I’ve got a piece about the new television in today’s issue of the Australian Literary Review. The full text of the article is available online, as is Michael Wood’s excellent piece about Roberto Bolano’s 2666, but print copies are available free with today’s Australian, and are well worth picking up, not least because only a small portion of the issue is reproduced online.
The idiot box grows a brain | The Australian.
Break text
’Martian Triptych'
Appears in Jack Dann's Dreaming in the Dark and Best Australian Stories 2016
’The Changeling'
Appears in Jonathan Strahan's Fearsome Magics. Compare prices for the UK print edition and US print edition; also available for Kindle (US and UK) and most other ebook formats.
Beauty's Sister
(compare hard copy prices on Booko; also available in the UK for Kindle, and in Australia for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo)
Into the Deep: Diving into Time and Tide
The Library at the End of the World
Could bringing Neanderthals back to life save the environment?
Terror, hope, anger, kindness: the complexity of life as we face the new normal
Unearthed: Last Days in the Anthropocene
The End of the Oceans
A Family of Disguises: Michael Ondaatje's Warlight
The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide
(available in the UK for Kindle, and in Australia for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo)
Work in Progress: On Writing The Resurrectionist
Slippery Migrants: what eels do when we're not watching
Sunburnt Country review: Joelle Gergis on a fraught future with climate change
Maybe I'm Amazed: A New Appreciation for Paul McCartney
Made Things: Jeff Vandermeer's Borne
Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene
James Nestor’s Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves
The Beginning is Nigh: Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Encounters With The Uncanny: On Ghosts, Ghost Stories and Brain Science
Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
Lev Grossman's The Magician King
Susan Casey's The Wave: In Pursuit of the Ocean's Greatest Furies
Ian McDonald's The Dervish House
Summer and the Myths of Australianness
William Gibson's Zero History, Spook Country, Pattern Recognition and Distrust That Particular Flavor
Bloody beauties: the rise and rise of vampire lit
Never real and always true: on depression and creativity
The idiot box grows a brain: the rise of the new television
Perfect worlds, in miniature: stories by Annie Proulx, Robert Drewe, Michael Chabon and Anne Enright
Stealing memory's thunder: James Frey and the rise of the fake memoir
city of tongues
An excellent piece in the ALR today, with a nice summary of the economic influence on development of the ‘new’ TV. The introduction of various electronic and information technologies made this possible, but that is another chapter.
Anyways, I did thinks to myself how local network TV has HBOd itself (a little) if one contemplates the recent screening of Underbelly.
I think there is a healthy appetite for the grand, layered social novel through TV ( a la the Wire) because it suits the times. The Wire is a prologue for the stories of the busted towns of the world, which have recently quadrupled in number.
Thanks for that. And yes, Underbelly is a show that owes a lot to HBO shows such as The Sopranos, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily a sign that Australian networks are changing their ways. The sheer volume of advertising Channel 9 ran during it seems to me to be an extension of their more general contempt for viewers. Whether they’ve realized it or not, Australia’s free-to-air networks are living on borrowed time – until they stop messing viewers around by programming as they see fit, holding back shows from overseas and just generally stuffing viewers around they’ll continue to lose viewers to DVD, download and pay tv, as well as just losing younger viewers who don’t have the patience to put up with having content delivered t the whim of a network, rather than on demand.
But enough ranting – thanks for the kind words.