George Turner – Graham Clements

10 Aussie Books To Read Before You Die.

Graham Clements — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 03:50:00 +0000

Last night I watched a recording of the first Tuesday Night Book Club’s “10
Aussie Books to Read Before you Die.” For much of this year the show’s
website asked people to select their choice from a list of 50 Australian authored
books.

I voted a while back and I can’t remember if I went
for The
Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, The True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey or Capricornia by Xavier Herbert. At the time I had read nine of
the books on the list, I have since read one more.

After the
program had listed ten to five, I was thinking how well read I am, as I had
read three of the six books (The Secret River, The Slap and The
Power of One). I was very hopeful that The True History of the Kelly
Gang would be number one. But I had forgotten about Cloudstreet
by Tim Winton which consistently wins polls for favourite Aussie novel.

The ten
books people selected were:

1. Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

2. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

3. A Fortunate Life – A.B. Facey

4. The Harp in the South – Ruth Park

5. The Power of One – Bryce Courtenay

6. Jasper Jones – Craig Silvey

7. The Magic Pudding – Norman Lindsay

8. The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

9. The Secret River – Kate Grenville

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay

I had
never heard of The Book Thief or Jasper Jones. I plan to one day read Cloudstreet and The Harp in the South.

My Ten Aussie Books.

If they
opened the list up to all Australian authored books then my list of the ten Aussie
books people should read before they die would look like this:

1. The Sea and Summer – George Turner

2. The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

3. Capricornia – Xavier Herbert

4. The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes

5. The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

6. Power Without Glory – Frank Hardy

7. Genetic Soldier – George Turner

8. Blood – Tony Birch

9. Things We Didn’t See Coming – Steve Amsterdam

10. The Waterboys – Peter Docker.

My list
is of books that I think say something about Australia and what is to be an
Australian, unlike a few of the books in the First Tuesday list. My selections cover
our past, present and future, whereas the future is not touched in the First
Tuesday list. My list would be different if I was just selecting my favourite
Aussie Books.

About a
third of the books I read are written by Australians. I worry that a lot of
Australian writers and wannabe authors appear not to read Australian authored
books and somehow find more relevance in books written overseas.

Review of George Turner’s A Pursuit of Miracles

Graham Clements — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:51:00 +0000

A Pursuit of Miracles is a
fabulously entertaining and thought provoking collection of science fiction short
stories. It maintains the exceptionally high standards of George Turner’s many
novels. Turner is arguably Australia’s best ever science fiction writer and
this collection shows why.

There are only eight stories in the collections 207 pages,
so they are mostly long stories. All but one of Turner’s nine published short
stories are in the collection. Turner preferred to write novels. Indeed, at
least two of the stories in this collection were later turned into novels.

Turner was obviously a proud Australian as most of the
stories are set in a future Australia. He seemed to be fascinated with
telepathy which is the main theme, or in the background, of a number of the
stories. Turner also seemed very much concerned with humanity’s destruction of
the environment. The collection was published in 1990 and the stories have not
dated.

The collection begins with the title story A
Pursuit of Miracles. It’s a story that snuck on me as I wondered about
the emotional intelligence of the scientists involved. It is set in a world
were very few animals live. In a research lab, scientists are attempting to see
if the animals that remain can be controlled by telepathy. But one of the
co-workers, a damaged clone, shows that empathy with animals would have been a much
better option to explore.

The second story, Not in Front of the Children, is a
story about arrogance and ignorance. A privileged teenage girl, who lives in a
world were aging has been slowed, rebels against her parents as she tries to
discover what death is.

Feedback is
a rather strange story, with a very unexpected and weird ending. A hypnotist
and a telepath are brought together by a rich pastoralist on an outback
property. The pastoralist believes that together they might be able to enter
his mind and go back to the beginning of creation. This experiment is watched
over by a solipsistic cultist who believes that the universe is his own imagined
creation.

Shut
the Door When You Go Out later became the brilliant
novel Genetic Soldier. It is one of the shorter pieces in the
collection and is set thousands of years into the future. Most of humanity had
deserted Earth, leaving it to its former indigenous tribes. A ship returns, its
crew wanting to resettle what used to be Australia. But this time, the
genetically altered Aborigines, object to be colonised.

In On the Nursery Floor a reporter
tries to find out what happened at a laboratory years earlier. The laboratory was used to genetic engineer
super intelligent children, who escaped. The reporter tries to track them down.

In
the Petri Dish Upstairs an orbiting community sends the
“perfect” man down to earth to marry a rich heiress. He takes her back to his
community’s huge space station that collects solar power and transmits it to an
earth they no longer feel part of and are sick of being subservient too.

The collection finishes with The Fittest, which is the
best story of the collection. It is set in a Melbourne slowly being inundated
by the sea. Society is split into the Sweet, the 10% of people who have jobs,
and the Swill, the 90% who survive on government handouts.The story revolves around a sweet family whose father loses his job, forcing them to move to
the swill’s slums. But one child is
brilliant with numbers, a talent that makes him valuable to those who don’t
want to leave records on computers. The
Fittest later became The Sea and Summer, which is the
best Australian science fiction novel I have read. It was nominated for a
Nebula Award and won that years Arthur C. Clarke award.

A
Pursuit of Miracles is an extremely strong collection that would
appeal to most readers of science fiction. If you are an Australian science
fiction reader, you simply have to read it and discover how good Australian
science fiction can be.

Fifty Shade of Bad Writing. George Turner’s Books to be Reissued.

Graham Clements — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 04:33:00 +0000

Fifty
Shades of Bad Writing.

Seems everywhere I look someone has written an article
about the mega-selling, publishing-game-changing, super- duper, must-read-before-you
die (or at least dis) Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James.

As a result, I am sure publishers are looking forward to
reading thousands of manuscripts full of badly written bondage scenes. Publisher’s
assistants will all be rushing home to watch porn on the web to get sex
back into some sort of normal perspective. But then again, the flood of bad
erotica might make up for those manuscripts full of teenagers in love with
vampires who refuse to give out.

Many of the articles I have read about Fifty
Shades of Grey have been about how badly written it is. An article I read in the Age today about
its awfully written sex scenes made me laugh, especially its imagined ocker
sex scene.

There was even an article about the book in today’s Chronicle, the local newspaper. Fifty
Shades has been selling very well locally. With one farmer reportedly buying it
because he wanted to see what all the hype was about (very sad). An elderly
woman who returned it to the library said it was just porn and rubbish – WTF did
she expect?

I have also read a few reviews on Goodreads and other
sites of Fifty Shades that have said it is badly written. But this badly
written book is allegedly making the author 1.36 million a week. There seems to
be one supposedly well hung ram leading a huge flock of erotically hopeful ewes.

George
Turner’s Books to be Reissued.

In my last post I mentioned having just read A Pursuit
of Miracles, by George Turner. Bruce Richard Gillespie
commented on that post on facebook saying he had control over the books of
George Turner. He said that there are plans for Gollancz to bring out a new
version of Turner’s The Sea and Summer, so you will all have the chance to go out
and buy the best Australian science fiction novel ever written.

Bruce also said he was trying to get Turner’s other
novels out as ebooks, which I would very much welcome as I am still to obtain copies
of Beloved Son, Transit of Cassidy, Vaneglory, Yesterday’s Men, and Down There in Darkness.

If you want to read some of the many articles
Turner wrote on writing and science fiction, issue 76 of SF Commentary,
edited by Bruce Gillespie, has 100,000 words devoted to the writing of George
Turner.

Turned started off writing non-genre
mainstream novels in the late 1950’s. He won a Miles Franklin award in 1962 for
The Cupboard Under the
Stairs. The
Lame Dog Man won the Commonwealth Literary Fund Award in
1967. Turner quit writing after five mainstream novels because there wasn’t any
money in it.

I have read that he was asked to review science fiction
for a magazine. Which he did. He thought that he could write better science
fiction than what he was reviewing. Which he went on and did. The above
mentioned The Sea and Summer was nominated for the Nebula Award and won
the Arthur C. Clarke Award in1988.