Helen Lowe's Blog, page 97

Support #Giving Tuesday — & Christchurch’s Heritage Tree Campaign

Burnside High School’s (pre-European settlement) Cabbage trees

I know, I know, I’ve been banging on about Christchurch’s Heritage & Notable Trees and my support for the Give A Little, that’s supported the team, that’s supported the trees, for the best part of a year — on and off, anyway!

But the long and the short of it is that Give A Little (as supported by the Spark Foundation) are having a Giving Tuesday — so I thought I should put out the word one more time for the trees, for the team, an...

Happening This Week: A Guest Post By Deborah Sheldon

On Friday of this week (Friday 2nd, December — gulp!) I am delighted to host Australian SFF writer Deborah Sheldon to the blog.

Deborah will guest post on the inspiration behind her newly released novel, Devil Dragon (Severed Press), with a particular focus on worldbuilding — something fun for the “…on Anything, Really” SFF crowd.

Thinking About Thanksgiving

It’s that season…

Thanksgiving is not a festival we celebrate in New Zealand; it is after all, a celebration that is uniquely…well, I was going to say American, but I understand Canadians celebrate it, too, so perhaps I should say North American—while recognising that Mexico is also part of North America and Thanksgiving is not a Mexican festival (as far as I know.)

Gosh, it gets complicated doesn’t it!!

The Ockham NZ Book Awards’ Longlist Is Out!

It feels weird to say this when it still feels very much like 2016, but the Ockham NZ Book Awards’ longlist for 2017 has just come out.

When I saw the list I did a wee Snoopy dance because my friend Frankie McMillan’s My Mother and The Hungarians is on it!

Frankie and HUNGARIANS are in the hunt for the Ockham Award for fiction; they’re in pretty fine company, too, including Love As A Stranger by Owen Marshall (who was my mentor in the NZ Society of Authors Mentorship Programme in 2005. )

One...

What I’m Reading: “The Outcast” by Sadie Jones

A friend loaned me The Outcast from her bookshelf because I said I felt like a break from SFF (Which I do read a lot if, it being my genre, so to speak.)

She thought I might enjoy it and she was right, I did. The Outcast is about 1950s, middle class, semi-rural England. In particular, it’s about a boy, Lewis, whose mother drowns in a tragic accident which only he witnesses. The Outcast explores the consequences of this traumatic event for ten-year-old Lewis, consequences that are exacerbated...

Tuesday Poetry: A Haiku “Beachcombing”

beachcombing
along the boulder bank
sandshoe, bottles, watering can

Helen Lowe

—

Recently, I’ve been focusing on poetry themed around the sea, including haiku. This is one of mine, from 2014, when I spent several months in a remote coastal location, finishing Daughter of Blood.

Prior ‘Sea’ Poems include:

“The Sea” by Tim Jones

“Dover Beach” (Excerpt) by Matthew Arnold

“Breathing You In” by David Gregory

“We are more than half water” by Helen Rickerby

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 1 b...

Saw the Movie “Arrival”…

… and I liked it.

Quite a lot, actually.

I thought it was an intelligent and engaging look at what a ‘first contact’ scenario might look like, with the tensions between what it really takes to establish effective communication set against the realities of our worlds divisions and fear.

Most of all, it was a hopeful film, both in the interactions between the human beings in the story and with the aliens.

I also liked both Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in their lead roles–Adams was compelling as...

What I’m Reading: “The Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu

This, dear readers, is the book that I did not grok.

It comes with very good credentials, winning the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006, being nominated for the Nebula Award in 2014 and winning the Hugo Award in 2015.

Written by Chinese SF author, Cixin Liu, and translated into English by American author Ken Liu, The Three Body Problem begins in the era of the Cultural Revolution but also takes place in the present day. To give some context, here is the backcover blurb from my pape...

An Interesting Observation From Reading “Magpie Murders”

Regular visitors here will probably realise that crime fiction and whodunnits are not my usual reading fare, which in terms of fiction is firmly centred on Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Historical novels, with Contemporary Realism providing a consistent supporting thread.

So when reading Magpie Murders (as reported on yesterday) I was intrigued to notice the difference in my approach. When reading my preferred genres I am a far more demanding and critical reader. I expect plot and characters,...

What I’m Reading: “Magpie Murders” by Anthony Horowitz

Magpie Murders is a whodunnit, very much in the style of the classic crime writers such as Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. It’s even set in a 1950s English village.

One of the stories, that is.

Because this, you see, is a whodunnit within a whodunnit, with the contemporary story centering on a missing manuscript and an editor’s realisation that a famous crime writer’s suicide may in fact be murder…

In many ways, Magpie Murders is a kind of roman-a-clef, except the key turns—not on the charac...