Description:
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
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