Ellen Datlow has published several Australian writers on SciFiction, most notably Terry Dowling. This week she has two stories by Australians, “Matricide” by Lucy Sussex and a reprint of A. Bertram Chandler’s “Familiar Pattern“. Check them out.

According to the bio that accompanies Lucy’s story, a new collection, Sancta, is due out later this year, which is terrific news. Her first collection, My Lady Tongue was wonderful, and a second one is long, long overdue.

The good folk at this year’s Australian National Science Fiction Convention have been in touch to let me know that nominations are now open for the 2005 Ditmar Awards. All the relevant information can be found on their website. Nominations can be made by email and close on 1 March 2005.

I’ve had a quick look around on the net and I haven’t found a good list of Australian stuff published during 2004, but I do know there was a lot of it. Novels, collections, and anthologies by Australians were published in Australia, the US, the UK, and Europe. Stories published by Australians were published in just about every venue you could imagine, from high profile magazines, website and anthologies overseas, to small chapbooks locally. Search them out, and nominate! The quality of the ballot, and the result, is determined by the quality of participation. If you read, nominate and vote the awards will be better.

And with that in mind, I direct your attention to the “Best Professional Achievement” and “William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review” categories, which seem to roughly correspond to the editing work I’ve done on The Locus Awards (HarperCollins), Science Fiction: Best of 2003 (Simon & Schuster/ibooks), and Best Short Novels: 2004 (SF Book Club/Doubleday Direct), and the reviewing etc work I’ve done Locus. I hesitate to say if they’re worthy of nomination, but your consideration is appreciated.

Mark Kelly, posting about the recently released Locus Poll and Reading List, wrote:

The online Locus Poll ballot is up … Special this year is a category for ‘best all-time fantasy story’ … Jonathan Strahan was the inspiration behind this category, and I’ll leave it to him to comment more about it in his blog.

Um, okay. I hadn’t really planned on saying much about it, but I always try to be responsive to suggestions. As a lot of you know, I spent some time last year working on The Locus Awards anthology. It was a lot of fun, and took into account not only results of the Awards but of various polls we’d done. I noticed, in looking at past polls, that we’d never specifically asked about fantasy short stories and though it would be interesting to see what readers thought were really excellent and important stories. I’m not sure what’s been written up in the magazine, but I had in mind stories published between 1900 and the present day. Hopefully the poll will give an interesting overview of what the magazine’s readers think are the best, the most important, the most enjoyable fantasy stories of the modern era.

I remember someone once told me that you couldn’t hear someone’s accent when they were singing. It struck me as an odd, and not entirely accurate observation. After all, how could you account for the heavily Australian accent of Mick Thomas if that were true. I then heard Missy Higgins, who sounds so Australian it’s almost caricature. I mean, her big hit is “Scaah” (Australians are suffering a chronic shortage of the letter “R” and try to use it economically, if at all) and refers to ‘moi noightloight’ (my nightlight) in one song. Sounds good, if kinda weird.

Brad Denton writes wickedly wonderful books. If you’ve read Blackburn, Lunatics, or Buddy Holly is Alive and Well and Living on Ganymede, you’d know that. His most recent books have been published by St Martins, but the Subterranean Press site lists a new novel, Laughin’ Boy, as being due out this year. The description for it reads:

America at the end of the Twentieth Century was a dangerous place. It was a place conceived in liberty, yet threatened by the forces of oppression and evil. It was a place where fanatics–political and religious, foreign and domestic–sharpened their swords to attack an innocent populace whose love of freedom was matched only by its lack of irony. It was a sick place in need of sick heroes. And so they came: PORNO GIRL, whose consumption of filth was merely a disguise to conceal her purity of soul… THE RACIST RANGER, whose repugnant jibber-jabber masked the fact that his strength was as the strength of ten… And Danny Clayton, the infamous LAUGHIN’ BOY — born in tragedy, caught in a despicable act — who would become both the most beloved and most hated man on earth. In other words: Its Savior. Or not. It would depend on whether he lived long enough for the rest of us to find out.

I hope it sells really well for Sub Press and gets a mass market edition. Either way, I can’t wait to see it.