Donald Trump cost me a book deal
Then there was the time Donald Trump cost me a book deal.
The feedback from one of the major publishers came in via my agent. The editor praised the high quality of the prose, the East Asian noir setting, and …
Category: Fiction
Ditmar Award Nominations – Double-Decker Chuffed
The shortlist for the Ditmar Awards has been released and I’m on it. Twice. Which means I’m double-decker chuffed, as my five year old son would say.
The Ditmars are voted on by the Australian spec fic community (where the …
The Post-Noir Literature of Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro writes in the aftermath of the noir event. The tragedy has passed, the noir moment of betrayal now an unreliable memory.
Ishiguro is my favourite living author. I re-read one of his novels recently: An Artist of the …
An Aurealis Nomination (plus recommendations for the Ditmars)
I was fucking chuffed to have received my first (and shit, maybe last) Aurealis Award nomination a few days ago. For the uninitiated, the Aurealis Awards are the juried prize for best genre fiction in Australia. 
The short story – …
I’m in Clarke’s ‘best science fiction of the year’ (fuck yeah)
Neil Clarke recently announced the table of contents for his ‘Best Science Fiction of the Year’. It’s an impressive line up. What the fuck I’m doing in it, I’m not sure, but hey, I’ll take it. Short fiction-wise this is …
New Story and Southeast Asian Science Fiction
A few years back when I’d first arrived in Vietnam, and was still very new to writing, I produced The Four Deaths of Taylor Ngo. Set in a jazz bar in Ha Noi (and, yes, based on a real …
Aussie SF Snapshot
I was recently interviewed by David McDonald for the 2016 Aussie Speculative Fiction Snapshot.
Undertaken every two to three years, the Snapshot is an informal census of the local genre scene. A tonne of cool authors and editors are …
The Samurai, the Gunslinger, the Private Eye: Modernity’s Antagonists
Red Harvest, Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars: Remaking the Remake
The American Western was revitalised by an Italian director inspired by a Japanese filmmaker with a love of hardboiled fiction.
This is the strange international pedigree of the ground-breaking A …
Americans Destroy Science Fiction
Equity
The Americans have done it again. The conservative wing has rigged the Hugo Awards, turning it into a list of ideological screeds, petty revenge stories, and comedic gay erotica. The progressive wing will no doubt punch back, like …
Fast Start to a Slow Year
Hectic beginning to the year after moving back home from Vietnam. Started a PhD, second child on the way, so much cricket to watch.
My writing output has suffered: it’s the worst start to a year, in terms of words, …