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Posts from the ‘Writing’ Category

Apr 3

Deep Water publication day!

Today marks the Australian publication of my new book, Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. It’s a really special moment for me: I first began thinking about it more than 20 years ago, and the process of writing it has consumed most of the past two or three years of my life.

It’s a big book in every way: it stretches from the Big Bang to the destruction of the Earth several billion years from now, and the darkness of the ocean’s depths to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and traces the ways the ocean has shaped not just the planet but human life and society, as well as delving into the wonders of the other minds and presences that fill its waters. I’m incredibly proud of it, and I hope all kinds of people will find something in it.

You can get copies now anywhere good books are sold or online in Australia and the UK, and preorder copies in the US, where it will be out in July.

My thanks to everybody who helped along the way – scientists and other experts who took the time to speak to me, the friends who read drafts and listened to me talk obsessively about it, the Copyright Agency for making me their Non-Fiction Fellow for 2020, my agent and everybody at Penguin Australia, Scribe UK and Harper One, and in particular my partner and family who made it possible for me to write it. It wouldn’t exist without any of you, and I’m so, so grateful for your support.

Apr 28

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Ghost Species publication day!

My new novel, Ghost Species, is published today in Australia. New books are always exciting, but this one is especially so, because it’s a book I’m really proud of. Set in Tasmania in the very near future, it centres on a secret project to resurrect Neanderthals, and it’s about extinction and de-extinction, loss and love, climate catastrophe and collapse. I think – I hope – some of the ideas in it will resonate, especially at present.

If you’d like to know more, you can check out I’ve written a piece for The Guardian about some of the questions and ideas that inspired the book, and if you’d like to hear a little bit of it, you can see me reading the first few pages as part of Read Tasmania’s Lockdown Reading Group below.

If you’re in Australia you can get copies from any good bricks and mortar bookshop, or check prices online. You can also get it from all major ebook vendors. If you’re outside Australia Book Depository should have copies available. I also highly recommend the audiobook, read by Rupert Degas, which is absolutely fantastic.

My thanks to everybody who helped this book become a reality. I hope you all enjoy it.

Dec 8

2018: Looking back, looking forward

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Replica of Neanderthal Skull in St. Michaels Cave, Gibraltar, CC 2012, Bjorn.

I’m planning to do a round-up of my favourite books of the past year later in the week, but before I do I thought I might just pull together a list of a few things of my own over the past twelve months.

The most significant, obviously, was the publication of The Buried Ark in June. The second part of my Change Trilogy, it picks up immediately after the events at the end of the first book in the series, The Silent Invasion, which was published in 2017.

Because of the way it begins, it’s a little difficult to talk too much about it without spoiling the first book, but I’m really proud of it, not least because I think it manages to avoid the second book sag that afflicts so many trilogies. It’s also had some fantastic responses from readers and great reviews from people such as Ian Mond in Locus and Cameron Woodhead in the Fairfax papers.

The latest issue of Island, No 155, which was published just last week, also includes a story of mine, ‘High Country’. It’s available by subscription or in good bookstores.

I also published quite a bit of non-fiction, perhaps most notably my Walkley-nominated, ‘The End of the Oceans’, which was in the August issue of The Monthly, and ‘An Ocean and an Instant’, a long and very personal essay about Adelaide, extinction and the death of my father for Sydney Review of Books’ New Nature series. These were complemented by‘A Family of Disguises’, a long review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight.

In addition to these longer pieces I did a lot of reviewing. Some of the highlights of that include Joy McCann’s wonderful history of the Southern Ocean, Wild Sea, climate scientist Joelle Gergis’ excellent Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia, Ryan O’Neill’s wildly entertaining and incredibly inventive Their Brilliant Careers, Christopher Priest’s deeply strange An American Story, Jock Serong’s terrific historical thriller, Preservation, and Micheline Jenner’s The Secret Life of Whales Eelco Rohling’s The Oceans: A Deep History and Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World. And although it wasn’t reviewing exactly, I was lucky enough to be asked to write about Sydney’s inner west for a wonderful feature about Sydney in summer for the Herald.

Mostly though, I’ve been working on a series of projects that won’t see the light of day for some time. The first is the final book of The Change Trilogy, A Vastness of Stars, which will be published late next year. It’s the most ambitious, the most cosmic and the most challenging of the three, but I’m really excited about it.

The second is my new novel, Ghost Species, which will be published by Penguin Random House in March 2020. I’ll talk about it some more a bit closer to the time, but it’s about time and loss and extinction and de-extinction, and I think it’s strange and beautiful and very timely, so I’m very much looking forward to people reading it.

Nov 5

November update

I’m deep in the middle of two books, so not here all that often, but just a few quick updates.

The first is the wonderful news that my essay, ‘The End of the Oceans’, which was published in The Monthly in August, has been nominated for the Walkley Award for Feature Writing (Long). I’m thrilled for all the obvious reasons, but I’m also delighted because it’s a subject of the utmost importance that I care about very deeply. If you enjoy it please share it.

I’ve also had several other pieces of non-fiction published over the past few months. The most significant was ‘An Ocean and an Instant’, a long essay about Adelaide, extinction and the death of my father for Sydney Review of Books’ New Nature series. It’s a very personal piece and was extremely difficult to write, but I hope people find something in it.

Also in Sydney Review of Books I have ‘A Family of Disguises’, a long review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, in The Australian (and staying with the oceanic theme), a review of Joy McCann’s terrific new history of the Southern Ocean, Wild Sea (possible $$$). And finally, I’ve recently uploaded a long review of the imaginary history of Australia Rodney Hall mapped out in the Yandilli Trilogy, The Island in the Mind and The Day We Had Hitler Home. It’s a few years old now, but they’re marvellous books, and it would be wonderful if they found new readers.

 

Jun 21

Winter Solstice

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By Heiser [CC BY-SA], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Today is the shortest day of the year here in Sydney, and the longest in the northern hemisphere. So I thought I’d celebrate with ‘Solstice’, the first chapter of Clade:

As Adam steps outside the cold strikes him like a physical thing, the shock still startling after all these weeks. For a moment he pauses, looking out across the bay, the crowding floes of ice. Then, adjusting his goggles, he descends the short ramp to the scoured stone upon which the building stands and strikes out towards the headland.

It is quiet out here today, the only sounds that disturb the silence those of the wind, the occasional squalling cry of the birds. Down by the water an elephant seal lies on the rocks, its vast bulk mottled and sluglike; around it tracks of human activity scar the snow like rust, turning it grey and red and dirty.

In the building behind him the other personnel are celebrating the solstice, an occurrence those stationed here have long observed with an extended meal and drinking and dancing. The event is a way of marking not just the date but the peculiar rhythms of life at the base, the annual cycle which means that from here on the arrivals will slow and departures increase, until only the skeleton crew who maintain the facility through the months of cold and darkness remain.

Passing the Klein-blue boxes of the power distribution units he finds himself wondering again about this tradition. Humans have observed the solstice for tens of thousands of years, but are those festivities truly celebrations, or something more ambivalent? Symbols of loss, of the running down of things? After all, the solstice also marks the beginning of summer’s end, the first intimation of the year’s long retreat back into the dark. 

Beyond the last building the land opens out, the dirty grey of rock and mud and melting snow giving way to the white glare of ice. The wind is stronger here, and even colder, but he does not slow or turn aside; instead, closing his hand around the phone in his pocket, he shrugs his neck deeper into his collar and quickens his step. Read more (or just go crazy and buy it already)

Jun 13

On writing and not writing: depression, creation and fiction

Resurrectionist coverAbout fifteen years ago, when I was working The Resurrectionist, Ivor Indyk from Giramondo Publishing approached me and asked me whether I’d be interested in writing a piece about my work in progress for Heat. Although the book was slowly moving toward completion it had been an incredibly difficult process, both emotionally and creatively, and at first I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to open up about how hard it had been. Eventually I decided I would, but in the process I found myself having to think about a whole series of questions about the way I worked, what I thought fiction did, and the ways in which my experiences with depression had shaped both the book and my life and work more generally.

I hadn’t thought about the piece for a long time, but recently I found myself going back to it after somebody asked me whether I’d ever written about process. Reading it again was surprisingly difficult – many of the feelings and experiences it discusses are ones I have no desire to revisit. But simultaneously I was struck by how little had changed, especially in regard to the mysteriousness of the actual process of writing:

“Novels – or at least the ones I am able to write – always seem to me to be curiously fragmentary things, at once prismatic and elusive. These pieces, these fragments, are part of a pattern, and they take their meaning from the whole, even as they reflect the whole within themselves. Finding these pieces, fitting them together, is not so much an act of creation as one of uncovering, of giving voice to something that is already there. This thing, the unwritten book, is like a potential, and to find it you need to learn to give way to the lines of force within it, the invisible tensions and attractors which give it its shape.”

I’ve now uploaded the piece. Although I don’t discuss it explicitly a lot of the piece is about depression, a subject I explored more fully in my essay ‘Never Real and Always True’. And if you’d like to read more by me about how I write, I recommend Charlotte Wood’s fantastic collection of interviews with writers, The Writer’s Room, or my interview with Catriona Menzies-Pike in Sydney Review of Books.

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May 29

Publication day for The Buried Ark!

9781743549902My latest novel, The Buried Ark, hits Australian bookstores today. It’s the second part of The Change Trilogy for young adults, and the sequel to last year’s The Silent Invasion.

The Buried Ark picks up immediately after the events at the end of The Silent Invasion. Callie has made it to the Zone, the region controlled by the alien presence of the Change, but only at the cost of everything she holds dear. Broken and alone she fights to survive in the alien landscape of the Zone, until a shocking discovery suggests a way of destroying the Change. Pursued by the Change she flees south again, only to find unexpected sanctuary in a secret installation known as the Ark. But the Ark is not quite what it seems, and before long Callie – and the entire planet – are in more danger than ever.

I’m really proud of it, and excited it’s finally in the world. When The Silent Invasion was published I said my plan was for each book in the trilogy to have a quite different focus and feel, so while The Silent Invasion is very intimate and closely focussed on the central characters and their journey north to the Zone, The Buried Ark would have global implications, and the final book would have a cosmic dimension.

I think – I hope – I’ve achieved that. The Buried Ark is bigger and more exciting than The Silent Invasion. But it’s also richer and stranger, and touches on a series of questions about the human and the inhuman, love and loss, and the weirdness and uncanniness of a world in which environmental change is dissolving the boundaries between us and the world we are destroying.

If you’re in Australia it’s available as an ebook, and at all good bookstores. Overseas readers should be able to buy it on Kindle. And if you’d like to read the first few chapters, they’re available on Wattpad (although don’t read them unless you’ve already read
The Silent Invasion, since they will ruin its ending). You can also read a little bit about how I came to write the series.

And just in case you’re wondering, the third book will be out next year.

Sep 5

Publication Day!

Clade Titan.jpgClade is out today in the UK, Ireland, USA and Canada through Titan Books. You can pick up copies at good bricks and mortar bookshops or online.

It’s already had some lovely responses: SFX gave it 4.5 stars and said it was “beautiful, terrifying and – despite everything – uplifting”, and Robert Macfarlane says “Clade is a brilliant, unsettling and timely novel: a true text of the Anthropocene in its subtle shuttlings between lives, epochs and eras, and its knitting together of the planet’s places”. 

If you’d like to know more you might want to check out my interview with Ecofiction about it and some of the challenges of writing about climate change.

My thanks to everybody at Titan for making this possible. I’m so pleased the book is going to find new readers.

 

Sep 4

Fish have feelings too

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Steve Dunleavy, ‘Big Eyed Scad, Kona Hawaii’, cc by 2.0 2010

I’m delighted to be able to say my article, ‘Fish have feelings too’, has been shortlisted for the 2017 Bragg/UNSW Bragg Prize for Science Writing, alongside pieces by Jo Chandler, Alice Gorman, Elmo Keep, James Mitchell Crow and Laura Parker. Originally published in the March 2017 issue of The Monthly, the piece is about recent research into fish cognition and intelligence. It will also be published later this year in The Best Australian Science Writing 2017, edited by Michael Slezak. I’m incredibly grateful to everybody at The Monthly and to Jodi Pini-Fitzsimmons and Culum Brown from Macquarie University for being so generous with their time and research. The winner will be announced in November.

 

 

May 17

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Sydney Writers’ Festival

Sydney Writers’ Festival is just around the corner, and features a stellar line-up that includes George Saunders, Anne Enright, Colson Whitehead, Mariko Tamaki, Fiona McFarlane, Witi Ihimaera and Krissy Kneen, and events in many locations across the city. I’m appearing on a number of panels.

First up, in Sydney Dance 1 on Thursday 25 May at 1:30pm, is It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Visions of Dystopia, with Sally Abbott, Briohny Doyle and Maria Lewis. Tickets are free.

Next is A Gathering Storm: The Rise and Rise of Cli-Fi, in the Richard Wherrett Studio at 11:30am on Friday 26 May, which also features Sally Abbott, Hannah Donnelly and Ashley Hay. Tickets are $15.

Then, on Saturday 27 May, I’m appearing at two events. The first is Keeping Company: Characters Across a Series, which is part of the Festival’s new All Day YA Program at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta, and also features Catriona Feeney, Amie Kaufman, Garth Nix, Lynette Noni. Tickets for the session are $15, and a five event pass is $50. The second event, which is back at Walsh Bay in Pier 2/3 at 4:30pm, is Dear Science, and also features Ashley Hay, Henry Marsh, Bianca Nogrady and Michael Slezak. Tickets are $20 or $15 concession.

I’m also appearing as part of two other events. The first, Close to Home, in Sydney Dance 2 at 3:00pm on Friday 26 May, is a tribute to my late friend, Georgia Blain, who died of brain cancer in December, and features readings from Georgia’s work by Tegan Bennett Daylight, Charlotte Wood and me. It should be a terrific event, and a great opportunity to celebrate Georgia’s life and work. Tickets are free.

And finally, on at 11:30am on Monday 29 May, I’ll be appearing with my partner Mardi McConnochie at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba as part of Generation Next, where we’ll both be discussing writing for younger readers. Tickets are $15, or you can buy a one day pass for $65/55, or a two day pass for $100.

If you’re there say hi!

Mar 28

Publication day!

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The first book in my new YA series, The Change Trilogy, The Silent Invasion, is released today! If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy from your favourite bricks and mortar bookseller, online retailers or on Kindle, iBooks or Kobo. Even better, for a limited time the print book is available for just $9.99 and the ebook for even less.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the book I’ve written a piece for the Guardian about the inspiration for the series; alternatively you can check out my interviews with the Dymocks and Booktopia podcasts. And if you’re in Sydney and you’re free on Thursday 27 April I’ll be in conversation with Garth Nix at Kinokuniya at 6:30pm.

And I hope you enjoy it – I’m so excited about it and the sequels, and thrilled they’re finally in the world where people can read them.

Mar 16

Writing on the Precipice: On Literature and Climate Change

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“Late last year, in the dying days of the American presidential campaign, the World Wildlife Fund published its most recent Living Planet Report. Published biennially, these reports have long made sobering reading, but 2016’s took that to a new level, declaring that between 1970 and 2012 close to 60 per cent of the world’s wildlife had disappeared, and that without concerted action that figure was projected to reach 67 per cent by 2020. In other words, humans were close to having wiped out more than two thirds of the world’s wildlife in just half a century.

“As somebody who has spent most of their adult life thinking and writing about animals and the environment, I found this story physically distressing. As with last summer’s bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef it felt like a tipping point, a moment when it had become clear we could not continue down the path we are on, a moment when things would have to change.

“In fact the world’s media greeted the story with a collective shrug. A few articles here and there mentioned it — and then it was gone, swamped by the drama of Donald Trump’s terrifying rise to power.

“It is difficult to know what to do in such circumstances. The climatologist James Hansen once said being a climate scientist was like screaming at people from behind a soundproof glass wall: being a writer concerned with these questions often feels frighteningly similar. Because although it is difficult to understand how one could not be writing about these questions, the ethical urgency one feels is tempered by a sense of the futility of the gesture in the face of such enormity, a feeling one’s tools are not fit for purpose. What is the point of stories in such a moment, one wants to ask. How can one poem or one song or one novel make a difference?” Read more at Sydney Review of Books

Mar 7

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Preorder The Silent Invasion for just $6.99!

Silent_Invasion_twitter.jpgThe Silent Invasion hits bookshops in three weeks, but for a limited time Australian readers can preorder the ebook from iBooks for just $6.99 and the print book from Booktopia for just $7.95.

Even better, you can read the first four chapters for free right now on iBooks.

So why are you waiting? Alien biology! Metamorphosis! The beginning of the end of the world! Grab a copy now!

Jan 29

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Ghost Species

shell-219665_960_720It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting on the beach beside the steel gantries and fuel tanks of Botany Bay’s container terminal watching my kids build a sandcastle by the water’s edge, a structure that keeps collapsing because the waves keep hitting it. But what I can’t get out of my head is the section of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, I read this morning, in which an unnamed narrator offers an imaginary account of the first sudden sea level rise in the 2040s. It’s a possibility I’ve also imagined in Ghost Species, the adult novel I’m writing (although mine is done from a more personal, experiential perspective), but simultaneously it’s a scenario that no matter how difficult it is for us to comprehend is now pretty much assured even if we do get emissions under control (as Elizabeth Kolbert wrote recently, “once feedbacks take over, the climate can change quickly, and it can change radically … It’s likely that the “floodgates” are already open, and that large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just the ice in front of us that’s still frozen”). All of which means this beach, a lot of this city, most coastal habitats, mangroves and reefs and, I suspect, much of our world, are all already lost, swept away by the ocean, like the bathetically symbolic sandcastle my kids are trying to build against the backdrop of the engine of global trade. Is there a word for his prospective grief, this knowledge nothing here will remain? For all the species and ecosystems that still linger, although they are already lost? For the way I feel when I watch my kids, and know that however safe the world they inhabit seems the future holds dislocation and disaster, or for my own uncertainty about what I should be teaching them? In his book Orison for a Curlew the writer Horatio Clare talks about Greece’s economic ruin being a cenotaph for our society, I wonder whether this moment might be another.

Jan 18

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Cover Reveal: The Silent Invasion

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I’m incredibly excited to present the cover of my new novel, The Silent Invasion, which will be published by Pan Macmillan Australia in April. It’s the first part of a trilogy of young adult novels set a decade or so from now on an Earth transformed by the arrival of alien biology. I’m incredibly excited about them, and I’ve had huge fun writing them, not least because they’ve let me play around with a whole lot of crazy ideas about alien ecologies and replication and quantum hive minds, while also writing a really personal story about love and loyalty and survival. I’ll be posting more information about them closer to publication, but for now you can pre-order the first part from your favourite bookseller, and make a note in your diary that the second book will be available in November.

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