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'“Ding! Round One.” This repeated opening sentence leads to hard-hitting moments in Daniel Tamone’s debut novel, The Fists of the Father, which centres on three generations of an Australian boxing family. For the youngest, 25-year-old Ted “Little Boy Blue” Taylor, the opening round started not when he first entered the ring but when he was a child facing his father’s “monstrous hands’’ in the family home in Sydney’s west.' (Introduction)
'Science fiction is often concerned with reproduction, which is typically figured as an incursion of the alien upon the human – exemplified by the horrific inseminations and chest-cracking faux-births in that classic of science-fiction cinema, Alien (1979). Mothers and motherhood are common themes in these films, as we see in the second instalment of the Alien franchise, in which the androgynous hero Ripley faces off against a grisly, extra-terrestrial, egg-laying mother. The feminist Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), has described such films as a figurative expression of an underlying misogyny that casts the reproductive female as “monstrous”, requiring violent repression.' (Introduction)
