Judecca is a fascinating piece of storytelling and a good example of the ways in which the new media universe has changed what is possible and how people tell stories. Judecca is a webcomic that updates more or less weekly and started way back in 2009. It is beautifully, hauntingly illustrated by Noora Heikkilä, and is co-written by her and Jonathan Meecham. Continue reading
Author Archives: Christopher Johnstone
Deep Ocean Things
THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE
Neil Gaiman ISBN 10: 1472200314
One of the reasons that Neil Gaiman is a very interesting writer is the way in which he mixes the mundane and the preternatural. When dredging through the mundane for stories, we all tend to go back to our own lives to pick over. And for this reason I suspect, there are Neil Gaiman stories that look semi-autobiographical on the surface. A couple of the short stories in Smoke and Mirrors give off that illusion. I say illusion because I suspect that stories that seem to (maybe) be about someone who was maybe Neil Gaiman (maybe) in an earlier time of life are no more deeply autobiographical than any story is autobiographical. And all stories are a bit autobiographical. They cannot help but be anything else.
An Examination Of Causal Vindictivecy
THE CASUAL VACANCY
J.K. Rowling ISBN 978-1-4087-0420-2
Alright. Yes. Vindictiveness would be standard English, but I wanted to play on The Casual Vacancy, and so I used a -cy ending instead.
But more to the point, vindictiveness is also the standard in J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, her first post-Potter book. This is a very grim, very interesting, very powerful and somewhat disconcerting book. I’ve read some reviewers complain that The Casual Vacancy – being as it is a very adult book about serious and troubling things – is difficult to read because it is written in a style not much different from the style of the Harry Potter books. I’ve read other reviewers complain that without the wonderment of the Potter universe what’s left behind is a grimy world without much redemption. I’ve also read a lot of reviews that sort of flailed around, accusing the prose of being workmanlike or of being overwritten or they accuse the story of being melodramatic or too dull or something, anything to justify a negative feeling about the book. Continue reading
Announcement: Commenting Switched On
COMMENTS
Just a quick announcement from us at The Melbourne Review of Books. In the first stage of our online launch we kept commenting switched off on all posts. We’ve now opened commenting on new posts. You will need to enter your name and email address to leave a comment and we reserve the right to delete comments that are deemed to be intentionally offensive or inappropriate.
Where a comment may cause offence but we feel the comment has been made in good faith we may flag it as having the potential to cause offence or in extreme cases we may resort to ‘disemvoweling’ where the vowels are removed but the comment is left in place so that people can read the comment if they really wish to.
LETTERS
If you wish to make a more substantive comment on an article or engage in general discussion, please send an email to meblournereviewofbooks@gmail.com and mark the topic as LETTER. We will publish letters in a semi-regular fashion under a letters post with editorial responses where appropriate.
Thanks and regards,
Chris Johnstone on behalf of The Melbourne Review of Books team
Five Rather Wonderful Audiostories
Possibly you listen to podcast fiction and audioboks. Possibly you don’t. Either way, you should definitely listen to the following five pieces. Three are from Escape Pod and two are from Podcastle, which reflects my own personal listening habits, but also reflects how the SFF crowd were early adopters of online audio formats for fiction. Because free SFF audio stories have been online for some years now, there is quite a bit of good Science Fiction and Fantasy to pick from. Unfortunately, mystery, crime , romance and lit fic are taking a while to catch up, but if you wanted to create a short-format fiction podcast in one of those genres it’s worth being are that there certainly isn’t much competition to deal with at the moment. Continue reading
On Melbourne
The following was read aloud at the 20th anniversary of Glass Wings online held at the Wheeler Centre on Friday 14th March 2014.
When I first moved to Melbourne I had only just broken up with Dublin. The break-up had been a long time coming, but of course it was still painful. When it did end I couldn’t say that she was as upset about it as I was. I couldn’t honestly say that she even noticed. That’s how cities are. She might be your one and only, but you are just one of her millions. Continue reading
From A Reader’s Point Of View
When I was living another life, in another country, some years ago, I worked for a time as a marketing researcher. My job, in this other life, was to sit hidden in shadows behind a one-way mirror – from this place I observed, made notes on and recorded the opinions of the product test group of the hour. They knew I was watching them – there was to inform them of this them of this, and besides which, I suspect the giant and otherwise completely incongruous mirror in an otherwise dull office complex would have been something of a give-away. Continue reading
Saga n1. A Long And Complicated (Account Of A) Series Of More Or Less Loosely Connected Events (O.E.D.)
SAGA (Volumes One and Two)
Brian K. Vaughan (Writer) / Fiona Staples (Illustrator)
ISBN 978-1-60706-601-9 / ISBN 978-1-60706-692-7
So even if you pretty much have your head stuck in the literary clouds and barely come down from the Mount Olympus of the Booker short list each year you are probably aware of graphic novels like Sandman and Maus. You might even be aware of Fables by Bill Willingham and Y the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. Continue reading
The Red Book of Lang
THE RED FAIRY BOOK
Edited by Andrew Lang (1890) ISBN-13: 978-0-486-21673-7 / ISBN-10: 0-486-21673-X
Fairy tales are fashionable again. I’m not saying they were ever unpopular. Children never do quite become suspicious of fairy tales the way adults do from time to time and era to era. Personally, I think we can trace the start the march of the fairy tale fashion of the early twenty-teens to Fables by Bill Willingham. If you haven’t read Fables, it is a comic about fairy tale characters stranded in modern New York. If the theme sounds vaguely familiar that’s because the series was so successful there were all sorts of plans to turn it into a film or television series, but then some bright exec somewhere (evidently) realised that all the characters were public domain. Why not write their own series that is sort of similar but not too similar and therefore, QED: no need to pay any royalties? Thus, fairy tale characters have suddenly suffused our TV screens and fairy tales have returned to the public consciousness again. Continue reading
Some Poetic Observations Of The Human Condition
AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
Laurie Lee (1969) ISBN 0-14-00-3318-1
I cannot fully convey to you what a treasure this book is. This is the vivid, wry, deeply felt and wonderfully, beautifully written account of a young man, the author himself, walking out the door of his English family home deep in the English countryside, to seek his fortune, to find himself, to find his road in life. By a path of almost whimsical-seeming choices, the author found himself eventually in London, and eventually leaving England to try his luck on the Continent. And then he found himself in Spain, walking on foot town-to-town, supporting himself with his violin – and this put him in exactly the right time and the right place to experience the Spanish Civil War when it erupted around him. Continue reading
Near Future SF Done Well
SPACEMAN
Brian Azzarello (writer) (2011-12)
Penciller: Eduardo Risso; Letterer: Clem Robins; Colorists: Patricia Mulvihill & Giulia Brusco
Spaceman was released as a nine-part series of monthly comics in 2011-2012 from Vertigo (the imprint of DC for grown-ups), and is now available as a deluxe graphic novel edition. By writer Brian Azzarello and penciller Eduardo Risso, Spaceman is among the best hard science fiction produced in any medium, film, TV or book in the last ten years. Continue reading
These Are Not Your Teenage Fears; They Are The Fears Of Today’s Teenagers
THE HUNGER GAMES SERIES
Suzanne Collins (2008, 2009, 2010)
The Hunger Games: ISBN 978-1-407132-07-5
Catching Fire: ISBN 978-1-407132-09-9
Mocking Jay: ISBN 978-1-407109-37-4
There is certainly no need to convince anyone to buy more of Suzanne Collins super-successful series, but I think there still may be a need clear up some confusion about this series and point out that if you haven’t read it, you probably should and why. Continue reading