August 21
I took the day off work to see China Miéville and Tom Cho on the first day of the Melbourne Writer's festival at Federation Square. Festivals are always inspiring and they always manage to raise questions in me, and today was no exception

The morning read
The morning session featured readings from three authors: China Miéville, Petra White and Irfan Yusuf, as well as some time for questions and a chat. China read some bits from a work-in-progress that was about, from what I could gather, the first union set up in Hell. His writing was great and it was interesting to hear it read aloud.

Irfan Yusuf has weird politics that I can't seem to pin down. He's an ex-Liberal, and the reading from his book reasonably highlighted racism in Australia. It was semi-interesting.

When questions came, I was able to ask China a question about how writing balances with his political activism, and whether he sees it as part of his politics. His answer to the audience was kind of straight forward, that he didn't see writing as changing the world. But speaking to him after, he was able to elaborate and said that he did see writing as a political act, but, of course, it was no replacement to actual political action.

Fable, Fantasy And The New Short Story
Tom Cho was in a session with Singaporean writer Cyril Wong. They both spoke about their short story collections. As a short story writer I found this really interesting. A large part of Cyril's presentation was about how his writing identifies him as gay and how he set out not to define himself as Singaporean, or as part of this East v West divide.

Tom's presentation discussed the concept of Mary Sue, a kind of perfect protagonist that authors use to live their fantasies. It raised some thoughts for me regarding short stories: whilst an author that is clearly intervening in the story is seen as being wrong, generally, in writer's circles, I think these rules shouldn't be hard and fast and I'm quite attracted to this idea of living certain fantasies through my characters, and I can see how this wouldn't just be interesting to the writer.

Overall, Tom's presentation was entertaining and humorous, as well as informative.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to ask a question regarding the status of the short story and short story collections, considering it's known that publishers generally won't touch short fiction collections unless it's written by someone already famous.

I wanted to ask a question about the role of small press and self-publishers in releasing collections, even without the aim of selling big.

The Future Of Fiction
The last session I saw was with China Miéville again, and Steven Amsterdam, regarding the future of fiction. Each approached it from a different angle.

Steven talked about the changes technology is making in the publishing industry, and as the sound wasn't too good, it was hard to make out what he was saying, but from I got out of it, it was a fairly apocalyptic (but reasonable) prediction that the publishing industry is heading into a sort of crisis.

China talked about the future of fiction in terms of how genres, movements and literature are changing. He made some interesting points, including that he thinks tropes like zombies and vampires have outlived their time. He also liked movements of literature, creating their own rules of genre and such.

Question time brought up discussion about the Kindle (which China hates and called Amazon a union busting company), eBooks, the internet and the publishing industry. China said he didn't want to place a bet either way on which way the industry was going and said that it's pretty turbulent just now and it'll take a few years to get a sense of where publishing is going.

August 22
I went to the "Visions of the City" session chaired by Overland's Rjurik Davidson, with China Miéville, Margo Lanagan and Jack Dann. China was clearly the most interesting person speaking in the session and it was good to see him attract a much younger crowd this time — as compared to all of the other sessions I've been to which had a much older crowd.

They discussed how the city featured in their work. Lanagan and Dan talked about how Melbourne features in both of their stories in the new edition of Overland. Miéville talked more about how the city features particularly in his new book The City and The City.

Mieville's fantastical writing seems to go against the grain of fantasy, which is known for its feudal like settings. In an old interview in Overland, Miéville particularly emphasised going against this grain as a way of being progressive within the genre.

A large part of the discussion talked about dystopias and utopias and how they're reflected. China made the point that dystopias in fiction aren't like real dystopia's because the aesthetic of many dystopias in fiction are nice looking and appealing.

Questions from the audience brought up discussion about how Miéville saw eras in culture were defined by sharp political events, like how 9/11 shifted the political climate and, earlier, Seattle, referring to the anti-capitalist demonstrations in 99.

I had my hand up but didn't get to ask my question in that discussion, but after the session, I went up to China and asked whether he thought the Global Financial Crisis is one of those defining events and whether it'd shape fiction. He said most definitely, but it was hard to predict right now. He did envision a kind of financially motivated apocalyptic type story, though, which I found interesting.

Once again, the session made me think, and I'm sure I've missed some important points, but perhaps I might remember them again and raise them in future.