good karma

[adelaidesean]

Here's a very good thing, for those who don't already know about it:

Ticonderoga Publications is joining in the effort to raise funds for Paul Haines.

Ticonderoga will donate $10 from the sale of each of its titles sold in August through its online store.

Paul Haines, a much-loved member of the Aussie sf community is going through a tough time. After being diagnosed with bowel cancer, having sections of his bowel removed and enduring six months worth of chemotherapy, he has recently discovered he has spots on his liver. Paul has met this news by reloading his guns and is going to fight it with two other forms of chemotherapy for cancers like his, combined with a monoclonal antibody called Avastin. Avastin, however is not part of Medicare or the private health system's funding at this stage. It costs $20,000 to do it. Money that he doesn't have.

Ticonderoga Publications has not set a limit on its donation, and hopes to raise in excess of $1000.

More info on Paul's fund can be found here.

And here's a wonderful review of Magic Dirt from Aurealis, for anyone teetering on the brink:

Sean Williams does people extremely well. Whether they’re Nietzschian supersoldiers, engrammatic remnants of a long-destroyed Earth, or imperfectly recorded copies of far future freedom fighter/ mercenaries, they have one thing in common. They are engaging, rounded, entirely believable individuals facing extraordinary circumstances. Their humanity – however stretched or moulded – is recognisably intact. He’s also particularly good at Big Ideas, and it’s the clash of these two elements that has produced some truly memorable SF series.

But up until things really took off for him with the publication of The Prodigal Sun, co-written with Shane Dix (which was actually Aphelion Publication’s The Unknown Soldier – Book One of The Cogal in another guise), he was best known for his short fiction. So having firmly established himself as an international bestselling Fantasy and Science Fiction novelist, it’s nice to see Magic Dirt, which brings together a package of Sean’s shorter work from 1991 onwards, because even in his early writing that dual focus on character and idea that’s served him so well since is very much in evidence. Take for example the classic ‘A Map of the Mines of Barnath’ a dreamlike, Dantesque tale of a man’s obsession to find his brother in a mine with an inner topography that defies all logic. Or ‘Entre les Beaux Morts en Vie’, where young Martin risks being played for a fool by one side or another as he ponders what becoming an eternal revenant may cost him. Or ‘Ghosts of the Fall’ which could have been a standard post-apocalypse tale but retains a definite freshness and delivers the promise of hope in what seems a hopeless situation precisely because the protagonist appears so real and so believable. Or ‘The Soap Bubble’ a joyously irreverent tale which also has a cleverly solid basis for why it’s characters, human and alien, act as bizarrely as they do. Or ‘Evermore’ which presages his Orphans Trilogy some four years later and shows humanity existing in a very different form, prey to weaknesses both old and new. Or ‘The Butterfly Merchant’ set in his Books of the Change universe which extracts a very human truth from what seems a metaphoric fairy tale. Magic Dirt contains eighteen such tales, all of them good many of them excellent. This is a book no self-respecting lover of Australian speculative fiction can afford to be without.

Comments

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

I'd better buy one....