Yesterday, a report into the Australian refugee policy was released. Here’s the recap, courtesy of the BBC:

Australia’s human rights watchdog has condemned the country’s treatment of refugees.

Asylum seekers were being held in “utterly miserable conditions” for prolonged periods of time, the Human Rights Commission said.

Children continued to be detained, it said in its annual report.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised a more humane refugee policy when he was elected in November 2007 and scrapped the policy of mandatory detention.

But a report from the government’s own human rights watchdog has found that refugees continue to be held in poor conditions.

‘Prisons’

Most detention centres had the feel of prisons, the report said, with razor wire, cramped conditions and detainees kept under surveillance.

At the detention centre in Sydney, inmates slept in dormitory-style bunk beds, with little privacy and few areas to exercise.

The commission described the conditions there as “utterly miserable”.

It also found that children continued to be detained, despite a pledge from the government to end that practice.

Of the almost 200 people in detention, over 40 had been held for more than two years. One person had been detained for six years.

Most detainees, the report said, experienced frustration, anger, distress and depression.

I sat here, thinking of something to say. I had a few witty comments about how new governments are much like old ones–for his work with refugees, former Prime Minister John Howard was awarded the Medal of Freedom and, it seems, offered a place to stay that saw Barack Obama and his kids sleeping in the gutter–but the truth is, outside that little joke that’s the usual storm of nothing from the press, I’ve got nothing to add. The apathy and cynicism I have for so much of the ‘world’s leaders’ is nothing you get in a day.

Link.

Sad to say we have bad news about The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: there will be no volume this year after all.

It is a simple truth that no book exists without much unseen work, so we’d like to thank the people at St. Martin’s who published the series for twenty-one years, the readers, writers (of the fiction, poetry, and the various annual summations), our co-editor Ellen Datlow, the packager Jim Frenkel, cover artist Tom Canty, and all the booksellers, librarians, and readers who supported the series over its lifetime.

It has been an honor and a thrill to work on these books over the past six years. We edited five anthologies and were part way through the sixth when we got the news about the 2008 volume and we’d like to thank (and apologize to) all the editors, publishers, readers and writers who helped us by sending and recommending material.

At this point in the year we’re usually deep in final reading and we can give the usual report: 2008 was a great year for fantasy. Over the next couple of months we’ll try and post more about what we read, recommendations, and so on.

New incarnations of the book may appear, there will be further announcements as the year goes on.

Again, thanks,

Sincerely,

Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link

A shame, though I’d fallen off reading it in the last couple of years due to cash concerns.

I remember finding the book back over ten years ago now, back in ‘94, and I was just starting to look for ways to find new authors. It was a good book for that, a way to get a place to start in all the work that was published in the year, and to sample authors you’d never heard or seen of before.

Link.

Dear Female Author–

I wish to publish you.

I know you might find this a strange concept, given how repressed you are in the publishing world, but I am interested in the numbers game, and clearly you are less represented than men. Well, white men, anyway. Black men, I’m sure not about. Asian men? Bit iffy bout that. Fairly sure Hispanic men aren’t represented more than women, but maybe Hispanic men represent more than Hispanic woman, who knows. Truth is, I am not, in fact, interested in you at all: your name, the type of fiction you write, your cultural, social, economic, religious backgrounds… please, don’t assume that these make you an interesting writer. Don’t assume that that is interesting at all. No, what makes you interesting is your breasts, your cunt, your reproductive organs, and that special way that women think differently to men. Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true. Men are Mars, Women are from Venus. We snicker at such a silly cliche, but it’s really true. You know how it is when men don’t ask for directions when lost and women bake a really fine cake. Women do do things better than men, especially in literature, where the idea that you could learn craft and skills and that work would vary from author to author is nonsense. After all, if it weren’t, we’d all stop listing numbers, and start talking about female authors who have names. But we don’t. Because that would be silly.

You might be asking why I have suddenly expressed this interest. After all, it’s dangerous thing for me to say as a white male. In the position of power that I am in, I’m not suppose to support anyone. Having done this, however, someone might accuse me of basically simplifying gender disparity in fiction and accuse me of, a) cynically targeting a female demographic for money, or b) reinforcing the minority portrayal that female authors currently experience, thus reinforcing the opinion that female authors are, somehow, different to male authors. And when I say different, I mean lesser. All authors are somehow different, but female authors are somehow different in a squishy girly way. Cooties. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t lie. Give us strong, throbbing men.

Yes.

Throbbing.

Perhaps with a Hemingwayesque kind of gun thing going on. You’re not a male author unless you suicide with a shotgun when you’re old.

Truthfully, I must admit that there is a slightly diabolical element to my plan here, female author. Forgive me if I don’t bother to learn your name. Oh, and you, the black girl in the background… sorry, I’m not helping you today. Perhaps next week, when I focus on why literary movements benefit from a range of culture, social, and economic voices as well as gender. Perhaps when I point out the very conservative nature of speculative fiction, and how its authors are predominantly from a white, middle class background, which is represented in the work, and the larger issue at play here, and perhaps when I focus on how non white portrayals in fiction are of more importance than a simple gender split on a numbers game… but that, that is next week, and not today. Today, I am only concerned with the fact that you look girly.

That you have the feminine touch.

That we can walk down the street together in heels.

That we can burst through the doors of those old, conservative magazines that none of us read, and which are continually shedding readers for this adherence to an ageing, dying demographic, and tell them that we don’t want a subscription, still. Thank you.

Yours,

Male Author #200345.

Indie Publisher Suing Borders for $1,000,000

If newly appointed Borders CEO Ron Marshall thought he was going to have an easy transition into power—and we concede that’s a mighty big if—that dream quickly evaporated: On Tuesday, Jasmine-Jade Enterprises, the parent corporation of Ellora’s Cave and Cerridwen Press, filed a lawsuit against the bookstore chain seeking $1 million in damages stemming from what Jasmine-Jade alleges were deliberately “excessive” orders of their books. (Jasmine-Jade has also filed a lawsuit against distribution company Baker & Taylor, accusing the distribution company of “conspiring” with Borders, which used B&T to return the unsold Ellora’s Cave and Cerridwen inventory.)

In a statement issued by Jasmine-Jade, CEO Patricia Marks described Borders’s alleged ordering of more books than it planned to sell, which the publisher claims was intended to ” reduce the amount owed [Jasmine-Jade] and produce a credit balance in the account,” as “churning.” She added, “It’s crippling the industry. It is especially hard on small publishers, who can’t absorb the staggering costs.” You may recall that when Impetus Press was forced to close last fall, the independent publishing company cited the return fees charged by their distributor as the leading cause of their financial downfall, and specifically mentioned Borders as an outlet that was returning substantial numbers of books. You may also recall another book distributor’s warning to indie publishers that Borders was anticipating “excessive returns” in the last months of 2008. That said, it is unclear whether either of those prior incidents support Jasmine-Jade’s allegations; that’s for a court to decide if the lawyers don’t come to a consensus first. (But if you’ve got some insight, by all means fill us in…)

Steph Campisi sent me this this morning, and it wasn’t until I’d done the morning chores that I had to do that I had a look at it, and well, it’s interesting.

Link.

Painting the office recently meant that I moved the books around. I figured this was probably a necessary evil, because the books had spread across the floor, left the shelves, and were trying to escape, or so it seemed. They had to be captured, returned, kept, caged… and in doing so, I have discovered a lot of things that I have just not seen for a while. One of them was the Chung Kuo series written by David Wingrove in the 90s. I’ve no idea how many of you read it, or have heard of it, but it was this huge sprawling science fiction series wherein China had become the world power, and rewrote history to remove the West.

It was, from memory, pretty fucking cool. The last two books, in the eight book series, were complete ratshit, but the first six were more than enough to cover me for how it ended. It was a sprawling, generational saga, one in which desire, greed, responsibility, friendship, sweet city scape designs, interesting social designs, and history played amongst each of the characters and plot, and I seriously dug it. Maybe if I went back to it, it wouldn’t be so cool. Books can be like that, after all, and in truth, I don’t plan to go back to it. Still, out of curiosity, I did a google search on Wingrove, to see what he had done since then. I knew he’d written a few Myst novels, but there seemed to be nothing those work for hire pieces, until it is that I read this:

Quercus has bought world rights (excluding France) in David Wingrove’s monumental Chung Kuo future history from Diana Tyler at MBA.

Nicolas Cheetham, Editorial Director of Quercus, said ‘Chung Kuo is a two-million-word, nineteen-book epic that brilliantly fuses Shogun and Blade Runner to rival the scope of Frank Herbert’s Dune or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. In a genre of big ideas and even bigger books, this is the biggest and most ambitious of them all.’

Set 200 years in the future, the Chung Kuo sequence introduces a world dominated by China. History has been rewritten and the West forgotten. There is no official record of Shakespeare, Mozart or Einstein and any reminders of the past are literally buried under mile-high, continent-spanning cities. An ornate, hierarchical society of 34 billion souls is maintained only by unremitting repression. Revolution seems inevitable but in such an overpopulated world any change could spell the end of humanity.

Chung Kuo has been over twenty years in the making. Eight books were published between 1988 and 1998, with rights sold in fourteen different territories. In 1988, the idea of a world dominated by China seemed outlandish, but two decades later, Chung Kuo’s vision of the future seems all too plausible. The series has been recast in nineteen volumes, including a new prequel and a new final volume. After a series launch in May 2009, Quercus will embark on an ambitious publishing programme that will see all nineteen volumes available by the end of 2012.

Reprinted in nineteen volumes, and with a new start and a new end… makes you just want to cry, doesn’t it?

Link.

Over at Harpers Online, Arthur Krystal says:

The ability to respond to prose and poetry hasn’t entirely disappeared, but it has been dulled. This is a dicey business to discuss. There are many people who still depend on novels and poems for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, and they tend to dismiss someone who feels differently. Clearly, I’m either depressed or I just don’t get it. Thing is, I’m not on meds, and since I believe that I do “get” Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Larkin, and Auden, I also believe that I’m able to appreciate what novelists and poets are doing today. And yet very little strikes my fancy. I can’t prove it, but I think the fault lies in the literary firmament and not in me.

It’s an interesting comment, because, to a point, I agree with it, and feel the same way (also, I feel that way about films, too).

Krystal’s problem, however, is that he spends too much time discussing genius, as if by doing this he reinforces his own intellect and position of power. Quoting Cervantes and Joyce and Shakespeare as genius’ doesn’t, in my mind, help his argument, because the authors he is talking about are merely canonical, and are easy marks for the ‘genius’ tag. Personally, I think Shakespeare is shockingly over rated, and Cervantes is more and less interesting depending on the translation, but it’s neither here nor there, because about half way through the interview I linked, I began to wander and drift, even as I began to understand what bores me some times. The continual referencing to older work, to supposed genius’, to how things should be, the almost condescending admittance to reading modern novels that have been well received… just, like, fuck off, you know?

I realised that, as I read the interview, that it is this very thing that bores me about art: the sameness that pervades artists in what is ‘genius’ and what it is that they should emulate. Don’t look to anything new. Don’t look to different forms, different style, different mixes, remember that there’s a classic way to do it, remember the canon, remember the shiny, shiny things you can’t cut up.

Bah.

I need to grab some breakfast.

Jhayne listed the 16 Random Things meme, “Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a note with sixteen random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose sixteen people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.” Like her, I’ve no interest in tagging people, but I liked what she did with her piece, so I’m going to try my own hand at it.

So:

1. People send me cards, and afterwards I never know what to do with them. Throwaway comments, throwaway well wishes, throwaway apologies. But I can’t toss them. I keep them in this pile, a collection of throwaway moments that people have sent me from around the world. Malaysia, Japan, the States, Iceland, Egypt, and Melbourne. Some have a little more thought put into them, a little more quirk, and these are the ones I like the most; but I wonder how long I’ll keep these things, my pieces of paper and cardboard that took but a moment for someone to write, and which, when I think of throwing them out, I am uncomfortable with.

2. It’s a lot easier to deal with people who don’t like you than those who do. One requires less consideration, after all.

3. In 2008, I turned off the radio in my car. I finally broke against the sharp rocks of dull witted radio personalities. I turned it on again a few nights ago to find two girls talking about weird images while on a road trip. One of them said to the other, “Have you ever been on a road trip,” and the other replied, “Yeah, we did the drive to Melbourne,” while the first talked about being in a camping ground. I sighed, and plugged back in my Ipod. Driving down to Melbourne and a nice freeway is not a road trip. Going to a camping ground is not exciting. Maybe it’s exciting if you pull over and a UFO lands in front of you with bright lights and Elizabeth Taylor steps out, looking like she’s from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Maybe that’s a little different. Maybe, I think, it’s too easy to get on the fucking radio.

4. I have a ratings box for the television. I said to the company that asked if I wanted to take part that I didn’t watch much television, and they said that I was kind of the demographic they wanted, so I agreed. Consequently, if I happen to turn the TV on and Friends is on, I turned the TV off.

5. I have never really spent much time around writers. A bit here and there. I don’t really know many musicians, either. Or painters. But I know a lot of people who work as social workers, therapists, and in other mental and physical health industries.

6. She sent me a message on facebook, wishing me a good Xmas and New Year. Really, I wonder as I read it, why do I keep this facebook account? At any rate, I never replied. The last time I saw her was the morning after my previous New Years, in which we ended up on the Super Lame evening of Vanilla Ice. It was a chaste kind of evening, though it could have gone otherwise, but even a little drunk–it was Vanilla Ice, and you can’t go there sober–there were just things said that left me with the impression that I was better off alone. Well, alone as a kind of chaste evening can be. Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe not. Either way, there was coldness the next day, and later, when I sent her a message, she told me she had deleted my number. I didn’t reply to her facebook message, a year later.

7. I have a jar I drop coins into. Never bothered with such things as a child.

8. She said to me, “I don’t like sheets. They just tangle around your feet, keep you trapped in your bed. I don’t use them. They’re wrong.” I’m 32 and it’s the first time I’ve met anyone with the same opinion about sheets as me. Seems like a long wait on something so trivial.

9. Since the end of 2000, I’ve been on anti-depressants. Something to set you straight when you can’t do it yourself. I never gave it much thought, but around the middle of last year, I figured it was time to give them up, and see how I was without them. So here I am, in 2009, without them, and I haven’t had anything for a month and a bit, and I’m doing okay. Everything has its time and place, it seems, and we can only hope that I end up on some tower shooting at people now, because the world has given me the shits and I’ve nothing to blur it out with.

10. I’m standing in line at the supermarket, listing to my Ipod, and gazing idly at the covers of magazines. There’s one with Nicole Richie on it, showing her in a bikini and big, goggle sunglasses. She’s got these stick arms that look like they would snap, but next to her is a picture of Victoria Beckham, looking anorexic. The picture beneath Richie says that she’s curved and happy now and, sure if you compare her to the latter, she is; that doesn’t mean that in the world of sanity and awareness that she is, however. Maybe I should write a letter. Put a bikini on. Send a picture with it. But then I’d probably have to buy a pair of those glasses, and I’ve always thought that they looked stupid.

11. I learnt to write short stories by reading comics and TV shows. The structure is the same, or at least that’s my theory.

12. I had a comic in this blog, and for a year, I changed the way I did things, tried to shift it so that it was at the centre. Since then, I have been wondering what I will do with this blog. I feel a little lost with it. I’m not sure what it should be anymore, or what I should do with it. There’s an entire chance that it could have run its course, too, and that I’ll be better off just shutting it down; but it’s not there yet, I don’t think, and I know what I’m like: I’ll find something I want to do and I’ll be full of direction and such thoughts won’t even exist.

13. I hate wearing shirts while I sleep. They tangle around you, try to strangle you. That’s not my scene.

14. For years, I had a camera, and I still do, if you include the one I have on my phone, but I barely take photos anymore. The camera I had broke while I was in the States, and while I was in a church, taking pictures. I’ve waited patiently for God to replace what he broke, but I think I might have to do that myself.

15. One of my favourite books still remains Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking.

16. I still figure I have time to become an astronaut.

Flip on the news, learn that Israel has rolled into Gaza, having shut down the power, and send in their helicopters, their soldiers, their funded military might.

I tend to be more sympathetic towards the Palestinians, but only because I fall on the side of underdogs when I’m not emotionally invested; otherwise, I tend to think there’s no right or wrong side in the whole mess it is. It has been going a long time. It’ll go on for a long time. My opinion ultimately comes down to a knowledge that people are dying for something that’ll be around a long time after they’re dead, and it’s just sad–but I’m hear, in a house in Sydney, with the air con turned up. I got it pretty easy, just like a lot of people with air conditioning do. What I do find interesting, however, is watching the coverage. Tonight they showed an Israeli training camp that had been built to resemble the warren of the Gaza Strip. Months of preparation said one station; another simply said nothing about that. When it came to the Palestinians, however, there was a lot of ‘we think’ and ‘they will have’ but no actual images of training camps. The person on the television seemed particularly disturbed by the fact that the strip would be trapped. Oh my god! We’re sending in tanks and they’re not going to like that! After these maybes and perhaps, the reporter added, as if it were an after thought, that they Palestinians had light weapons, nothing compared to the largely American made Israeli military.

I go through phases watching the news, because of this exact thing. Everyone is presenting an angle, creating a fiction built upon half truths, or a truth build upon fictions, whatever you like. Occasionally it gets to me, that we all live in a world where we are pretty much manipulated on a daily basis to get us to think, feel, and purchase someone else’s opinion.

Maybe if they gave me fries with it, I’d be good.

It’s a new year.

I’d like to say I’ve been doing fascinating things, but the truth is I’ve painted my office, read a bit, wrote a bit, played video games.

2008 wasn’t exactly the best year I’ve had. In many ways, it felt like a year to curl up and sleep through, or at least to escape. I wrote a novel, I kept Nowhere Near Savannah going for most of the year, I was self employed for the first time, I wrote a few short stories… but I feel like the end of the year was a bit slack, and I didn’t do as much as I could have. I still managed to feel a bit burnt out, though, which probably points out to a shockingly small burn out threshold on my part. My hope is that this year should be a bit different, and hopefully things will start to pick up financially and career wise, but if not, well, there’s always 2010.

I tell you what, though, there was one really surprising thing this year, and that was the fact that people continued to read and post about 26lies. There were the guys and girls who had it as part of a course, but there was, throughout the year, little pops of notes about the book on my google alerts notification. Most of them weren’t worth mentioning, just comments that people made on message boards, and the like (there was one, oddly enough, on a Harry Potter board, which made me laugh). There wasn’t a bad thing said about it, and it’s this cool little buzz that the book is just moving along, being read, being shared. I watched Black Sheep come and go and disappear without any real trace and that, no matter what you (the author) think of the work, is always a harsh deal. It was a little harsher given all the circumstances around it, but for the most part, I’ve let it go, closed those doors, and moved on. What else is there to do? But 26lies… that little book seems to have an odd life of its own, so much so that someone - I have no idea who, but thanks - actually wrote a wikipedia page about it.

It’s a strange, cool world at times, and it’ll surprise you no matter how cynical you are.

So lets hope 2009 has more dead celebs, and more people reading and buying my shit, just as I write and sell more of it.

Peace, y’all.