'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)
Epigraph:
‘What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?’
Prospero, The Tempest
'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)
'Conceptually, The Art of Navigation is as intriguing as it is ambitious. The narrative is part near-future time travel, part historical drama, part nostalgic Australian Gothic – and all slipstream fiction. The novel braids, unbraids, and rebraids three main threads of time and place: suburban Melbourne in 1987; the royal courts of Elizabeth I and Rudolph II in 1587; and the outskirts of a new, not-quite-Melbourne in 2087. Yet there is practically nothing simple about this book – not the style or structure, nor the way it resolves. This complexity is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of slipstream stories. Slipstream fiction is difficult to process; it’s demanding, often frustrating. It functions because it is strange, because it estranges. Readers are not made welcome, not offered clear or complete pictures, but are instead asked to decipher dream-like visions glimpsed sideways through a warped scrying glass.' (Introduction)
'Conceptually, The Art of Navigation is as intriguing as it is ambitious. The narrative is part near-future time travel, part historical drama, part nostalgic Australian Gothic – and all slipstream fiction. The novel braids, unbraids, and rebraids three main threads of time and place: suburban Melbourne in 1987; the royal courts of Elizabeth I and Rudolph II in 1587; and the outskirts of a new, not-quite-Melbourne in 2087. Yet there is practically nothing simple about this book – not the style or structure, nor the way it resolves. This complexity is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of slipstream stories. Slipstream fiction is difficult to process; it’s demanding, often frustrating. It functions because it is strange, because it estranges. Readers are not made welcome, not offered clear or complete pictures, but are instead asked to decipher dream-like visions glimpsed sideways through a warped scrying glass.' (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)
