Humankind is in danger. The Year of the Fruitcake tells of the Earth-based life of a mostly-mindwiped alien anthropologist inhabiting a human perimenopausal body instead of her own more rational body with its capacity to change gender. This alien has definitely shaken a great intergalactic empire by sitting in cafés with her new best friends. Chocolate may or may not have played a part. Will humanity survive? Polack describes her novel as, "Bleak. It's political. It's angry. It's also sarc...

Professor Luke Mann is the leader of a team heading back to the Languedoc, year 1305. Their goal? To study the environment, refine delta T and, in Luke's words, "to change the universe". With him is Artemisia Wormwood: a Medieval historian who needs the money to save the life of her dying sister.But time travel is untested, and dangerous. Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert, a village in Languedoc, is a desert of souls. Monastery, pilgrimage path, and legend; that's all there is. Perfect for s...

Some keys open doors to strange worlds...Melissa has a happy marriage but her everyday life is a constant battle against pain. She discovers that her artwork can produce magic, prompting her to apply for an artist's retreat to a mysterious country house. Her old schoolfriends Bettina and Zelda are also at the same retreat. But neither the house nor their friendship is what they think. A mystical library, rapacious shadows, and keys to otherworldly rooms are the links to saving the ...

A collection of three time travel science fiction novels by Christopher Coates, Gillian Polack & Michael R. Stern, now available in one volume!Alternate Purpose: In a world devastated by a global pandemic, two scientists develop a radical plan to prevent the catastrophe by sending someone back in time to stop it from happening. But the only person capable of surviving the process is Devin Baker, a man with a troubled past and a dangerous mission ahead. As Devin tra...

All three books in Gillian Polack's 'Enchanted Australia' series of contemporary fantasy novels, now in one volume!The Time Of The Ghosts: Ghosts trail after us. They are our fears and the shape of our hates. Poltergeists and the spirits of drowned girls; malicious presences and portents; cat vampires and roaming bushrangers. These ghosts haunt Canberra, and it takes four women, one cup of tea at a time, to face them. But can they take down the darkness and keep th...

Renowned artist Grania, famed as a painter of light, arrives in a sleek space ship from Lost Earth, ready to embrace New Ceres and its New Enlightenment in its entirety - its 18th century set up, its coffee houses, its gossipy salons, and its obsession with a low-level approach to tech . . . But is she really ready for its cutthroat society, its strange food issues or for Livia? Livia who toys with lives on a whim, and will stop at nothing to realize her dream society.When Grania m...

Pink tutus, magic, sarcasm, amulets and bushfires: this is suburban fantasy in Australia.Life is never quite what it seems, even without the lost family heritage delivered to Judith and Belinda. Judith wants an ordinary life... mostly. If Belinda weren't Judith's sister, and if it wasn't for bushfires and bigots, Belinda's life would be perfectly ordinary. Judith will tell you so; you don't even have to ask.Belinda's friend Rhonda has a superpower. Each time she sees the fu...

Fay invented a world of fantasy where she could dwell in happiness. Her friends in this perfect world were Belle and Persa, Enlai and Flor. She visited them on the edge of sleep, shaping their lives to suit herself."I dream better than other people. More efficiently and effectively," she explained to herself. Her dreams were a flicker away from reality.After Gilbert turns up in her refuge, undesigned, unheralded, and disturbing, Fay's dream world shatters. But are her dream...

Shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or ReviewFiction plays a vital role in describing history and transmitting culture. How writers understand and use history can play an equally important role in how they navigate a novel. This book explores the nature of the author’s relationship with history and fiction – often using writers’ own words – as well as the role history plays in fiction.Focusing on genre fiction, this study considers k...

Jewish Fantasy Worldwide: Trends in Speculative Stories from Australia to Chile reaches beyond American fiction to reveal a spectrum of Jewish imagination. The chapters in this collection cover speculative works by Jewish artists and about Jewish characters from a broad range of national contexts, including post-Holocaust Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel, South America, French Canada, and the Middle East. The contributors consider various media including novels, short stories, film, YouTub...

Vonda N. McIntyre preferred to keep her author's biography short and sweet: "Vonda N. McIntyre writes science fiction." While true, this modest claim conceals accomplishments that earned her multiple accolades and an enduring place among the most influential fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.Even more important to the authors of this tribute anthology, McIntyre was a kind and generous supporter of other writers. In Bright Morning, eleven career writ...

The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping.The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions.Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding, colonialism, diasporic e...