disassociated

The 2022 astronomy photographer of the year shortlist was unveiled on Tuesday 5 July. The award, organised by the Royal Observatory Greenwich is in its thirteenth year, and the entries, as usual, never fail to amaze. Shortlisted images are on display at London’s National Maritime Museum until Sunday 7 August 2022, with the winners being announced on Thursday 15 September 2022.

When late British author Mal Peet died in March 2015, his final novel, Beck, remained unfinished.

In a phone call Peet made to friend and American born, London based writer, Meg Rosoff, shortly before his death, he expressed a desire to finish writing Beck, but didn’t think he’d be able to. At that point Rosoff offered to step in.

At the time of their conversation, Rosoff knew nothing about the novel, or how much progress Peet had made. But this posthumous collaboration paid off. Beck was well received. In August 2016, the Sunday Times named Beck their Book of the Week, describing it as “powerful, shocking, uplifting, funny and beautifully written.”

But this is not the first time one person’s novel has been finished by another, because of death or incapacitation. Realising illness would prevent him finishing works in The Wheel of Time series of fantasy books, late American author Robert Jordan, prepared extensive notes, allowing Brandon Sanderson to conclude the fifteen book series.

British writer Siobhan Dowd died in 2007, before A Monster Calls, which she was working on at the time of her death, was finished, a task that Patrick Ness took on.

In some cases though the quantity of notes written by a deceased author have been enough for another to create books from scratch. The works of British author J. R. R. Tolkien are a case in point. After Tolkien’s death in 1973, his son Christopher wrote a number of Tolkien novels including, The Silmarillion and The Fall of Númenor.

Despite the success some have enjoyed, taking over another author’s part-finished manuscript remains a process fraught with difficulty. How exactly can one writer step into the shoes of another? How do the creative visions of two artistic people align? And perhaps, most crucially, how does one author assume the voice of another?

It was a question Rosoff grappled with, when picking up Beck where Peet left off. But the solution soon came to her: “the answer, I discovered, is not to.” It seems then, if an author is sufficiently in synch with the person whose work they are continuing, a book finished posthumously by another author can do well.

The 2022 Ned Kelly Awards shortlists have been announced by the Australian Crime Writers Association. This year the work of nineteen writers has been shortlisted in four categories.

Best debut crime fiction

• Sweet Jimmy, by Bryan Brown
• Shadow Over Edmund Street, by Suzanne Frankham
• Cutters End, by Margaret Hickey
• Banjawarn, by Josh Kemp

Best true crime

• The Mother Wound, by Amani Haydar
• Larrimah, by Caroline Graham and Kylie Stevenson
• Banquet: The untold story of Adelaide’s family murders, by Debi Marshall
• A Witness of Fact, by Drew Rooke

Best international crime fiction

• Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet
• The Heron’s Cry, by Ann Cleeves
• The Maid, by Nita Prose
• Cry Wolf, by Hans Rosenfeldt

Best crime fiction

• The Enemy Within, by Tim Ayliffe
• The Others, by Mark Brandi
• You Had it Coming, by B M Carroll
• The Chase, by Candice Fox
• Kill Your Brother, by Jack Heath
• The Family Doctor, by Debra Oswald
• The Deep, by Kyle Perry

The winners will be announced in early August 2022.

We’re in the middle of National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee week, or NAIDOC week, in Australia, which is a celebration of the history, culture, and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

It’s also a good opportunity to focus on the literature of Indigenous and First Nation people, and Twenty reasons you should read blak, by author and activist Anita Heiss, is an awesome starting point. The suggestions were made during a speech Heiss gave at the Blak and Bright Festival in 2016.

And now for something a little different… Maryna Viazovska, James Maynard, June Huh, and Hugo Duminil-Copin, have been named recipients of the 2022 Fields Medals, which recognise outstanding mathematical achievement. The Fields Medals are only awarded every four years, to mathematicians under the age of forty, by the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union.

I suck at maths, I truly do. I need a spreadsheet to reconcile my budget to buy cups of coffee. But I was impressed by the work undertaken by the 2022 recipients. Hugo Duminil-Copin was commended for “solving longstanding problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions in statistical physics, especially in dimensions three and four.”

That made some sense, up until the word phase.

Maryna Viazovska’s work also sounds outstanding: “for the proof that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing of identical spheres in 8 dimensions, and further contributions to related extremal problems and interpolation problems in Fourier analysis.”

No, sorry, I didn’t get a single word of that. Thankfully though there are people in the world who understand these sorts of things.

The Random Exhibition Title Generator was a bit of a favourite in the earlier version of disassociated, when I originally linked to it in 2011. While choosing a name for an exhibition is probably the least of an artist’s worries — because I expect just about every other aspect of putting on an art show is onerous — apparently more than a few people found it useful. I hope you too find it helpful.

In the wake of a request from the United States Federal Communications Commission that Apple and Google remove TikTok from their app stores, James Paterson, an Australian opposition senator, has raised concerns about the security of Australian TikTok users’ data, in a letter posted on Twitter.

Even though TikTok servers are based in America and Singapore, there are fears Chinese government officials may have access to the data of Australian TikTok users.

Australian users’ data is stored in servers in the US and Singapore, which raises questions about whether that data is subject to the same security concerns. Liberal Senator James Paterson has publicly put it to TikTok to address those concerns. “Australian TikTok users deserve to know whether their private information is equally exposed,” Mr Paterson wrote on Twitter.

Goodreads has published a list of members top book choices so far, for 2022, across six genres. To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, The Maid by Nita Prose, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, and The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, are among titles at, or near, the top of their category.

A total of twenty-one books, in four categories, including the inaugural Karijia Award, have been named on the 2022 Environment Award for Children’s Literature shortlist, a literary award which is hosted by the Wilderness Society.

Notable among those included on the shortlist is retired Australian Football League player Adam Goodes, whose book, Somebody’s Land: Welcome to Our Country, co-written with Ellie Laing, has been named on the Karijia Award shortlist, a prize which recognises the best in First Nations storytelling for children.

Picture Fiction:

• The Accidental Penguin Hotel, by Andrew Kelly, illustrated by Dean Jones
• 9 things to remember (and one to forget), written and illustrated by Alison Binks
• Sharing, by Aunty Fay Muir and Sue Lawson, illustrated by Leanne Mulgo Watson
• One Potoroo: A Story of Survival, by Penny Jaye, illustrated by Alicia Rogerson
• The River, by Sally Morgan, illustrated by Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr
• Saving Seal. The Plastic Predicament, by Diane Jackson Hill, illustrated by Craig Smith

Non-fiction:

• The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Peculiar Pairs in Nature, by Sami Bayly
• The Australian Climate Change Book, by Polly Marsden, illustrated by Chris Nixon
• The Way of the Weedy Seadragon, by Anne Morgan, illustrated by Lois Bury
• The Gentle Genius of Trees, written and illustrated by Philip Bunting

Fiction:

• Fish Kid and the Turtle Torpedo, written and illustrated by Kylie Howarth
• Bailey Finch Takes a Stand, by Ingrid Laguna
• The Good Times of Pelican Rise: Save the Joeys, by Samone Amba

The Karijia Award for Children’s Literature:

• Sea Country, by Aunty Patsy Cameron, illustrated by Lisa Kennedy
• Sharing, by Aunty Fay Muir and Sue Lawson, illustrated by Leanne Mulgo Watson
• Warna-Manda Baby Earth Walk, by Susan Betts, illustrated by Mandy Foot and Susan Betts
• Wiradjuri Country, by Larry Brandy
• Somebody’s Land: Welcome to Our Country, by Adam Goodes and Ellie Laing, illustrated by David Hardy
• The Story Doctors, by Boori Monty Pryor, illustrated by Rita Sinclair
• The River, by Sally Morgan, illustrated by Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr
• Walking in Gagudju Country: Exploring the Monsoon Forest, by Diane Lucas and Ben Tyler, illustrated by Emma Long

The winners will announced during Nature Book Week, which takes place from Monday 5 September 2022 through to Sunday 11 September.

EmilyBlaster is a game developed by characters in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the latest novel by Los Angeles based American author Gabrielle Zevin, which is being published by Penguin Random House tomorrow, 5 July 2022.

This isn’t something we see every day, a device, or object, featured in a work of fiction that becomes actual or tangible. The object of the game is pretty simple, all the more so if you’re familiar with the work of nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson. To succeed a player needs to shoot words appearing on the screen in the correct order, to form one of Dickinson’s poems, which is shown before the game begins.

My accuracy level was — let’s say — nothing to write home about, but maybe you’ll fare better. The game itself — by the sounds of things — is one of many produced by Sam Masur, and Sadie Green, who collaborate successfully while still studying at university in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow:

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Zevin says EmilyBlaster is one of the first games she devised in the novel, which she intended be simple yet effective:

It’s the simplest game in the book, and I needed it to be convincingly something a clever college student might be able to make on limited resources and time in the 1990s. The game was inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and by edutainment games of the 1980s, like Math Blaster!