This Oath and This Indenture: Health Care, Stereotypes, and Our Climate Change Dystopia

Hey penguin fans, this weekend I’m going to be attending the (Un)ethical futures: utopia, dystopia and science fiction conference. My paper, This Oath and This Indenture: Health Care, Stereotypes, and Our Climate Change Dystopia, will be a 20-minute presentation as part of the ‘Climate and Dystopias’ session on Sunday afternoon. I’m so excited to be attending and presenting at this conference.

Tickets are still available, and you should consider coming to experience my feelings on health care in science fiction, because I have a LOT of feelings about health care in our climate change dystopia.

The abstract:

Continue reading

Imagining Australia’s Climate Change Dystopia – a 2015 update

In early 2014 I used the CSIRO 2007 climate change projections to develop possibilities for our Science Fiction Climate Change Dystopia, which was published at The Toast. This weekend at Continuum 11: Southern Skies, I talked at length about the science behind our climate change future, and I’ve been invited to speak on a panel at the NSW Writers’ Centre Speculative Fiction Festival in July on this topic, so it seemed timely that I update my essay on imagining Australia’s climate change dystopia.

You can download it: imagining climate change dystopia update 2015.

Haw Par Villa: where your soul can never leave though your feet may go on the way

As a child, as an adult, as a being who has come via South-East Asia, I am obsessed with Haw Par Villa, and always will be. Up at The Toast this week, Haw Par Villa: where your soul can never leave though your feet may go on the way. A really personal essay, and one of which I’m very chuffed.

Mum hustles us out the door. “I’ve never been,” she says, and that’s all I know.

There are other people milling around when we arrive. They’re all Chinese, too. This doesn’t strike me until later, but here, now, I don’t question it.

The snake looms over the gate. We move towards the Gates of Hell, and though it is my first glimpse, it is not my last.

A pair of articles on ABC TV’s Serangoon Road: ABC TV’s Serangoon Road and Australia in the Asian Century; Australians in Singapore and the legacy of colonialism on Serangoon Road. [Peril, February 2014] Looking at the representation of Singapore and Australia in a highly publicised ABC-TV production.

In this pair of posts I will be looking at Australia within its regional and historical context, and Asia within Australian media. The White Paper Australia in the Asian Century may have found itself archived to Trove well before its time, but Serangoon Road was commissioned and produced within its moment. It is a reflection of where Australia has found itself for over half a century now; here, separated from its Colonial Masters by the great Asian Monolith.