The proper name of the Australian Wheat Board inquiry is the Inquiry into certain Australian companies in relation to the UN Oil-For-Food Programme. I’m not making that up. Most people are calling it the AWB inquiry, or if they are feeling rather formal, the Cole Commission (after the commissioner, Terence Cole, AO RFD QC).
What promised [...]

For your voting pleasure:

LOCUS Online has bowed to the storm of public pressure and removed the previous photograph of the Nebula winners to replace it with this:

Much, much better. Joe Haldeman’s head has been stretched by wide-angle distortion, but that’s an artefact of the camera that was probably unavoidable under the circumstances. I can assure readers that Mr [...]

Mr Peek, them’s fightin’ words.
There I was, innocently browsing through Rjurik Davidson’s photos of the Bunya Mountain workshop and thence to Ben Peek’s LiveJournal where I came across this entry.
Bunya Mountains - The Bunya Mountains were a place I spent some time at last year. It was okay, but I found all that wildlife to [...]

The Nebula Awards were handed to the happy winners on Saturday. The bad news is that Our Margo missed out (that’s Margo Lanagan), but she did well to make the final ballot of a notoriously parochial award. Fortunately, while the Nebulas often miss exemplary work (Ian R. MacLeod’s “The Summer Isles” didn’t even make the [...]

Talking Squid is Dell Magazine’s Blog of the Month.
For those who don’t know, Dell publishes Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, as well as mystery/crime magazines Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which sit outside our genre of principal interest but I heartily recommend anyway. I subscribe to Asimov’s via [...]

As George Santayana put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is difficult to argue with this proposition, but the statement carries an implied reversal. Those who do remember the past can avoid making the same mistakes. At this juncture of the Iraq War, I am not so sure.
These [...]

An appropriate May Day story: Our own Nick Evans and Russell B. Farr have announced The Workers’ Paradise, a speculative fiction anthology inspired by new Australian labour laws. What they are looking for are:
[Y]our best stories on the theme of work, workplace relations, speculative economics or related topics…We are looking for submissions from any genre: [...]

Cat Sparks has been up to her ears in submissions for her latest Agog! anthology, but she tells me that the stories have been selected and she is now in the process of editing the book in time for the Conflux convention. Here is her formal announcement:
Agog! Press is pleased to announce a new anthology [...]