The Sleeping and the Dead", Cat Sparks, in Ishtar (Gilgamesh Press)
* "Above", Stephanie Campisi, in Above/Below (Twelfth Planet Press)
* "The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt", Paul Haines, in The Last Days
of Kali Yuga (Brimstone Press)
* "And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living", Deborah Biancotti, in
Ishtar (Gilgamesh Press)
* "Julia Agrippina's Secret Family Bestiary", Tansy Rayner Roberts, in
Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press)
* "Below", Ben Peek, in Above/Below (Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Short Story
----------------------------------------------------------
* "Breaking the Ice", Thoraiya Dyer, in Cosmos 37
* "Alchemy", Lucy Sussex, in Thief of Lives (Twelfth Planet Press)
* "The Last Gig of Jimmy Rucker", Martin Livings and Talie Helene, in
More Scary Kisses (Ticonderoga Publications)
* "All You Can Do Is Breathe", Kaaron Warren, in Blood and Other
Cravings (Tor)
* "Bad Power", Deborah Biancotti, in Bad Power (Twelfth Planet Press)
* "The Patrician", Tansy Rayner Roberts, in Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth
Planet Press)

Best Collected Work
----------------------------------------------------------
* The Last Days of Kali Yuga by Paul Haines, edited by Angela Challis
(Brimstone Press)
* Nightsiders by Sue Isle, edited by Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet
Press)
* Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti, edited by Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth
Planet Press)
* Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts, edited by Alisa
Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press)
* Ishtar, edited by Amanda Pillar and K. V. Taylor (Gilgamesh Press)

Best Artwork
----------------------------------------------------------
* "Finishing School", Kathleen Jennings, in Steampunk!: An Anthology of
Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (Candlewick Press)
* Cover art, Kathleen Jennings, for The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press)

Best Fan Writer
----------------------------------------------------------
* Tansy Rayner Roberts, for body of work including reviews in Australian
Speculative Fiction in Focus! and Not If You Were The Last Short Story
On Earth
* Alexandra Pierce, for body of work including reviews in Australian
Speculative Fiction in Focus!, Not If You Were The Last Short Story On
Earth, and Randomly Yours, Alex
* Robin Pen, for "The Ballad of the Unrequited Ditmar"
* Sean Wright, for body of work including "Authors and Social Media"
series in Adventures of a Bookonaut
* Bruce Gillespie, for body of work including "The Golden Age of
Fanzines is Now", and SF Commentary 81 & 82

Best Fan Artist
----------------------------------------------------------
* Rebecca Ing, for work in Scape
* Lisa Rye, for "Steampunk Portal" series
* Dick Jenssen, for body of work including work in IRS, Steam Engine
Time, SF Commentary and Scratchpad
* Kathleen Jennings, for work in Errantry (tanaudel.wordpress.com)
including "The Dalek Game"
* Rhianna Williams, for work in Nullas Anxietas Convention Programme Book

Best Fan Publication in Any Medium
----------------------------------------------------------
* SF Commentary, edited by Bruce Gillespie
* The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond
* The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
* Galactic Chat, Alisa Krasnostein, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Sean Wright
* Galactic Suburbia, Alisa Krasnostein, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Alex
Pierce

Best New Talent
----------------------------------------------------------
* Steve Cameron
* Alan Baxter
* Joanne Anderton

William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review
----------------------------------------------------------
* Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene, for "2010: The Year in Review", in The
Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (Ticonderoga Publications)
* Damien Broderick and Van Ikin, for editing Warriors of the Tao: The
Best of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature (Borgo Press)
* David McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Tehani Wessely for "Reviewing
New Who" series, in A Conversational Life
* Alexandra Pierce and Tehani Wessely, for reviews of Vorkosigan Saga,
in Randomly Yours, Alex
* Russell Blackford, for "Currently reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr
Norrell by Susanna Clarke", in Metamagician and the Hellfire Club

---

Congrats to all the authors who received honourable mentions in this year's YB Horror by Ellen Datlow:

Anderton, Joanne “The Sea at Night,” Dead Red Heart.

Backshall, Annette “Hunting Rabbits,” More Scary Kisses.

Ball, Peter “The Last Thing Said Before Silence,” Weird Tales 357, spring.

Baxter, Alan “Punishment of the Sun,” Dead Red Heart.

Biancotti, Deborah “Bad Power,” Bad Power.

Biancotti, Deborah “Palming the Lady,” Bad Power.

Brown, Simon “Thin Air,” Dead Red Heart.

Cavalchini, Damon “Renfield’s Wife,” Dead Red Heart.

Conyers, David and Goodrich, John “The Masked Messenger,” Andromeda SIM #52.

Dowling, Terry “The Shaddowesbox,” Ghosts By Gaslight.

Dyer, Thoraiya “The Bird, The Bees, and Thylacine,” ASIM 51.

Edwards, Jacob “Behind the Black Mask,” Dead Red Heart.

Fay, Joanna “Black Heart,” Dead Red Heart.

Gates, Raymond “The Little Red Man,” Dead Red Heart.

Hannett, L. L. “Gutted,” Shimmer 13.

Hannett, Lisa L. “Carousel,” Bluegrass Symphony.

Hannett, Lisa L. “From the Teeth of Strange Children,” Bluegrass Symphony.

Hannett, Lisa L. “Fur and Feathers,” Bluegrass Symphony.

Hannett, Lisa L. “Them Little Shinin’ Things,” Bluegrass Symphony.

Hannett, Lisa L. White and Red in the Black,” Dead Red Heart.

Hanson, Donna Marie “The Life Stealer,” Dead Red Heart.

Hardy, Lachlan “The Bunyipslayer and the Bounty Hunter,” Aurealis #45.

Harland, Richard “An Exhibition of the Plague,” Anywhere But Earth.

Harland, Richard “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism,” Ghosts by Gaslight.

Harwood, John “Face to Face,” Ghosts by Gaslight.

Irwin, J.J. “Haniver,” Shimmer 13.

Ivanoff, George “Vitality,” Dead Red Heart.

Jansen, Patty “Quarantine,” Dead Red Heart.

Kempshall, Pete “All that Glisters,” Dear Red Heart.

Kennett, Rick “On the Other Side,” Midnight Echo #5.

Lanagan, Margo “Into the Clouds on High,” Yellowcake.

Lanagan, Margo “The Proving of Smollett Standforth,” Ghosts by Gaslight.

Lawson, Chris “Apologetoi,” Dead Red Heart.

McDermott, Kirstyn “Frostbitten,” More Scary Kisses.

McHugh, Ian “The Godbreaker of Seggau-li,” Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Mag.50.

Mok, Anne “Beacons Among the Stars,” Evolve Two.

Mok, Anne “Interview with the Jiangshi,” Dead Red Heart.

Murphy Nicole R. “The Fairy King’s Child,” Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Mag. 50.

Nix, Garth“ The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils ...,”Ghosts By Gaslight.

Slatter, Angela “Sun Falls,” Dead Red Heart.

Slatter, Angela “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter,” A Book of Horrors.

Sparks, Cat “The Alabaster Child,” Gutshot.

Warren, Kaaron “A Pot to Piss In,” Voices from the Past.

Warren, Kaaron “All You Can Do is Breathe,” Blood and Other Cravings.

Warren, Kaaron “Lucky Fingers,” The Conflux Cookbook.

White, Jen “Listening to Tracy,” Dead Red Heart.

Apologies to anyone I missed.

So a little later this year than usual, here is my imaginary Year's Best anthology for 2011.

In imaginary running order:

Year's Best Australian SF 2011

The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt… Paul Haines (The Last Days of Kali Yuga)

Reading Coffee… Anthony Panegyris (Overland)

Space Girl Blues… Brendan Duffy (Anywhere But Earth)

The Last March of the Silent Militia… Peter M Ball (Weird Tales)

Fruit of the Pipal Tree… Thoraiya Dyer (After the Rain)

Below… Ben Peek (Above/Below)

Nation of the Night… Sue Isle (Nightsiders)

SIBO… Penelope Love (Anywhere But Earth)

The Patrician… Tansy Rayner Roberts (Love and Romanpunk

Into the Clouds on High… Margo Lanagan (Yellowcake)

Honourable mentions

How to Tell if You're the Red Herring… Jacinta Woodhead (Overland)

Bad Power… Deborah Biancotti (Bad Power)

The Fairy King's Child… Nicole R Murphy (ASIM)

Visitors.. Peter M Ball (After the Rain)

Interview with the Jianshi… Anne Mok (Red Dead Heart)

The Proving of Smollett Standforth… Margo Lanagan (Ghosts by Gaslight)

The Encounter… Sasha Beatie (Hope)

Mouseskin…Kathleen Jennings (After the Rain)

Undine Love… Kathleen Jennings (ASIM)

Europe After the Rain… Lee Battersby (After the Rain)

Canterbury Hollow… Chris Lawson (F&SF)

The Shadowwes Box… Terry Dowling (Ghosts by Gaslight)

Bad Thought and the Mechanism… Richard Harland (Ghosts by Gaslight)

The Painted Girl… Sue Isle (Nightsiders)

Frostbitten… Kirstyn McDermott (Scary Kisses)

The Dark Night of Anton Weiss… DC White (Scary Kisses)

By Any Other Name… Kim Westwood (Anywhere But Earth)

Summary

2011 was a diverse year. It felt like there was a lot of stuff published, and I mean a lot. And there was no doubt a lot of stuff I never got to read. I lost count at around 300 stories, but there were a lot more out there.

My overall feeling was that the quality was stretched a little thin, but there were still plenty of really good stories if you were happy to search for them.

In last year's post I spoke about there being two tiers of writers, and publishers, developing. And that's probably held true to some extent. There are a number of writers really hitting their straps and producing consistently good work that is starting to get noticed on the world stage. Twelfth Planet Press is probably the most consistent publisher in the country at the moment, as was reflected by their World Fantasy Award. 2011 saw the first four collections in their Twelve Planets publication schedule, a series of four-story collections from the best Australian female authors. The quality of these was consistently high, with the collections by Sue Isle, Deborah Biancotti and particularly Tansy Rayner Roberts standing out as some of the best work published during the year. In all, it was a better year for single-author collections than for anthologies, with very strong collections also from Margo Lanagan with Yellowcake and Paul Haines with The Last Days of Kali Yuga. Unlike the Twelfth Planet collections, these were primarily reprint collections, but both contained excellent new work.

Beyond that, things get a little more diffuse, perhaps because, of the four anthologies I really enjoyed in 2010, Twelfth Planet was the only publisher to produce work in 2011 (Jonathan Strahan produced high quality international work, however). Perhaps for that reason, I found the anthologies a lot more even than in 2010, with good work mixed among middling across the board. It would be hard to pick a standout anthology or two for that reason, although I thought two which were above average were Tehani Wessley's After the Rain, a mixed genre themed anthology containing strong stories from Thoraiya Dyer, Peter Ball, Kathleen Jennings, Dirk Flinthart, and Lee Battersby, and Keith Stevenson's SF anthology Anywhere But Earth, which had good stories from Brendan Duffy, Kim Westwood, Penelope Love, and others.

A lot of the energy in 2011 came from new publishers. I particularly enjoyed the Hope anthology, edited by Sasha Beattie, which inspired some strong work from authors in a themed anthology based no suicide prevention. Breaking the rule that editors should never publish their own work, Sasha Beattie's story was probably my favourite, and there was good work from Alan Baxter and Pamela Freeman. There was also the mixed genre Eighty Nine from Jodie Cleghorn, and the latest anthology from the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, Winds of Change, from editor Elizabeth Fitzgerald. The latter were a little patchier, for my money, but taken as a whole they offer an interesting view of a bunch of new writers who are quietly making progress and no doubt creating their own energy as the next generation to those currently being published by publishers like Twelfth Planet. It's well worth looking at these venues for a glimpse of the future.

Ticonderoga seems to be moving more toward retrospective author collections (its Lucy Sussex collection got some attention in 2011), but published two original anthologies last year. Liz Gryzb's follow up paranormal romance anthology More Scary Kisses contained some solid work and a couple of very good stories from Kirstyn McDermott, DC White, Jason Nahrung and Felicity Dowker. Dead Red Heart, at thirty-three stories, was to my mind a little too long for a themed anthology; I was very much vampired out by that point. It probably would have been a better two hundred page book, but nevertheless it contained some good work by Anne Mok, Joanne Anderton, Jason Nahrung, Felicity Dowker, as well as a bunch of promising new authors. Ticonderoga also published a collection from Lisa Hannett, Bluegrass Symphony, which got some good press, although it wasn't my kind of thing.

These days, ongoing magazines seem to have been almost supplanted by anthologies, but it is worth noting that ASIM remains regular and consistent, with good stories from Thoraiya Dyer, Kathleen Jennings and Nicole Murphy. Elsewhere, Aurealis relaunched as an electronic publication late in the year, and Midnight Echo continues to publish local and overseas horror writers. Cat Sparks has taken over as fiction editor at Cosmos magazine and published a number of local SF stories there in 2011 (I saw very few of them). And local literary magazine Overland, under new fiction editor Jane Gleeson-White, published some very good speculative fiction, including works by Jacinta Woodhead and Anthony Panegyris.

I took a break from Last Short Story reading in 2011, so my knowledge of local writers published internationally is patchier. Authors such as Damien Broderick and Sean McMullen continue to appear regularly, and Chris Lawson had a strong story in F&SF.  Peter M. Ball continues to make waves, and is undoubtedly not far from a major breakthrough of some kind. And Jack Dann and Nick Gevers published Ghosts by Gaslight, an anthology of Victorian ghost stories with a strong Australian contingent, including stories by Margo Lanagan, Richard Harland and Garth Nix.

I'm not sure how best to characterise the year, other than as broad and diffuse, and unpredictable. Twelfth Planet continues to be the unstoppable juggernaut of local publishing, and its move from anthologies to single-author collections changes the landscape somewhat. Beyond that, it will be interesting to see if Fablecroft and Coer de Lion can follow up and consolidate their strong anthologies, or whether the recent trend of publishers coming and going year by year continues. And I think this year will be interesting to look back on, when some of the newer authors who are starting to emerge have had a chance to build a name for themselves.

Finally, reluctant as I am to finish on a sad note, it would be remiss of me to conclude this summary without mentioning the tragic passing of Paul Haines, early in 2012, after a long battle with cancer. Haines was an extremely talented author, still young, and he was just starting to write some of the very best work of his career. A glance through his stories in recent years, collected both in The Last Days of Kali Yuga from Brimstone Press, and Slice of Life from Mayne Press, show the talent, the intelligence, the courage on display in his writing. His work was fierce and dark and full of black humour and cutting observation. We are much less for having lost him, both as a writer and as a great guy, and we are very lucky to have so much of his work collected. If you haven't read these books, buy them now and check him out.