Dreaming down under - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0732259177 ISBN 13: 9780732259174

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1998

Synopsis

This is a collection of Australian speculative fiction, both "wild-side" fiction which has an edge of horror, fantasy or magical realism; and genre fiction - science fiction, fantasy and horror. The stories have comments by editors and thoughts by the writers.

About this title

Review

The World Fantasy Award winning-anthology Dreaming Down-Under manages the impressive feat of being both a definitive Golden Age compilation and a new wave groundbreaker. This is because Australian speculative fiction has entered a golden age at the turn of the millennium, and because the editors of Dreaming Down-Under, Jack Dann and Janeen Webb, asked contemporary authors born or living in Australia to contribute the best speculative fiction they could create. The 30 contributors have lived up to the challenge, producing stories that are uniformly literary, frequently ambitious, and sometimes disturbing. The stories range all across imaginative literature, from revisionist myth to hardboiled cyberpunk, from paranoid horror to imaginary-world fantasy. Dreaming Down-Under may reshape the future of speculative fiction not only in Australia, but around the world.

In addition to its generous 200,000-plus words of original fiction, the anthology contains 20,000 words of interesting and informative nonfiction. The editors introduce Dreaming Down-Under with a discussion of the current antipodean ferment and a short history of Australian science fiction; they also provide each story with an individual introduction. Each author provides an afterword for his or her story. Fittingly, Dreaming Down-Under also has a passionate preface by Harlan Ellison, who edited the legendary Dangerous Visions anthology series (1969-1973) that changed SF forever. --Cynthia Ward

About the Author

Jack Dann has written or edited over fifty books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, which is published in over ten languages and was #1 on The Age Bestseller list. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "A grand accomplishment," Kirkus Reviews thought it was "An impressive accomplishment," and True Review said, "Read this important novel, be challenged by it; you literally haven't seen anything like it." His novel The Silent has been compared to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Library Journal chose it as one of their 'Hot Picks' and wrote: "This is narrative storytelling at its best-so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended."

Dann's work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Mark Twain. He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (twice), and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. He has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). His novel, Bad Medicine (retitled Counting Coup in the US), has been described by The Courier Mail as "perhaps the best road novel since the Easy Rider Days." His latest book is the retrospective short story collection Jubilee, which The West Australian called "a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller." He is also the co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology of Australian stories, Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1999.

Jack Dann lives in Melbourne, Australia and "commutes" back and forth to Los Angeles and New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0732259177
• ISBN 13: 9780732259174
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 554
• Editor: Jack Dann, Janeen Webb