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SF bookshelf

This is a collection of mini-reviews of science fiction and fantasy books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length, often because I couldn’t find time. It began as a string of comments to an identically-titled post on Green Path which now continues independently as Environmental Science Fiction.

The most recent additions to the collection are at the top; dates given are the dates reviews were added.

Index

The Year’s Best SF Vol 2 • Tales from the Inner City • Anthropocene Rag • Zen Cho • Every Version of You • The Scar • Babel • The Year of the Jackpot • Children of Memory • Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits • Reconstruction • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida • The Anomaly • Flyaway • From Here On, Monsters

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 2

This fat volume published by Saga presents ‘the best SF short stories published in 2020’ in the opinion of its expert editor, Jonathan Strahan, and I’m not going to argue: it’s a terrific collection. Nearly thirty authors, newbies to veterans, explore our most pressing current concerns (race, gender, AI, social justice, climate change) by projecting them into possible futures. Others have fun with future crime or the implications of hard science.

Bonuses are an outline of what happened in SF publishing and a critical overview of the best novels and novellas of the year. I was pleased that so many of my own favourites rated well. Let’s see:  Anthropocene Rag, The Order of the Pure Moon, Flyaway, The Ministry for the Future, Agency, and books by Wong, Tchaikovsky, Johnson and Doctorow.

This volume’s only negative is a small one, its totally generic title. There must be hundreds of collections called The Year’s Best Science Fiction, with various subtitles, so include the editor’s name in your search for it. To add to the confusion, ‘Volume 1’ (which I’m sure was just as good) is actually the previous year’s collection from the same editor and publisher. (14.3.25)

Tales from the Inner City

Shaun Tan’s Tales (2018) will probably be shelved amongst children’s books in your local library or bookshop. They are variously whimsical and surreal, gentle enough not to frighten small children, and they are generously illustrated with his own paintings, which are sometimes more important than the text. But don’t be deceived: they are subtle, profound fables about our relationship with the animal world. Buy the book for a child by all means, but be sure to read it yourself. (8.3.25)

Anthropocene Rag

Alex Irvine’s Anthropocene Rag (2020) is a roadtrip, somewhat in the manner of Spinrad’s People’s Police, through territory explored by Cory Doctorow, William Gibson and Greg Egan among others.

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Dark Emu

• This post replaces and updates my original (2023) introduction to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu in The European colonisation of Australia on this blog, and a series of comments and additions which followed it there.

Dark Emu

As I said in 2023, it has gradually become apparent that the Australian history we learned in school fifty years ago obscured much of the truth about the early years of European settlement. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) is a key work in our rethinking of that narrative.

I knew about the book for some years before I finally found the time and courage to read it. I had avoided it because I really didn’t want to read yet another account of white injustice and brutality, but I needn’t have worried: the book is not confronting in that way but is primarily about pre-contact indigenous communities and their food.

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The Mapoon Story

Mapoon is a small community on the Western coast of Cape York Peninsula, 200 km South of Bamaga (which is almost on the tip) and 100 km North of Weipa.

This is the story of Mapoon according to the Aboriginal people of Mapoon as they wrote and recorded it in the Dry Season of 1974 and the Wet Season of early 1975.

There was at Mapoon at that time about six families, pioneering the rebuilding of their destroyed settlement…

So begins the Introduction to the first of this pair of books, published in Melbourne in 1975 by an activist organisation. The second volume, much longer, tells the story of the “Invaders” largely in their own words, quoting extensively from church and government records.

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Fantasy from the Dark Ages

The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.

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The early colonial period in Northern Australia

canoes in mangroves
Aboriginals and Canoes at Cooktown ca 1900 by James Cossar Smith

This post was triggered by the wonderfully evocative old photo above. It comes from the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, part of a large collection indexed here.

The page will gradually grow into an anthology-style post like People in Australia before Europeans arrived and The European colonisation of Australia but covering specifically the early colonial period in northern Australia, roughly 1850 – 1930 and anywhere north and east of a line from Bundaberg to Darwin. Like those two, it will be a collection of snippets from items that deserve to be remembered, from various online sources.

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