Graham Storrs

I hope my favourite sci-fi newsletter, Ansible, won’t mind if I reproduce the following paragraph verbatim. Not only is this matter one that outrages me, but Ansible’s treatment of it is just brilliant. Anyway, enjoy: Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was convicted [...]

Dear Mr. Conroy, I see from your recent announcement that you and the Labor Party are still determined to go ahead with installing national Internet filters. As an Australian writer, I cannot stress how strongly opposed I am to this measure. Whatever your good intentions for filtering child pornography – and I give you and [...]

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on. Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. [...]

There is a petition up on the GoPetition site, addressed to, “THE HONOURABLE THE SPEAKER AND MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT” which people concerned about the government’s insane plan to lift parallel importation restrictions on books can sign. The text is as follows: (Preamble): The Australian Government is considering whether to abolish [...]

Well, you all know I’m home by now. I just want to summarise my experiences at the Byron Bay Writers Festival before I forget. The BBWF is only the second writers’ festival I’ve been to but it was similar to the other one in many ways. The big differences were in the venues. The Brisbane [...]

If the Australian Government and the big-chain booksellers have their way, the Australian publishing industry will be all but dead in a few years’ time. There are very few Australian literary agents now, but they too will have gone. For Australian writers – especially new ones – the only chance of being published will be [...]

When I was a wild and untamed teenager, I used to do crazy, far-out things, like reading Jean-Paul Sartre. I forget where I read it now but he tells a story about a student coming to him to help with a decision he had to make  (about the student’s love-life if I remember correctly.) Wise [...]

The Productivity Commission was asked by the Australian Government to look into the effects of removing local copyright protection for Australian publishers as a way of reducing the cost of books in the bookshops. It has recommended that parallel importation should be stopped. Currently Australia, like the USA and Great Britain, provides protection for its [...]