So, remember that thing where Mark Oshiro and I are co-editing the Speculative Fiction 2015 anthology? The fabulous cover and even more fabulous TOC are here! Feast your eyes on the magnificence!
And here’s the TOC:
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SpecFic’ 15 will be released in the summer and all profits from sales will be donated to Room to Read. We really hope you enjoy it!
Last night, I went with my husband to see the final Harry Potter film. It was good fun – we both choked up a little at various points – and a satisfying conclusion to a narrative which has saturated the popcultural zeitgeist from June 1997 to July 2011. Doubtless, the influence of and significance of the series will continue for many more years to come, but right now, I can’t help but cast an eye back on the past fourteen years and remember what the series has meant to me.
When Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone first hit the shelves in 1997, I was eleven years old – the same age as the protagonist, and, like him, just starting high school. I wish I could say I was quick off the mark, a devotee of the series from minute one, but in fact, as was doubtless the case for millions of other people, it wasn’t until the 1999 release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that I started to catch on. Which isn’t to say that I’d never heard of the series before then; even though I was unaware of their popularity, the first two books were so omnipresent that I couldn’t help but notice them. Stopping off at a grimy, tin-shack service station on the way back from a horse-riding lesson at the age of about twelve, I remember seeing the first book displayed prominently on a cardboard rack. My interest was piqued by the cover art, blurb and premise, but the location didn’t inspire confidence. Prior to that day, I’d never a book I’d want to read – or even, possibly, any book at all – on sale in a service station. Though I’d seen it proffered elsewhere, part of me wondered: what sort of book gets sold in a place like this? Unable to think of an answer, I let it be.
But in 1999, aged thirteen, Azkaban hooked me, and for a ludicrously cosmetic reason: the cover. Or, to be more specific, the hippogriff on the cover. A mythology nerd since primary school, fantastic creatures were both a favourite obsession and a specialty area of knowledge. Unicorns and dragons, though tempting, were common – but a hippogriff? Beyond the pages of my reference books, I’d never seen one drawn before; certainly, I’d never seen them fictionalised. Throw in the fact that the book was a hardcover with a celloglazed dust jacket (I was, and always will be, a sucker for celloglaze) and on sale at a discount, and you had a match made in heaven. I didn’t even care that it was book three of a series – a fact which would paralyze me now, but which mattered much less then, despite the fact that I never got more than three chapters through any out-of-ordered read before lack of comprehension prompted me to abandon it. By all rights, I should have given up quickly, no matter how many hippogriffs there were.
Instead, I read the whole thing in an afternoon, pestered my parents for the first two volumes the rest of that week, and then, when they finally acquiesced the following weekend, I went back and read the whole story – including Azkaban – in a single, day-long session. From then on, I was hooked. When Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire finally came out in 2000, I bought it on the release day. I was fourteen years old, and my friend Smott – a fellow geekling, responsible in her adult incarnation for my Solace & Grief character art – was visiting for a week. We each bought a copy of the book and read it together the same day: Smott in a nest of blankets on the floor of my room, and me on my bed in the corner. I was slightly quicker, though; just as I’d reached the climatic graveyard scene, Smott exclaimed over some earlier moment, to which I snappishly replied:
‘Quiet! Harry’s fighting Voldemort!’
‘Of course he is,’ Smott said placidly, and the two of us kept reading.
It was three more years before the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – a longer gap than ever before, filled with fearful suggestions that J.K. Rowling had writer’s block. By the time of its release in June 2003, I was deep in my final year of high school, grappling with exam stress, depression and the perils of being seventeen. When the Weasley twins abandoned Hogwarts, I shouted and cheered them with all the fervour of every student-reader who could only ever dream of doing likewise. Another two years passed, and by July 2005, when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out, I was nearing the end of my second year at Sydney University. This time, though, I had a different reading buddy. Sometime late the previous year, my then-boyfriend-Sean’s housemate – a shy philosophy student by the name of Toby – had expressed a belief that the Potter books weren’t all they were cracked up to be. The two of us were lounging around in the dim-and-dusty Coogee flat he shared with Sean, who was presently elsewhere. I asked if he’d read any of them; Toby said no, to which I replied that I would respect his opinion if he tried the series. Toby accepted my challenge. Rather than dislike the books, however, he soon became as fond of them as I was. After moving in to a new place in 2005, not only did he take to checking the Leaky Cauldron website for updates on Prince, he even turned his mother into a fan, too. Busy with work on his Masters thesis and coping with family health problems, it took Toby longer to read the sixth book than I did, but once he had, we wasted no time in swapping theories about RAB and where the final installment was headed.
By the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July 2007, Toby and I were engaged and living in Melbourne, with just two months left before our wedding. We each bought a copy from the local bookstore and read it together that same weekend. Since then, we’ve watched all the films together, whether at the cinema or on DVD. And last night, we rounded things out with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, just one day after we returned from a trip to France to our new home in St Andrews, Scotland.
1997 – 2011. Fourteen years is a long time – long enough for a girl to grow up, change schools, fall in and out of various jobs, get married, become a published author and move continents. It wasn’t Harry Potter that brought Toby and I together, but it certainly helped, and we’ve shared those stories ever since. Come September, we’ll be celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary – and wouldn’t you know it? The appropriate gift is books.
Thanks, J. K. Rowling. For everything.
It’s still in rough at this point, but for those of you who are interested, behold: The Key to Starveldt!
(Apologies for the tiny graphic – the other images I have are all Adobe PDFs, and I can’t figure out how to make them into JPEGs for ease of use.)
As I type this, the edited pages for TKTS are sitting just to my left, and I am anticipating that a fully updated manuscript will be sent back to Ford Street – who now have a shiny new website – by the end of this weekend. I can’t give you a concrete release date yet, but right now, it’s looking to be sometime in August/September 2011. Apart from all the work involved in sending final edits back and forth, printing the actual books and organising promotions, the fact that I now live in Scotland means that physically getting myself to the launch has become a much more involved process than it was for Solace & Grief. However, while it would be nice to be on hand when the book hits shelves, I understand that certain of you are keen to see what’s been happening to Solace, Sharpsoft and the rest, so regardless of what happens with my travel plans, I’ll do my best to ensure the book comes out as soon as it reasonably can.
*blaring of trumpets*
Dear Mr Rudd,
Since your triumphant ascention to the Prime Ministership, there seems have been some confusion about who, exactly, was elected. It’s true that I (and others of like mind) voted for the Labor Party under your erstwhile helmsmanship; but that does not mean, Mr Rudd, that we voted for you. You were merely the vehicle with which we ousted the long-loathed Howard. This is not to say we don’t appreciate your governance, or rather, the governance of your party. We do. We are really ecstatic at the prospect of a Labor federal government. But the honeymoon has ended, Mr Rudd – as, indeed, was inevitable – and the time has come for straight talkin’.
Let me be frank. We don’t like Kevin the Man. He is not who we voted for. He might share flesh with our PM, but as far as we’re concerned, he’s a totally different entity. We are interested in his opinions only insofar as they mirror those of Kevin the Prime Minister. We are extremely uninterested – not to say unimpressed – with any effort to make Kevin the Man a spokesman for our nation. Kevin the Man is entitled to his opinions, just like any other citizen. But he is not entitled to lend them Prime Ministerial authority.
Which brings me, Mr Rudd, to the subject of Olympia Papapetrou.
When you tell an 11-year-old girl that her naked self constitutes an abusive image, it is you – not the photographer and not her subject – who has brought abuse to the party. Consider her portrait as a Rorschach test for your psyche. Where it is possible to see beauty, innocence, fragility, youth, childhood, art, you see only naked sexuality, adult, abusive and paedophelic. This says nothing about Olympia Papapetrou, Mr Rudd, but considerably more about you. Personal opinions aside, you did not become Prime Minister through an inability to compromise, act tactfully or otherwise shut up on cue. Such evasions are your meat and drink, Mr Rudd, just as they are for all effective politicans: and you are very effective. Shaming Olympia Papapetrou was not your only option, because whatever morality is professed by Kevin the Man, Kevin the Prime Minister holds right of veto – or should, when it comes to public speaking.
Here is a photo a mother took of her child. Here is a photo that child loves – cherishes as an image of herself. If it comes to hold a taint for her, that taint is your doing, Mr Rudd. Because in your capacity as Prime Minister of Australia – which capacity you are in whenever the cameras are rolling – you told an eleven-year-old girl that her naked body is ugly, wrong, and a symbol for the most depraved act that could ever be perpetrated against it.
Child protection advocates seem curiously uninterested in Olympia’s right to defend her portrait, and for no better reason than her age. In another five or seven years, if she still loves the photo, will they listen then? Perhaps such advocates are, ultimately, used to speaking for children, not to them. There is condescention in the view that children cannot think for themselves, which assumption children’s rights advocates have spent the better part of a century trying to correct. To then turn around and claim the exact opposite – that Olympia cannot know her own mind, and is utterly unentitled to enjoy a photograph of herself, or to comment intelligently on it, because of her age – is deeply, insultingly hypocrtical.
Mr Rudd, the office of Prime Minister means more than a right to be heard or to make political judgements: it means the responsibility to do so with intelligence, forethought and a measure of objectivity. We ordinary citizens may complain on blogs or at the pub, in the street or to friends with more freedom than you now possess: because we are ordinary. When you stepped into the top job, you did so at the expense of your right to free and public opinion, because although the Prime Minister is a person, their office is not. Australia cannot speak with the voice of Kevin the Man, but only with that of Kevin the Prime Minister, his government and their people.
In that sense, Olympia Papapetrou – naked or clothed and regardless of age – has more entitlement to her public opinion than you. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, Mr Rudd. And you are neither.
Sincerely,
Foz
shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows 