So, I was out reading all of the usual blogs when I came across this line:

“Undead seagulls, feh.”

It easily rates as the best line I’ve seen on a blog in a long time. Made me smile, and want to read the story that should follow.

In other news, Ben Peek’s Livejournal experiment continues, with about 20 people answering the five questions. If you’re part of the OZ sf scene, go sign up. Maybe someone’ll gather it all in a cool little chapbook, and I want to see how many more ways he can come up with to kill us all.

So, when Tim asked me to name the one novel I was really looking forward to this year it nearly killed me. How do you pick between Anansi Boys, Accelerando, Fifty Degrees Below, Rangergirl, or any one of a dozen others. Yes, I picked The Girl in the Glass because I can’t wait to see it, but it was close. One book I’m really looking forward to is Justina Robson’s Living Next Door to the God of Love. You can read about it on her website, and it looks like it should be very, very cool. O

There must be something in the water. I don’t know if it’s school holidays, grandmother’s visiting (which is going famously, btw), or what, but Jessica (four and three quarters) and Sophie (three and a half) have been complete horrors the last two nights. Put them to bed at the usual time, and they have spent the next three hours running riot. We were watching The Supernanny on Monday for tips, and Sophie was up constantly, coming into the room. I swear, she was checking out the enemy, getting a head’s up on the tactics we were going to use. The kids are great in most every other respect, but in this regard they’re being terrible. There are a number of costs to all this, at the moment. First, peace of mind, second, any time to do any work at all. I need to progress a bunch of things, and just cannot get the time. It’s led to a couple projects being dropped, and pushed a few others out of shape. Hopefully domestic bliss will be re-established soon.

On another note: it’s look less and less likely that I will make Continuum in Melbourne in July, which is a bummer. It looks like fun.

Here are two things that I have been pondering: 1) why do I find YA fiction so attractive right now, and 2) what do I really think of the Australian SF scene at the moment. Hmm. Neither of these things are really interesting, I suspect, for you constant reader, but I’m going to indulge myself.

I wouldn’t say that I have a long history of working with/being aware of ‘young adult’ fiction. Like a lot of readers, I went through a long phase of reading it when I was a child and then young adult myself, and I occasionally (read unwittingly) dipped into it from time to time through my twenties and thirties, but I’m editing a YA book right now and reading quite a lot of YA fiction. Why? What suddenly makes books like Holly Black’s Valiant, Diana Wynne Jones’ Conrad’s Fate, Garth Nix’s Drowned Wednesday, or even Scott Westerfeld’s very wonderful ‘Midnighters’ books so appealing? Is it a post-Harry Potter thing?

On reflection, I think it’s a comfort factor. A lot of young adult fiction is both unrepetentantly imaginative and very welcoming in tone. I find the books, when they’re good (and don’t get me started about lazily written books by people looking to hijack the YA boom) to be cozy, friendly, engaging and nice. Yes there are characters in peril, yes the stories are riveting and things could go terribly wrong, but there’s something in the tone that evokes a different age for me, when the problems of the real world were a long way away. That’s why I read them, but why try to edit one?

The answer to that is twofold. The first part of the answer is that I saw what I thought was an obvious blindspot – a lack of intelligent, cutting edge SF for young adult readers. It seemed to me a book that moved beyond the Heinlein juvenile mode would be one that readers today would respond to. I think I may be right, and the stories I’ve seen so far suggest I might be. The second part of the answer is that it’s a personal exploration for me, as most of the books I edit become. I want to understand YA fiction better, to get a clearer picture of YA science fiction today. The best way to do that, for me, is to get involved. Work with people, meet writers, see the stories that get created. It’s also a book that I feel very passionate and excited about. Some time, in about 18 months, there’s going to be a beautiful book produced by Sharyn and the other wonderful folk who work at Viking, and I’m going to be enormously proud. It’s a wonderful thing.

Talking about what I think of the Australian science fictions scene at the moment is immensely harder (though I’ve addressed it a little over at Ben Peek’s LiveJournal). I was very active in Australian SF between 1990 and 1999, and have effectively been outside the country between 1999 and 2005 – my attention has been elsewhere. That said, every now and then something floats past that catches my attention, names like Andromeda Spaceways or Agog, Brendan Duffy or Deb Biancotti. I hear about writers who are doing well overseas like Marianne de Pierres or Trudi Canavan, and old friends like Dowling, Dann, Brown and Williams all still seem very active. And I’ve increasingly been hearing a lot about writers who don’t seem to be making much of a mark here at home, like K.J. Bishop, Anna Tambour and Rjurik Davidson, but are doing great work.

So, what’s the scene like? I think we’re just moving out of the post-1999 WorldCon phase for Australian SF. The 1999 WorldCon was the last great gasp, the last hurrah for the SF boom of the ’90s. A lot of writers and most of the small presses aimed their energies at making an impact on the international stage in Melbourne, and having done so, pretty much ran out of puff. They went home, and lapsed into some kind of coma. This didn’t mean good work wasn’t being written or people weren’t enthusiastic, just that the apparent center began to loosen, the scene to fragment. Suddenly there wasn’t one main ‘scene’ to be part of, but rather a number of smaller, separate groups. As those groups worked out who they were and what they were about during the early ’90s (and you can see those groups doing it, especially in Brisbane and Canberra), things picked up momentum again and the scene is beginning to look remarkably healthy. Oddly, perhaps, it still reminds me a little of the early 90s (though on a bigger scale). I think the various groups are doing better and better, writers are growing and developing, but I don’t see a new centre forming yet (though it may do so in Brisbane), but I think when it does you’ll really see things start to move forward. There’s still a lot of amateurish work published, still too much small town insularity, but things are picking up. It looks like it could be a very exciting time, and that’s something I’d like to be part of.

Over at Ben Peek’s urban sprawl, I answer five more questions, this time about what I’m doing. The other folk being interviewed are more interesting, so it’s worth checking it out.