AustLit

'This conversation took place over the summer of 2020/21. We were looking for a new way to discuss, to essay about, speculative fiction. Should we write each other letters? Emails? We talked on the phone and started writing/overwriting a shared googledoc, extending our edits into a conversation that teased out ideas – asking and answering, testing and challenging each other. Wow, we thought, is that what you think. Okay…' (Introduction)

'This collaborative paper explores how the ‘spec-fic’ category may be responding to contemporary political and environmental challenges. It presents two case studies, in the personal writing and professional publishing experiences of authors Rose Michael and Cat Sparks, to consider the ways speculative fiction engages with real-world concerns. The paper acknowledges the genre’s contested relationship to harder-to-categorise cross-genre or interstitial forms of non-realist fiction, as well as its obvious antecedents in science fiction and its arguable overlap with ‘big L’ literature. As creative practitioners and published authors who dis/identify with generic labels in different ways, the authors contend that the use, misuse, and abuse of genre conventions has been, and continues to be, personally and professionally productive – particularly in a contemporary publishing landscape impacted by changes to technology and platforms that have transformed traditional relationships and roles.'  (Publication abstract)

'I count myself lucky. Weird, I know, in this day and age when all around us the natural and political world is going to hell in a handbasket. But that, in fact, may be part of it.

'Back when I started writing, realism had such a stranglehold on publishing that there was little room for speculative writers and readers. (I didn’t know that’s what I was until I read it in a reader’s report for my first novel. And even then I didn’t know what it was, until I realised that it was what I read, and had always been reading; what I wrote, and wanted to write.) Outside of the convention rooms, that is, which were packed with less-literary-leaning science-fiction and fantasy producers and consumers.'  (Introduction)

'The year of the Slippery When Wet Tour three girls leave their safe suburban world to spend a life-changing night in a forest on the outskirts of Melbourne, where they plan a half-serious séance to call forth bushranger Ned Kelly. A world away in time Edward Kelley - alchemist, necromancer and crystal ball 'scryer' for Elizabeth I's astrologist Doctor Dee - is beset by visions. Narratives from 1987, 1587 and 2087 merge and converge as this gothic ghost story becomes a fantastic tale of possession in a blazing work of speculative fiction. ' (Publication summary)