I've just finished Jack Dann's anthology Dreaming Again, and what a wonderful ride through the Aussie speculative fiction landscape it was. Following on from the 1998 Dreaming Down Under edited by Dann and Janeen Webb, the anthology collects 35 stories from some of Australia's best genre writers.  

Jack had tempted me with a copy of the MS earlier this year. But other than reading a couple of stories because I'd read earlier iterations and was keen to see how they turned out, I wanted to consume the book in one go and had to put it aside until I finished my World Fantasy Award judging duties. 

Standouts for me included stories by Angela Slatter, Simon Brown, Trent Jamieson, Peter M. Ball  and Dirk Strasser. It was great to see such a good representation from Clarion South graduates - seven in all. And it was newer authors - Clarion South graduates or not - who made some of the biggest impressions on me. Whether it's the eery stillness of Christopher Green's Lakeside or This is My Blood by Chris Lynch and Ben Francisco with its mix of Speaker for the Dead and The Sparrow with some schlock thrown in for good measure ,or the sheer audacity of Jason Fischer's Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh - a number of new authors hit the ground running.

The 1999 Melbourne Worldcon was seen by many as ushering in a new era in genre fiction in Australia but I think the 1998 publication of Dreaming Down Under had just as much to do with it as Aussiecon 3. Together the two kicked off a decade long resurgence that revitalised the local scene. I doubt it's possible for any one or two things to create that much of an impact now but Dann's Dreaming Again gives it a jolly good try. But put that aside - the book's worth reading because it's full of great stories, well told. 

Go read it now.

Even before my World Fantasy Award duties began our three bedroom townhouse was hardly coping with the number of books we were buying. Now, we've reached the tipping point and the random piles are just too... random. 

The first answer was to stack books against a wall but now I've started a cull some of our books. The first cut wasn't too hard because I began with old non fiction books that I was keeping out of habit - random works from the 1970s and '80s. That hardly made a dent though and now I have to get a bit meaner.

Of course, it was all made a bit more special when on the weekend my daughter looked at one of the random piles of books and announced: "You and Katie live in a library."