A Pocket Full of Eyes, by Lili Wilkinson

Taxidermy, gamers, lust and romance, a suspicious death - I don't know how Australian author Lili Wilkinson weaves these all into a coherent story, but she does. Published by Allen & Unwin in 2011, the tale has humour, lovely geeky moments, clever clues and tricky red herrings, suspense, and wonderful characters.

I would guess the title is a deliberate reference to Agatha Christie's A Pocketful of Rye, not just the words from the nursery rhyme 'Sing A Song of Sixpence'. The heroine, Beatrice May Ross, is much the same age as teenage private eye Veronica Mars, but her style of sleuthing is more like Miss Marple's - at least to start with. A fan of girl detectives Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, Bee is determined to solve the mysterious death at the museum where she's doing work experience in the summer before her final year of high school.

From just a description the characters might sound caricatured, but in the context of the story they are totally believable, multi-layered, and engaging. Bee's mother Angela is a Dungeons & Dragons gamer, who has a gaming buddy turned boyfriend known as the Celestial Badger. The romantic interest is Toby - an annoying, cute, mysterious medical student who spouts random facts about animals and insects, and is an excellent kisser. Gus, the senior taxidermist at the museum and Bee's mentor, is laconic, habit-bound, and dour - at least until shortly before his death.




In between sleuthing, discovering what Toby's motives really are, dealing with a duplicitous best friend, and becoming expert in various techniques of taxidermy, Bee realises why she is so addicted to reading classic crime fiction, with its logical plots and neat conclusions. Her precision, list-making and attention to detail help her find clues, but she needs a different approach to deal with the changes in her life.

Some useful information: Flesh-eating beetles are used to clean the more fragile skeletons of birds and small animals before the rest of the taxidermy process. Bee tells Toby that sometimes the beetles aren't keen on what they're offered, but spraying the corpse with a mixture of Vegemite and beer will whet their appetites because "They're good Australian beetles." :-P

at the Speculative Fiction Festival 2011, NSW Writers' Centre

Keith Stevenson launches the anthology Anywhere But Earth

Richard Harland

Alan Baxter

Margo Lanagan

Judith Ridge and Margo Lanagan

me and Pamela Freeman

On Australian Women Writing SF

a guest post by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Australians writers aren’t particularly known for their science fiction, especially right now with fantasy dominating the bestseller shelves, and more of a slipstreamy, speculative fiction sensibility prevalent in the small presses. But it’s there - it has always been there - simmering beneath the surface. As is common where a genre is perceived as marginal, those few examples most people can remember tend to be the ones written by men, just as the majority of books reviewed or considered historically to be “important” also tend, on the whole, to be those written by men.

But I am not most people!

Among my favourite and best beloved works, the first one that comes to mind is the classic feminist-lesbian-shakespearian-dystopian short story by Lucy Sussex, “My Lady Tongue.” There’s also Less Than Human, an industrial-robots-in-near-future-Japan novel by Maxine McArthur, which I love for its characterisation and sense of place as well as a kick-ass crime plot.

Speaking of kick-ass, well, you can’t talk about Australian science fiction without mentioning Marianne de Pierres, who has kept the space opera flag flying in recent years, even as the rest of Australia’s meagre handful of SF writers leap aboard the fantasy ship instead.
Nylon Angel is an Australian classic (dytopia again, we do that so well), and her Sentients of Orion series comes well recommended. Even her recent YA debut, Burn Bright, which has all the hallmarks of a vampire paranormal, is science fictional in the extreme.


I always get annoyed when people put together lists of “important” or “classic” science fiction works and deliberately leave out the YA or childrens books, because that’s often where the women authors are to be found. Certainly, when it comes to science fiction, Australia has a long and marvellous history of children’s authors writing brilliant, disturbing work. Gillian Rubenstein’s Space Demons, for example, is a true Australian children’s classic, very much of its time but still chilling in the depiction of a computer game that can swallow you whole.


Right now, I’m hanging out for what I believe will become a new Australian SF classic. Sue Isle’s Nightsiders was published this month by Twelfth Planet Press, the first in a series of short story quartets by Australian women writers. I haven’t seen the finished book yet, but I have read a couple of the stories and am excited to see more. Nightsiders is another Australian dystopia, centred around a future Perth which has been evacuated by the majority of its population due to climate change, in which only a few stragglers remain, sleeping by day and living by night. The stories I have read of this suite already are harsh and touching, and I can’t wait to receive my book in the post!

One thing is for certain - we have some great Australian women SF writers, but not nearly enough. I’m hoping that the next decade will bring some great new work from established and new voices, and that readers return to the genre in droves.


Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of Power and Majesty (Creature Court Book One) and The Shattered City (Creature Court Book Two, April 2011) with Reign of Beasts (Creature Court Book Three, coming in November 2011) hot on its tail. Her short story collection Love and Romanpunk will be published as part of the Twelfth Planet Press “Twelve Planets” series in May. It is a little bit science fiction.




This post comes to you as part of Tansy’s Mighty Slapdash Blog Tour, and comes with a cookie fragment of new release The Shattered City:

Macready laughed, stepping back, out of range. “Does the sword not feel like she belongs to you?”

Skysilver, that was the trick to it. Didn’t matter how fast it took you, being a sentinel, it was skysilver that drew you in and made you belong. It had a song you couldn’t quite hear, a heat that connected you to the sky and the Court. If Delphine could just listen to the song of the skysilver, she would understand.

“No, she belongs to you, and I don’t take gifts unless I know their price.”