I'm looking forward to seeing lots of friends (and making new ones) at the Aurealis Awards Ceremony in Brisbane on Saturday.* Who's coming and who's not? Looks like the giant electric head will be absent this year, thank goodness. :-)

While we're gazing into the crystal ball, what about Swancon? I just booked my hotel room and ticket. Hurrah!

* Follow the link. That's exactly what I'll be wearing on the night. And isn't the chick's raygun shaped like a wine bottle?

Huge congrats to all the nominees of this year's Aurealis Awards, among which I'm pleased as punch to be numbered. Saturn Returns is in the running for Best SF Novel, making it my sixth consecutive appearance in that category and giving me my twentieth nomination all-up. I'm excited but not holding my breath. The short-list is very strong, and I haven't had a win in this category since 2001 (which is a bit of a worry :-).

Anyway, it's wonderful to be part such a fine line-up. What an amazing pool of talent we have here in Australia! I'm sure there were many, many other fine stories that didn't make it over the line, and my commiserations go to those who might be feeling disappointed.

Ultimately it's about celebrating the community we're all part of, and in that spirit I'm really looking forward to the bash in Brisbane next year--which will be co-hosted by Kim Wilkins and some big loser from Adelaide... :-)

I'm remiss for not posting much about writerly stuff lately, so here are some reviews of Saturn Returns that have been accumulating over recent weeks:

Colin Steele neatly summed it up for the Canberra Times--"Saturn Returns probes the nature of what it is to be human against the wider backdrop of the rise and fall of civilizations"--while Brooke Walker of Good Reading thought it "A breathtaking piece of space opera!"

Dirk Flinthart liked it in the pages of ASIM: "Saturn Returns is a fine book. It’s better than fine...a very entertaining read. Williams’ prose is sharp as ever, with vivid characters, imaginative techno-splashy stuff, and a satisfying dash of dry, sly humour tucked up around the edges."

Keith Stevenson very kindly raved in Aurealis: "In Saturn Returns, I felt a new assuredness, a strength of voice that was compellingly entertaining and thought-provoking. Saturn Returns is Sean’s best yet—go out and buy it."

My favourite review of all, though, was in Locus. Russell Letson describes it as a "Jacobean revenge melodrama" featuring "a mysterious, memory-damaged, morally-ambiguous but militarily potent hero; even-more-mysterious masked opponents; a gang of companions evincing varying degrees of loyalty, sympathy, and resentment; wildly various, extra-large-scale, magical-technology-filled environments; murky pasts, secret histories, hidden agendas, sudden reversals, murky and shifting alliances; plus the usual amusements of chases, captures, escapes, kidnappings, rescues, befriendings, betrayals, and blowing stuff up."

As if that wasn't enough, he goes on to add "malcontents, tainted protagonists, secret and shifting alliances, and convoluted plotlines in pursuit of revelation or revolution or simple payback--mixed motives; love-hate relationships; unholy alliances, affections, and obsessions; amnesiac heroes, masked enemies, and wheels within wheels. And again the setting, in which every kind of scale is exaggerated and the sheer weight of millennia of history (and characters' lifetimes) and millions of cubic lightyears of space, dwarfs even the extravagant foreground action."

Exactly the kind of book I like!

And lastly, while on the topic of reviews, David Conyers in Albedo One had this to say: "Geodesica Ascent and Geodesica Decent have some great ideas, clever characters, and present a convincingly imagined world. These two novels are amongst the best Australian science fiction written in the last few years." For which I am very grateful.