Other Spacetimes

INTERVIEWS WITH WRITERS OF THE IMAGINATION Claw-marks in the foothills of spacetime: These are the first steps (and sometimes the last) of the Antipodean dreamers who have created a sort of parallel world of science fiction, fantasy, horror. Many of these fantasists are now established masters of the craft of imagination, well known beyond the shores of their home continent. Here is Kate Forsyth, with her best selling fantasy novels, and Sean Williams who has been a New York Times best seller for his Star Wars novels as well as a notable fantasy and sf innovator, and Sean McMullen, who also shifts with ease between strange science fiction and stranger fantasy, as does Stephen Dedman, and Tess Williams, who roams oceans of the mind. Some set out to be science fiction writers when the genre was barely begun: Frank Bryning and George Turner. Some are brilliant new stars even now: Bernard Cohen, Cameron Rogers, Hal Colebatch (whose forays into Larry Niven's Known Space universe have won him plaudits). And more-here are 25 sinuous, amusing and confounding conversations with writers who have inhabited and fostered the imagination, some of them for more than half a century. Van Ikin, recently retired as a literature professor at the University of Western Australia, conducted these interviews during the past four decades. Co-editor and curator of this anthology, Damien Broderick, has been dubbed (by Ikin) the Dean of Australian science fiction.