My Life In Review

Choosing Zoe by Laura Budd

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:59:53 GMT

I spent pretty much all of yesterday laid up in bed with back pain so bad I could barely breathe. Literally.

We went out for breakfast yesterday morning, but by the time we got home I couldn't breathe without feeling like I was being stabbed all over. I knew I'd be bedridden for the day, but couldn't face another day of SF/fantasy/horror.

I had spied a book I wanted at a second hand book store last week and so asked Lee to drive me to the store so I could get it.

Titled "Choosing Zoe" it was the sort of book you find in the remainder bin at A&R. But the blurb intrigued me and so I wanted it.

I started it at 12pm and finished it at 8.30pm (and that included a two hour drug-induced sleep mid-afternoon). It was that good.

Essentially the novel is a love story. Yes, it has the requisite woman loves man and man loves her back sort of love story. And yes, there is a bit of a triangle love story too, but that isn't the point.

The point of the love story lies with the unseen protagonist, an unborn baby wanting to be born. The story is more to do with the baby loving Zoe and choosing to be with her, despite all her foibles and fallibilities.

Don't worry, I'm not dropping spoilers here. This is all laid out up front.

As I lay in bed trying to sleep at 11pm last night one question popped into my mind. Zoe is a vegetarian. This is quietly slipped into the text at various intervals, it's not heavy, you barely notice it's there. She talks occasionally about animal rights and treating them humanely. Again, all very subtle and barely there. You don't even notice it as an issue within the work until you think about the fact that she has an abortion half way through the story.

And that was when my eyes sprang open. It just seemed so random. How does a person fight for the rights of animals because animals can't speak for themselves, but get rid of an unborn baby just because it doesn't suit their lifestyle at that point in time? And don't give me the argument of 'well, foetuses aren't really people'. That's a viewpoint, not a fact. And that's not the way the author addresses the baby either. The unborn (and unconceived) baby in this work is very real, very alive, very much part of what's going on. Zoe may not see it as real, but the reader definitely does and this is a character you grow to care about. The abortion is devastating to the reader because we see it as a real loss of life, more so than the prawn Zoe guiltily eats at a dinner party.

I tell you, Laura Budd is a genius because I'm still thinking about the ramifications of all this 24 hours later. The other aspect of it all is, by the end of the novel I still don't know which side of the argument Laura Budd sits on. Is she pro-life or pro-choice? The work is handled so well I leave the story with my own view point affirmed, but I can see how a different reader with a different view point will find their affirmations met too.

I don't know if you'll be able to find the novel at your local book store, but I'm sure your local library will be able to get their hands on it.

Love it.

Back to bed now. The pain is still bad and I have a manuscript to read.

Antipodean SF 128 edited by Ion Newcombe

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:38:45 GMT

It's the Australia Day Long Weekend and Lee and myself have had a pretty full on time of it. I want to do some reading, but really, well, I can't be fagged. Devoting myself to anything right now seems just too hard.

I subscribe to Antipodean SF but don't often have time to read it. Right now I can't be bothered finding a book, walking into the bedroom, lying on the bed and opening the pages. I am however on the net and the new issue of AntiSF just hit my inbox, so it makes sense to right click the link and read that way.

Several stories were, by and large, rather ho hum and others were downright terrible. I don't believe in giving any author bad press (I've seen what happens when you do) so I'm not going to list the ones I hate (although I will admit that the two I disliked most from a technical point of view respectively feature a tea bag and alien dentistry).

What I will talk about however, is the two stories that did stand out as something a little above the ordinary (for me anyway).

Richard Thorne's The Phone Rings really did it for me. Yes, it probably is a little bit predictable and the trope is a little old, but the wrap up line is solid gold.

The other story that made the dip totally worth while was A Spork in the Road by Matthew Sanborn Smith. This clever story tells a large back story in just a few words then finishes it off with a neat and satisfying ending.

Go, read, join, vote. AntiSF is free and, best of all, has been the launching pad for many an Australian SF author. I'd like to think we'll be seeing more of Richard Thorn and Matthew Sanborn Smith from now on (and not just in AntiSF).

Canterbury 2100 edited by Dirk Flinthart reviewed by kaelajael

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:34:31 GMT

Canterbury 2100 has appeared on the shelves and looks like being one of the most reviewed anthologies of the year. I would love to do a review, but since both Lee and myself appear in it, I've disqualified myself from doing so.

My good friend kaelajael has taken up the reins and in the spirit of the site has written the review while using her own life as a backdrop. kaela is my first guest reviewer. If you'd like to be a guest reviewer please let me know.

Canterbury 2100

To paraphrase an old quote, “I don’t know much about SF, but I know what I like.”
I don’t necessarily know why I like one story and not another, and I’m not really interested in analysing what appeals to me and what doesn’t.
I think of myself as an average reader. Not, I want to stress, an average fandom reader, whom I think generally has a higher standard than the average person on the street. Just your average, run of the mill, reader. I’m a person who enjoys Hollywood Blockbusters and Airport novels. All I ask from my entertainment is that it entertains me. I want it to hold my attention, to allow me to escape into another world for three-quarters of an hour, twice a day, to and from work.
Given that I catch the train a little after stupid o’clock in the morning, what I read also has to break through the fog of sleep deprivation that envelops me in the early hours.
So it is kind of fitting that my first review of a book read during my daily commute is for Canterbury 2012.
There are eighteen individual stories in this anthology, bound together by an over-arching frame. Of these, I liked nine in varying degrees. Of the remaining nine there were three I hated, and two I really didn’t like, the others I just didn’t connect with.
So, what did I like?
I should say up front that when it comes to Lyn Battersby’s work I am biased. Afterall, she’s my best friend and I absolutely love almost everything she has written, so it’s no surprise to me that one of my two favourite stories is The Conductor’s Tale. I have thought long and hard about whether this was written by Lyn has influenced my feelings to the story and I honestly have to say I don’t know. However, I don’t think it has, it’s just that Lyn writes the type of story that I love and wish dearly that I could write.
The Lighterman’s Tale by Trent Jamieson was the other story that stuck with me. It was short and bittersweet and just the type of tale I like.
The anthology kicks off with The Tingler’s Tale; another story that I found engaging. When I’m still thinking (positively) on a story sometime later and ‘the penny drops’ suddenly, then I have to admit that it had that certain je ne sais quoi that appeals to me.
Outside of those three stories, I really enjoyed the accounts from the Janus, the Hunter, and the Miner.
So that’s my top six. There were still three stories I liked, and nine I didn’t, but I’ll leave that to you to imagine what fell where.

Movie - The Dark Knight

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:39:27 GMT

Hands up if you haven't seen Dark Knight yet?

Bueller.

Bueller.

Bueller.

My beloved and I decided to see Dark Knight on Thursday night. I was really sick and not in the mood, because, naturally, when you're sick with a sinus infection, the last thing you want to do is go to a noisy cinema, breathe in the stale air and look up at an over-bright, fast moving screen. I had a pressure headache and I felt like I wanted to rip my teeth out. But, I wanted to please Lee so I agreed.

Now, like most of you, I'd heard a lot of hype about Heath Ledger's performance. Yes, I have to admit I was pretty determined to be disappointed by the movie. I was rather convinced that Heath was receiving the pity vote, for like being dead and stuff, so I knew I was going to pick holes in the apparently flawless performance.

Nup.

Heath Ledger really was brilliant. He was so good, in fact, that I had to keep reminding myself I was watching Heath Ledger. When it comes to creepy lip-licking, The Joker is the new Hannibal Lecter.

We know our comic books and how they work, right? Superheroes are the steel jawed men who are strong, honest and totally reactive. Generally mild-mannered during their down-time they only spring into super-action when the villain arrives. But, the villain, haha, the villain is proactive. Villainy requires around the clock attention, no galas or afternoon teas with the mayors for these guys.* They're too busy either doing evil or planning on doing evil. But that's okay, because we know that all they're going to get for their troubles is knuckle sandwich and a lecture on being nice.

The Joker is a villain, but in this version he aint your normal, run-of-the-mill Evil Genius. No, this Joker is a terrorist, pure and simple. He doesn't perform his Evil Deeds for money, or power, or revenge. No. He does it because it's fun to shake things up a little and to make a point about the Nature of Man. For three hours I watched, not a common comic book villain, but a full-on maniac creating fear and chaos in a town as jaded as Gotham City. And I was worried, because his brand of Evil always seemed to be one step ahead of the Caped Crusader. He anticipated the Batman's reactive nature and cultivated into his plot. In the end it's not the Batman that defeats him, but the fact that he turns out to be wrong about the Nature of Man thing.

As for the movie itself, Dark Knight was also very good. Not as a superhero movie, mind. As a superhero movie it was so-so. But. It is the first SF movie in a long time that has begged for a literary deconstruction. The layers of text and meaning were worthy of any uni essay and Lee and I spent the next few days feeling our way through the textual composition. What we saw was a modern allegory of what it means to be afraid and the repurcussions of reacting to that fear. I came away from the movie with the feeling that I'd learnt something new as a person which is not something you can say about most comic book adaptations.

So, all in all, I loved Heath Ledger's Joker, I enjoyed the literary aspect of the movie, I tolerated Christian Bale as the Batman because I don't think anyone else could have made it better.

I hated the ending. Really. Because, when I'm sitting in a dark, dank cinema being all martyr-like in my need to please my husband despite being sick, the last thing I want to see is Batman doing much the same thing. Be a hero for me, dammit. That's what you're there for.

*Except for Lex Luthor. Somehow he manages to be a super-villain AND a socialite. This is a rare skill in a villain.

The Nimrod Flip-Out. Written by Etgar Keret. Published by Pan MacMillan Australia

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:43:04 GMT

In a few weeks I'll be 39. As I see out the end of my fourth decade on Earth, I've been looking back at my life and what I've made of it.

-I finished high school- just.

-I married in my early twenties, and again in my mid-thirties. I've been given the responsibiliy of five amazing young souls, to mold and develop with varying levels of success.

-I'm a published short-story writer and had the joy of having a film option taken out on one of my works.

-I've been nominated for a number of awards for my writing and editing skills and even won two of the local ones.

These are the sign-posts that make up the meandering road that makes up my life. As I travel along the well-worn path I turn to look back and I have to wonder:

Is that it?

I mean, really? Are the best years of my life behind me already? Where are the surprises, the U-turns that keep life from feeling stale?

One day a strong wind will come along and blow me off my mortal coil and all I have to show for my efforts is a (sometimes questionable) ability to procreate and throw words at a page.

It was with this frame of mind that I began to read Etgar Keret's “The Nimrod Flip-Out.”

I have five children, which doesn't really allow a lot of time to call my own, so a quick scan of the Table of Contents made me an instant fan of Keret's work. With an average of 6.5(ish) pages per story, I found I could easily dip into the work between multiple loads of clothes washing, dish washing, floor sweeping, bed making yada yada. Even toilet training the three year old provided an opportunity to take in a story as short as “Baby”.

Now, I've written my fair share of flash fiction so I know that when it comes to short literature, flash is considered the runt of the litter.

So what do you do when faced with a whole litter of runts? The same thing you do with any other litter. You pick up each puppy and you compare it against the rest of its breed, checking for weight, temperament and life expectancy.

With this in mind I picked up the first story offered and held it up for examination, and yes, I was excited by what I found. “Fatso” contained everything I look for in a story. It was well-weighted; ie it felt like a complete story and not just a synopsis of a larger thought. The temperament was friendly enough in that I felt the language expected the audience to be literate without being pretentious. And as for life expectancy, I judged it to be viable as I was still thinking about the plot ramifications days after I read the work.

So, I now had a bar against which all others within the litter would be judged. The next six stories proved to live up to expectation and I became convinced by Keret's genius.

At this point I put the book down and for one reason and another read a Jodi Picoult novel instead.

During this time Lee claimed “The Nimrod Flip-Out” for himself and I had to wait until he finished it before I could resume reading.

After a week or so the book was returned and I picked up with story eight “Eight per cent of nothing.”

One hour and several stories later I put it back down again with the thought “Is that it? Are the best stories behind me already?” The work was solid enough but it began to all feel rather 'samey', as if the author had discovered one successful tone and was determined to stick to it.

And, worse than that, I found that the stories were beginning to feel unfinished. However, I persevered and was soon rewarded with the type of runts that spiders would spin webs for.

The minute I finished reading “For Only 9.99 (Inc. Tax and Postage)” I had to put the work down and take a deep breath. At that moment I had found my favourite story for 2008. This is flash fiction at its best. Every word pointed to a master craftsman at work and I fell in love all over again.

And it didn't end there. Only minutes later I began (and finished) “A Thought in the Shape of a Story.” I cried. Four pages long and I blubbed like a baby.

If you're looking to buy an easy to read yet intelligent and thought provoking collection, then these two stories make it worth the purchase price alone. But, fortunately you do get a lot more value for your money. In a collection that features 32 pieces, you do get at least a dozen truly excellent works and no bad ones.

Keret is, quite simply, an exciting and readable author who has a lot to offer both readers and writers alike. He doesn't let you dwell on what has been but forces you to take stock and plan for what is to come. And what more can you ask for from life?