I’ll be teaching a couple of writing courses at Canberra Institute of Technology in the first half of this year:
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy
6.30-8.30pm on Wednesdays, from 17 February – 23 March 2016
The Fiction Writer’s Toolkit
6.30-8.30pm on Wednesdays, from 11 May – 16 June 2016
Details and links to the booking site here.
I’ve sold a fractured fairy tale called “Sleeping Beauty” to British magazine Holdfast for their “Love, Sex, Romance” issue, due at the end of Feb. (WARNING: story contains traces of True Love and Romance.)
Nice to get off the mark for 2016. I believe it’s also my second ever sale to a British market. The other one was at Hub magazine way back in 2007, which you can read here, or listen to the audio version at Escape Pod, here. (WARNING: story contains traces of Mad Cow Disease)
The title story of my collection, “Angel Dust”, will be featuring on the Far Fetched Fables podcast, sometime in the hopefully not-too-distant future. The story was originally published in the Clockwork Phoenix 2 anthology in 2009.
Gotta love a story that keeps on giving 🙂
And my name on the cover of Asimov’s again! Little happy dance.
(Of course, there’s only seven stories in this issue because one of them is a novella by Allen M. Steele, so all seven authors made the cover, but I’ll take it.)
My contribution is called “The Baby Eaters”. It’s a cross-cultural contact story, with aliens.
A little while back, I got an email from Tehani Wessely at FableCroft Publishing, saying she was looking for stories for a planned anthology, called In Your Face, that were “provocative and/or confronting but with purpose – they should be pieces that perhaps make readers uncomfortable because they are a bit too hard-hitting / close to the bone, but which do so in order to interrogate these themes and ideas, and make a point about the world we live in.” She asked if I had anything that might suit.
I said, “Weeeell… I have this story that starts with the line ‘The paedophiles are protesting, again’.” The story’s called “Tolerance”, and it’s something I’ve had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about for a while – tolerance, I mean, not advocating the right to fuck children.
I think the problem with tolerance is that it’s too weak to be a foundational social value. I think it too easily becomes a cover for cowardice, or just plain laziness. You don’t have to bother understanding something if you’re just tolerating its existence, close to but separate from you.
When that happens, it’s frighteningly easy for political agendas that should never be tolerated to co-opt the language of legitimate identity movements. I picked paedophiles in the story as an extreme example to illustrate the point, but I remember a friend telling me about a conversation he had with a prominent German academic, who he asked why post-modernism had never taken off in Germany the way it did in the English and French speaking worlds. The reply was, “Ja, ve already tried ze identity politics in Germany between 1933 and 1945.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ian McHugh 