Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 146

The Shattered City: the cover has landed!

Look what I just found on the internet! (the link is to the ebook of The Shattered City which will apparently be released on April 1.)

March is a Yellowcake with Candles Burning Brightly

Link High for Happiness

There have been some lovely tributes to Nicholas Courtney over the last few days. My favourite is the selection of Brigly Pictures by Calapine, though I also enjoyed the obituary that Toby Hadoke wrote for the Guardian, and Tom Baker's personal farewell. I09′s post is worth checking out if only for the great YouTube vids of, well, the Brig being Brigly.

Elsewhere on the internet, a fascinating discussion took place on Kate Elliott's blog about whether women write epic fantasy differently to men. Back here in Australia, Rowena Cory Daniells is bemused at the perception in the US and UK that women writing fantasy is an unusual thing, and is doing a blog series featuring female fantasy writers. There are some very interesting comments in both posts from some very prominent writers which range from the illuminating and inspiring to the kind of depressing.

Hyperbole and a Half, the cartoon blog that taught me to eye my daughters with suspicion and dread, tells a tale of childhood fear, and one little girl's quest to destroy her sister's innocence. It's funny as hell and I do mean hell.

In closing, if there is a better wedding gift than the Angry Birds Honeymoon Game that Jenny Crusie crocheted for roommate and fellow author Lucy March, I have never heard of it.

Galactic Suburbia Episode 26 Show Notes

There's a new episode up! Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.

Episode 26

In which Tansy and Alex soldier on womanfully without their lost comrade, to catch up on three weeks of publishing news, the Nebulas, books, books, and more books, and tackle the crunchy pet subject of Australian SFF Publishing in its entirety: how do Australian specfic readers get their books? Who publishes them and how do we buy them? (Realised too late this is a pretty massive topic – please email us to tell us what we got wrong and what we left out!)

News

Bitchgate round up – ancient history now!

Scott Westerfeld interview gives the author perspective

LJ Smith, author of bestselling 20 year book series The Vampire Diaries fired by her publisher, who will hire new writer to continue the books.

Interesting post by Tobias Buckell on ebooks

(love the bit where he zooms out on the graph)

Borders and Angus and Robertson go into receivership, blame online/overseas sales. Fair, or not?

Nebula shortlist includes several of Tansy's favourite books from 2010, and there is much rejoicing. Also, will Christopher Nolan beat Richard Curtis?

RIP Nicholas Courtney, best known as the Brigadier from Doctor Who

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alex: Life, Gwyneth Jones; The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin; Revelation Space, and Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds

Tansy: Debris (due Oct 2011) by Jo Anderton;

The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, Kim Newman;

Across the Universe, by Beth Revis

Pet Subject: How do Australians Buy SpecFic Books?

This comes from a request by Niall Harrison to learn about the other side of Aussie specfic – the mainstream/Big Name Publishers, how Australians buy books, etc.

Big Name Australian Publishers (who handle SFF)

HarperCollins Voyager

Hachette Livre/Orbit (incl Gollancz, Picador, Little Brown etc)

Allen & Unwin

Random House

Pan Macmillan

The Cost of Australian Books/Australian editions – GST, the fight against parallel importation.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/20...

Chain Stores – Borders, Big W, Collins, ABC, Dymocks, Angus & Robertson (Borders & A&R now in receivership but not all shops company owned – many will close)

Online Shopping – local and overseas (Amazon, Book Depository, Fishpond, BetterWorldBooks)

Indie/SFF Specialist Bookshops

Hobart: Ellison Hawker

Melbourne: Minotaur and Swords and Sorcery (Reader's Feast also has a well-picked if smallish selection).

Perth: Planet and Fantastic Planet, White Dwarf and a few more new and not so new

Sydney: Galaxy, Infinitas

Brisbane: Pulp Fiction Books, Avid Reader

(who did we forget? Tell us!)

Feedback: Tehani from Perth, Cat from Wollongong & Shane from Redfern.

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don't forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Remembering the Brigadier.

I heard today that Nicholas Courtney recently passed away peacefully. He was 81. My condolences to his family and friends – in the larger community of Doctor Who fandom, he was greatly loved and respected, which is really the best thing any of us can leave behind.

While he had a long and varied acting career, the role he will most be associated with is Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart in Doctor Who. Courtney first stepped into the part in 1968 in The Web of Fear, and most recently in 2008 reprised the character in "Enemy of the Bane," in an episode of spin off show The Sarah Jane Adventures. That's forty years!

The Web of Fear and its sequel, The Invasion, both worked as a kind of audition for the UNIT concept, which was to be a central hub of the show in the 1970′s. As first Colonel and later Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Nicholas Courtney was the chap who had to deal with Yeti invading the underground, and then Cybermen taking over London. The Doctor was more of an annoyance than anything to him, though he became an ally pretty quickly, and performed what could have been a fairly uninteresting guest role with great charisma and warmth.

Like most people, I fell in love with the Brig during the Jon Pertwee Years. When Doctor Who was relaunched in 1970, in colour and with a new style and format, Pertwee's Doctor was matched not only with a girl assistant, but with a family. UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) was based on the idea that, if the Earth gets invaded by aliens quite as often as Doctor Who tends to suggest, surely there should be some kind of military force set up to combat said threats. This organisation, Lethbridge Stewart himself and Sgt Benton had all been introduced during the Troughton Years, but became the centrepiece of the new look version of the show.

Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor, exiled from space adventuring, was teamed with this organisation, with an effect somewhat similar to what happens when Lestrade calls in Sherlock Holmes to deal with a case – only UNIT as a whole were a touch more fond of the Doctor. The first season of this era put the Brigadier up against not only the Doctor's disapproval of shooting things, but also the chill disapproval of Dr Liz Shaw, who disliked anything to do with the military. After she left, the Brig himself chose the rather scatty but compliant Jo, to ensure that the Doctor's companion was someone on the payroll. Later, he and Sarah Jane bonded over the Doctor's erratic nature, once the TARDIS was fully working and UNIT's scientific advisor could just vanish any time he wanted… and often did.

Nicholas Courtney played the Brig as a traditional military man from the beginning – clipped, no-nonsense, and with a tendency to pull out explosives when he sees aliens. The Doctor, as his scientific advisor, regularly told him how he was doing it wrong. While some stories hinged on the conflict between their two methods, on the whole they made a pretty good team. The Brigadier is probably one of the characters who showed most development in the 70′s era of Classic Who, as he went from a career officer who had only seen a couple of weird things in his life, to an alien specialist who had been there, seen that and bought the t-shirt. He still had faith, though, determined to find, someday, the alien menace who WOULD be conquered by bullets.

Infamously, even when faced with the ultimate impossible, a flying gargoyle in a small English village, the Brigadier responded with aplomb: "Chap with the wings! Five rounds rapid." He buried the Silurians, caused a toxic maggot invasion by blowing up some caves he shouldn't have, regularly lost the villainous Master ten minutes after capturing him, and yet was utterly believable as a competent leader who coped admirably with being constantly in over his head. While the Brigadier was often written as a bit of a duffer, there only to contrast with the Doctor's brilliance (shades of Watson rather than Lestrade), Nicholas Courtney always played him with great dignity. The pay off was that the world-weary Lethbridge-Stewart often got some of the best lines, and even when the dialogue wasn't there for him, he only had to lift a cynical eyebrow to make his opinion clearly felt.

The Three Doctors would have to be one of my favourite Brigadier stories, as we not only have him come face to face with his "old" Doctor, but he also sees inside the TARDIS for the first time, and really travels to another world. Also there's the classic 'bullet-sucking' monsters that are so frustrating for the poor dear. I also especially love him towards the end of the Pertwee era – dancing with hippies in The Green Death, dealing stiff-upper-lip style with the betrayal of one of his best men, and embarrassedly hiding a moment of weakness when a mind reader gets under his skin in Planet of the Spiders. The most soldiery soldier of them all was also a great big squishy marshmallow underneath the uniform – the science fictional equivalent of Mr Badger in Wind in the Willows.

The ladies were always "Miss Shaw," "Miss Grant," and "Miss Smith" to him. He was enough of a chauvinist that it didn't occur to him to call Liz "Doctor Shaw."

When the Third Doctor died and regenerated, all we got from the Brigadier was "here we go again," though he secretly seemed pleased that, unlike Sarah, he knew what was coming. And this time, he got to see how it happens!

The Fourth Doctor/Tom Baker's first story, Robot, follows a similar formula to most of Pertwee's UNIT stories, though it's clear throughout that this is a different man, and that he feels little attachment to or obligation to UNIT or the Brigadier. Once that first adventure is done, the Doctor flits off into space with Sarah Jane and Harry Sullivan, leaving the rest of the old team behind. They returned a season later for Terror of the Zygons, which was a lovely swansong for Courtney's Brigadier character, featuring many of the things that made him such an entertaining character: snappy dialogue, dry wit, and fighting aliens. In this case, the Loch Ness Monster AND aliens.

From this point on, the Brigadier became a favourite point of nostalgia for Doctor Who fans and the production team. He turned up in Mawdryn Undead (1983) as a school teacher with a haunted past, seeming to have left his past as a soldier behind him. This story, originally written to feature actual schoolteacher companion Ian Chesterton, was a bit bewildering, and doesn't really fit with anything else we see of the Brig's "retirement" in later episodes. The best explanation is that he went undercover in the boys school (possibly hunting for evidence that, you know, alien political prisoners were being kept there against their will) and then got whacked by Mawdryn's paradox, thus forgetting everything about his real job for a while. Courtney does do a very good job of what he is given, particularly playing two different versions of himself from different times, but ultimately not quite enough fits in with any other stories! I did like that his former smugness at knowing about the Doctor's habit of regenerating is turned on its head here, and that he and the Doctor's regular companions are convinced that he has done it again…

Don't know who made this awesome gif - let me know if it's yours & I'll credit you!

Later that same year, the Brigadier returned in the utterly indulgent nostalgiafest that was The Five Doctors – in this, we see him at his retirement party (which surely should be BEFORE Mawdryn Undead, so how does he recognise Tegan and the Fifth Doctor, eh? Eh? Unless he wasn't *really* retired the first time around…) and for the most part he is teamed with the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton). Their double act is one of the nicest parts of this story, two aging men having one last adventure together. Most of the characters only got one or two special moments in this packed special episode, but the Brigadier gets lots – a stroll down memory lane, a brief reunion with both Yeti and Cybermen, and especially a moment in which he finally gets the better of the Master!

Then came Battlefield (1989) in the final season of Classic Who, an Arthurian epic with guns and explosions. This story, set in 2005, was a love letter to UNIT past and future. We met the Brigadier's successor: Brigadier Winifred Bambera, a gruff, competent black woman. We also discover that while the Doctor has been gone, UNIT has upgraded their hardware, developing weapons and ammunition specifically tailored to certain alien threats. Now that he can leave the world in good hands, everything was set up for the Brig to meet his death at the hands of a large, explosive demon from another reality… and I believe it was intended that he should do so in this story. But they couldn't bring themselves to do it – so he was picked out of the rubble and sent home to his wife.

The Brigadier had many futures after leaving UNIT: a lonely, broken maths teacher with some strange trauma in his past, a bluff and hearty old soldier glad to make it to his retirement party even if he had to stop by the Dark Tower on Gallifrey on the way, and finally the relaxed, happy husband, pottering in his garden. His private life had only ever been hinted at in the old UNIT days, but we had once heard a tidbit about a weekend in Brighton with a certain lady called Doris – whom we meet, in Battlefield, as his wife and the reason why he has found peace at least.

Since Nicholas Courtney had appeared as another character in William Hartnell's First Doctor era, and had appeared alongside the First Doctor in the Five Doctors, only the Sixth/Colin Baker had not appeared with him. To tick the box of this particular fan desire, they made sure to put the two characters together during Dimensions in Time, a charity special which is generally regarded as the worst thing ever associated with the show.

It is probably for this reason that the first appearance Nicholas Courtney made as the Brigadier in the Big Finish audios was alongside the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn, in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor. He then made an appearance in Minuet in Hell, meeting the Eighth Doctor and Charley. I haven't seen the former but very much enjoyed the latter, particularly the use of amnesia and missed opportunities to keep the Doctor and the Brigadier from recognising each other at first – so that even when he knows the Doctor is about, he gets the wrong man. Once again, your smugness is unfounded, Sir Alastair!

One of the (many!) sad things about Nicholas Courtney's death is that it puts paid to the hope of fans that he might make an appearance in the core series. The Tenth Doctor made a reference to him in UNIT story The Poison Sky, and was told he is now 'Sir Alastair' and that he is stranded in Peru – which makes a change from the old days, when he was always off in 'Geneva' when the actor was unavailable. So the Brig was knighted for his contribution to the British Empire! Good to know.

His recent appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures was not quite what I was hoping for – and yet was lovely. I welled up at seeing him there, all lovely and Brigadier-like, even if he stayed seated at the desk most of the time (NOT very Brigadier-like, but considering he was like 78 at the time, fair enough really). The idea that he and Sarah have stayed in touch and that they still support each other made me very, very happy.

I would kind of like to have seen the Brig deal with Captain Jack, too, but we can't have everything.

I recently dug out an old free audio play I got with Doctor Who Magazine, called The Coup (available here as a free download from Big Finish). It's wonderful. We see the Brigadier, pulled out of that elastic band retirement of his, to make a speech – a particularly important speech, at the end of UNIT as it is finally closed, to be replaced by a new organisation. But the Silurians make an appearance, and the Brigadier is faced once more with the aliens he once blew up rather than trying to understand.

This time around, he makes a different choice.

Anyone who rolled their eyes at the cop out conclusion of the Silurian story in the latest season of New Who, anyone who has nostalgic feelings about UNIT and wants to check out how it ended and began again, and most importantly, anyone who ever loved Nicholas Courtney's portrayal of the Brigadier could do worse than to download that particular play. It's short, it's clever, and I defy you not to have a tear in your eye when he finally makes his speech.

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart (of the clan Stewart!) had many, many epilogues to his character's journey. This rather obscure one is my favourite, and I hope you like it too.

Girls in Spaceships, with a side order of robots please

I've been thinking a lot lately about YA science fiction – and the lack thereof. As YA fantasy took the noughties by storm, a regular refrain I heard was, but what about the science fiction?

It turned up from time to time, of course, and there have been some wildly successful examples: Scott Westerfeld's dystopian Uglies series, Suzanne Collins' the Hunger Games trilogy, and zombie thriller Feed by Mira Grant. Then there have been the steampunls stylings of Westerfeld (again), Richard Harland and Cassandra Clare. Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi have both written books for teens.

But… there just haven't been enough spaceships. To be precise, not enough girls on spaceships. With robots.

Science fiction as a whole has been in a bit of a slump. More specifically, science fiction written by women has been shrinking at a rate of knots – it's still around, but whenever publishers put out less of something, diversity is usually the first thing to suffer. A wave of spaceships and robots in YA could be just what the doctor ordered, sparking off a renaissance in the larger genre similar to what has happened with the development of urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

There's a myth that girls aren't interested in science fiction. It's far more likely that this idea has come about because, in fact, science fiction has not always been that interested in girls. This post about "hard SF now with girl cooties" was very nicely timed, and those books have gone straight on to my To Read list.

Science fiction has been around a really long time. It needs new ideas, new blood and new waves in order to revitalise itself on a regular basis. The thing that still hasn't been done to death, in fact has hardly really got started (yet) is the science fiction for and about teenage girls.

(Sarah Rees Brennan once blogged the brilliant idea of doing a Gossip Girl in Space, and it really stuck with me – why has no one written this yet? Do I have to?)

I think it's coming. I've seen the signs. Not just in manga, and in the popularity of shows like New Doctor Who with female audiences, but in the books that are starting to emerge. I recently read Across the Universe by Beth Revis, a generation ship story which gripped me from its opening chapters, because of the compelling teen characters combined with a crunchy, difficult science fictional setting. It's a great read, with the emotional intensity that makes YA so appealing to the adult (as well as teen) reader, but also raised some really interesting themes that felt fresh because of the way they were being told through the voice and style of modern YA fiction.

Amy, one of the novels protagonists, is cryogenically frozen for a 500 year space voyage to a new planet, along with her parents. They are important military personnel; she is inessential cargo. She is accidentally unfrozen fifty years too soon, and finds herself stuck in the middle of the creepy community aboard the spaceship – the people who are taking the long route to the new planet, generation after generation, their job being to maintain the ship along the way.

Amy's arrival has a powerful effect on Elder. the boy who is designated the next leader of the ship, and he begins to realise how many unpleasant compromises his predecessors have made to keep the community functioning – and how much of his world is a lie.

The book is packed with all manner of interesting ethical questions, many of which do not have easy answers. Then, right when I was beginning to feel like the book had come to an acceptable though not entirely happy ending, it pulled out a sucker punch in the last couple of chapters which made me realise that the slight discomfort I had been feeling about the romance itself, and the nature of unrequited love/unspoken crushes as a trope, was also about to be paid off in spades.

I'm not sure I liked or approved of the ending, if I thought about it too carefully with my feminist hats on (feminism requires more than one hat) but it fitted with the overall theme of the novel which was – sometimes you have to compromise your ideals to survive. The fact that the ending squicked me out a little bit didn't actually ruin the reading experience for me or make me throw the book across the room at all – it made me think. As all the best YA does.

In short, I want more – more combinations of the squishy girl cooties YA emotional relationships, and the science fiction toolbox. I can read a LOT more of these before they come close to catching up to my urban fantasy or mainstream girlfic reading history. So what else is coming? Has anyone heard of upcoming releases in this vein? I know Diana Peterfreund is working on Persuasion-in-space which is super exciting. I know that robots are being heralded as the Next Big Thing in spec fic. It's all very promising, and I'm really hoping that the next couple of years bring me the books I an dying to read.

Robots! Girls in spaceships! Intellect and Romance over Brute Force and Cynicism! BRING IT ON!

A Good Day to be a Gooner (unless you're 6)

I'd got the days mixed up, as often happens when you're in a country half a day ahead of your football team, and didn't realise until I got up this morning that the game was on right now. I could only really keep half an eye on it as I got the girls ready for their day.

It didn't really matter. It's Barca, after all – the best we could hope for was not humiliating ourselves, and getting out of the Champions League nice and early so we could concentrate on that other trophy, the one that maybe, MAYBE this year, we might have a chance at.

I found a feed briefly and saw a rather dull ten minutes of the game before it crapped out on me, so I didn't bother. Twitter kept me informed. Like when they got their first goal…

And then, just as I was leaving for the school run, we got a goal, and a second, in quick succession. Twitter again kept me informed. By the time Raeli was at school, I knew we'd won! It didn't properly sink in until tonight, when I got to watch the whole game, and saw how utterly splendid it all was. The fast footwork, the great hair, the happy hugging boys, the sheer joy of the crowd. The goals. I enjoyed watching it so much. And hooray, we're officially at the point where SBS thinks it's worthwhile to show Arsenal Champions League games live… the second leg will be screened as it's played. Might have to arrange not to be doing the school run that day…

It's the first leg. Chances are very likely that we'll be thoroughly spanked at Camp Nou. But I think we can all live with that. This game was still glorious. I'm so happy for Arshavin, proving himself after a patchy season. I'm a little stunned at how great it is to have a really really good goalkeeper (I had such a soft spot for Almunia but… yeah, time to go, mate). I'm bouncing at getting to see Van Persie, Walcott, Wilshere and Cesc in such great form. And – not going to lie – I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief that no one got broken.

Seriously. Our boys are made of glass. Last time we played this leg against Barca, Cesc accidentally fractured his leg while shooting a penalty. These things happen to us all the time.

This afternoon, Raeli informed me over icecream at the pancake train (on an actual train) that she was thinking of switching allegiance to Chelsea. This is something she regularly says, knowing it will drive me INSANE. She only knows Chelsea exists because it's Daddy's team – a team he chose to follow on the grounds that this would drive me INSANE.

I smiled beatifically at my dearest darling and told her that it was her choice, but I wasn't buying her a Chelsea shirt.

She then suggested she might switch back to being a Gooner Girl when she was seven. I was very restrained in not telling her that until she did, Jem was officially my favourite child.

My Dad (who reads this blog and likes to drop anecdotes from it into conversation when I least expect it, Hi Dad!) tried to get her to change to Manchester United on the grounds that this is the team that everyone should follow. I challenged this assertion by proving he didn't know the names of any of the current players. Even the really famous ones.

Even  godiyeva does better than that, and she only follows Manchester United in order to drive me INSANE! Should it worry me how many of my nearest and dearest deliberately take (or pretend) an interest in football teams other than mine in order to freak me out?

Still, at least it keeps them off the streets.

Good Listening and a Souffle of Links

So school is back! I've been lucky enough to be able to shift most of my workload to, well, now, so that the last several weeks of the summer holiday were all Mummying all the time. Now, of course, I have to go from nought to typing maniac in 60 seconds, and I'm not *entirely* sure I remember how to do it. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here is a delicious mix of tidbits from the internet over the last week or so and some great things I've been listening to while catching up on the housework, supervising trampoline time, and sewing an Alice in Wonderland wallhanging.

Ben Peek wrote a post which completely blindsided me, about an author who embodies perseverance, "the one who to me sucked up the bad times and pushed through them, and the one who should stand as an example for new authors…" The twist is, it's me!

N.K. Jemisin writes about gender assumptions/associations surrounding epic fantasy, and why anything that deviates from the masculine norms of the genre are seen as suspect. There are some brilliant, intelligent comments about gender, romance and the male gaze. Lovely stuff.

Alisa posts about Twelfth Planet Press award eligibilities for the coming awards season. Have you nominated for the stuff you can nominate for yet? Don't forget that all of us who were at Aussiecon can nominate for the Hugos this year. Would be lovely to have some Aussie names on that ballot.



This amazing, powerful post by Juliet Jacques about being a trans woman and a football fan really affected me, to the point where I read through her whole year's worth of columns about transition. I can really recommend these for anyone looking to educate and inform themselves about some of the issues affecting people trying to transition. I found it a real eye opener, and she's an entertaining and funny writer with it. Plus, football fan!

Jim Hines had some pointed things to say about the 'self publishing ebooks is totally the way to make a career sing like a canary' people and the way that 'ebooks are the future' so often gets turned into a bashing of commercial publishers and their methods.

So that's the links done. Now for the listening…

The latest Salon Futura podcast has a great round table discussion about small press publishing featuring our own Alisa Krasnostein (plus Sean Wallace and L. Timmel Duchamp) – those of you mourning the lack of a Galactic Suburbia episode this week (sorry, we'll be back with all guns blazing next week!) may like to check it out. There's also a cool interview with Ann VanderMeer about her editorship of Weird Tales which was great to hear, especially the bit where they both start talking about Peter M Ball and unicorns.

My Big Finish obsession has been continuing apace. I have been relistening to all my Ace and Hex plays, and really enjoying the first two seasons of the 8th Doctor and Lucie Miller, which were designed to fit the tone of New Who a bit more firmly than the monthly series. They're fast paced, funny and character-crunchy 50 minute episodes, with some fantastic casting. The whole first season is great, though the quirky Horror of Glam Rock (featuring Bernard Cribbins before he joined RTD's Who crew) by Paul Magrs is a stand out, as is the exceptional two part finale, Human Resources.

I'm currently on the finale of the second season, which features a return of the Sisterhood of Karn and (quite possibly) Morbius, though I haven't yet heard him with my own ears. The standouts for this season were Max Warp, a quite stunningly outrageous Top Gear parody with spaceships and Graeme Garden, and the comedy-romance-tragedy of The Zygon Who Fell To Earth (featuring Tim Brooke Taylor and Steven Pacey), but I also really loved the creative anachronisms of Dead London and the splendid historical heist story Grand Theft Cosmos. The return of the Headhunter, who is officially my favourite female villain of Doctor Who's history, was a cause for much glee.

Elsewhere, I also discovered the Big Finish Comedy Podcast, which was released fairly recently as a limited series of 5 minute episodes to promote the Mervyn Stone mystery novels by Nev Fountain, which revolve around a script editor of a defunct cult sci-fi show of the late 80′s, who also solves crimes. The podcast is a great introduction to the character and his world, and over the course of about half an hour of bite sized, highly entertaining interviews (the conceit is that this is a DVD extra for "Vixens from the Void") presents and solves the mystery of who killed the actor who played the quirky translator robot Babel J. It's very funny, featuring among other things the note-perfect tones of Nicola Bryant, and absolutely free.

There is more, I expect, but I'm sleepy, and it's school tomorrow!

The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, by Kim Newman

I fell hard in love with The Man From the Diogenes Club, by Kim Newman, some years ago. This collection of short stories was based around the premise that Mycroft Holmes' gentleman's club was a secret society of crimefighters, dealing with bizarre and unclassifiable crimes through history. The original collection centred mostly around the 70′s, and took its inspiration from any number of cult TV shows of the era.

Cat Sparks, a fellow fan of 1970′s cult TV, remembered my adoration and got hold of a copy of the next book in the series for me, from World Fantasy, complete with the author's autograph. Thanks largely to my two year phase of reading little but YA, I failed to read it until now. I'd liked the first one so much that I had got quite paranoid about chancing the follow up. But there's a third now, so time to read the second!

The Secret Files is another selection of mostly previously published stories, featuring members of the Diogenes Club and their associates. The stories cover a wider time period than the first one, starting in Victorian times and making its way forward until the final novelette/novella which is set in the 70′s once more. I enjoyed the first four stories the best, as they led quite neatly into each other, and I could see the relationship between them, even as the protagonists shifted around. After a few I was less keen on, Newman brought it all together with a written-for-this-collection piece which hit all the beats I had been hoping for, and tied up many characters and loose ends. I had been floundering a little in the last few stories, trying to grasp the point of it all, and the final story really gave me what I wanted, a satisfying conclusion that made it feel like a true and complete story suite rather than just a bunch of stories loosely connected by their central concept.

In "The Gypsies in the Wood," the first story in the collection and my favourite of the bunch, a family is devastated by two recently missing children, and bemused when an adult man emerges from the forest, claiming to be the little boy lost. As Charles Beauregard investigates, the lost daughter is also recovered – only, there's something very wrong about her. I loved this take on the changeling myth, which benefits from being told over several acts, following up the future of a family made up of a man who escaped the fairies, and his creepy sociopathic changeling sister. The story references all manner of historical pop culture, from the illustrations of Arthur Rackham to the career and life of Walt Disney, with all manner of real historical details jumbled up with amusing fictions.

"Richard Riddle, Boy Detective," and "Angel Down, Sussex," both follow up the story beyond "The Gypsies in the Wood," showing the further adventures of several characters, and introducing new ones.

Another brilliant piece was "Clubland Heroes," set in 1919, a murder mystery which delves into the world of the Splendid Six, very British superheroes which feel as if they have leaped out of the pages of a Boy's Own Magazine of the period.

Far more than the first volume, this one sets up the Diogenes Club as a secret history, and what a history it is! I especially enjoyed the characters of Kate Reed, Daredevil Victorian Lady Reporter, in "The Gypsies in the Wood," and Catriona Kaye, freelance agent, in "Angel Down, Sussex" and "Clubland Heroes." The entire concept, of Avengers style mystery/fantasy investigations throughout British History, is a fascinating one with all manner of possibilities, and I look forward to seeing how it's followed up again in the third volume. Newman's writing is elegant and funny, and he is excellent at hooking in the reader with a strong character's perspective, which is my favourite kind of short story.

Completely worth the wait!

(and now I totally want to go and rewatch a bunch of old Avengers episodes)

Ask Not What Your Library Can Do For You…

I've been watching with a sickening feeling the fight to keep Britain's libraries intact as the conservative government hacks and slashes their funding. It's just awful. And maybe ours in Australia aren't under current threat, but who's to say that next time the Liberals get in we won't be in the same situation?

Libraries are so important, and those of us lucky enough to live in countries that have a thriving library system need to remember that.

Tasmania has a fantastic crop of state libraries, all linked by computer so you can order a book from their wider catalogue and have it sent to your local library. I use this service a lot, as I don't have the leisure to browse shelves with two children – I discovered last week that my now-walking-with-confidence toddler Jem is a right library rampager, and was shocked to be overwhelmed with the memory of chasing Raeli around the same aisles, something I had completely forgotten.

So yes, I order books or CDs I want, and pick them up when they come in.

Both my girls love the local library. It was one of my regular haunts with Raeli when she was tiny – we often went to the Rock n Rhyme baby sessions together, and she had her own library card from the time she was six weeks old. Okay yes, I often take my own stuff out on her fee-free card, I'm only human!

Last week I discovered to my disappointment that we had missed the fortnight of cool school holiday activities they had been running, so as consolation to Raeli, we took Jem along to Rock N Rhyme, which is much the same as it was when Raeli was little. She was delighted to recognise many songs from Play School, and enjoyed clapping or singing along with her baby sister. Jem was mostly well behaved, though she did blow raspberries entirely through one of the stories.

I often use the library for research, pulling up non fiction titles by the half dozen, often for books I only dip into, and would never need again. I have also raided their great YA, manga and murder mystery sections. I'm always a little surprised (though I shouldn't be!) at how up to date they are – my current obsession with Doctor Who audio plays has found several there, to supplement my buying from Big Finish. I don't feel guilty about listening to the ones I get from the library – they're obviously buying the CDs regularly, which is yay for supporting audio play producers. I listened to my first Charley & C'Rizz and Ace & Hex plays through the local library, which means it is directly responsible for several hundred dollars making their way from my account to the pockets of the Big Finish crew. Totally worth it.

Oh and I just discovered that we now can download audio books and ebooks directly from the State Library website. Eeeee. When Kaia told me she got ebooks from her library in Sweden, it sounded like heaven and the future rolled into one.

Raeli has her own school library now, so this recent visit was the first we had made together in ages, and certainly the first since Jem was able to walk (and run, and hide, the minx). Usually when I go these days it's on the rare occasions that I am able to leave the kids at home and escape somewhere with my laptop for a couple of hours. Nice flat tables. Nice mostly quiet atmosphere. Nice earbuds. Bliss.

Our local library is always full of people. The computer banks are probably a big reason for that – anyone who says the internet has rendered libraries redundant is speaking from a position of extreme privilege. Not everyone can afford the high prices Australians are charged for the internet, or for a decent computer. Jobseekers, teenagers and the elderly all congregate around the online centre that is attached to our library. But there are many other people too – young parents by the bucketload (okay, the kids and the books are by the bucketload) because where else can you go that's free and undercover, to entertain your children and get yourself out of the house?

Where I live, in Kingston Tasmania, we have lots of suburb and lots of shop and due to an extreme mismanagement of urban planning, no parks or playground areas that are in any way central. This was a particularly big deal when Raeli was little and I didn't drive. Now I can whisk her and Jem off to one of the further-out parks, but back then the library was one of the main places I took Raeli because I could get there by foot.

Also, you don't get sunburnt in a library. Just saying.

There are lots of reasons why I regularly fall out of the habit of using my library. I don't like to be pressured when I read, and sometimes that 3 week limit just tick-tick-ticks away at my subconscious. It's understandable – I often buy books only to have them "cook" on my to read shelf for months or years. Books with a use-by-date stress me out. Then there's the severe embarrassment of having to go to the counter and admit that the toothmarks in that brand new board book actually belong to your child.

Then there's the fact that my eldest daughter discovered Barbie movies through the local library. Barbie movies. It's not all sunshine and free books. Sometimes kids develop their own reading habits in these places. Anarchy, I tell you. Anarchy!

But that seductive wench of a library always lures me back, with its convenient position, and the catalogue that is somewhere for my fingers to travel to when I'm in a MUST-ACQUIRE-BOOKS phase but Fishpond & Book Depository have already had too much money off me that month.

We recently went down to visit my Mum in the arty village of Cygnet, for lunch and shopping. She dropped in to her local library, which was closed when we first went past, because it's so small that only one person staffs it a time, and they had gone to lunch. But when we got in it was warm and inviting, and while her library doesn't have the same bells and whistles like ours, it had a kiddie table that Raeli was immediately drawn to, and my Mum is also able to order any book from the State Library catalogue and have it delivered almost to her doorstep.

Libraries, in short, are awesome. (did I mention that mine is still displaying a poster of Power and Majesty, seven months after I gave it to them?) When I haven't been for a while, I forget how awesome they are. But if anyone tried to take mine away, I would be devastated, and angry, and I would fight tooth and nail to keep it. Via the Guardian (which is where I nabbed these great poster images), I've been following the stories about various closures and protests, and how the very idea of the library is changing from something that is council/government funded and provides an actual career path for people, to something that is run by volunteers. It's sad, and it's scary, and I hope it's something that never happens here.

But just in case it does, it doesn't hurt to remind yourself that if you have a library nearby, there are plenty of resources you could probably use, and using those resources is important. It's not just something you have to do in the weeks when you're a bit broke and don't feel like hitting up Amazon. Libraries are necessary, and if we don't use them, we could lose them forever.

What's your local library like?