“Mono No Aware,” my favorite piece in the collection, describes an Earth nearing destruction. In “The Literomancer,” a young girl with big dreams of becoming a bullfighter moves to China in the 1960s with her military family and has trouble adjusting. In it, a boy's Chinese mother makes him origami animals that move after she breathes into them. The title piece became the first work of fiction to win all three of SFF's major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award. These melancholy and gorgeous short stories infused with Chinese history and culture have won many awards.

I was not made to change anything except for the spelling.The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu (Gallery/Saga Press) 'The American publisher wasn't worried about it being Australian. 'It's an Australian story, and that's why it was so disappointing I couldn't sell it in Australia,' she says. Sparks' own far-future sci-fi novel, Lotus Blue, is set in Australia but published by the American firm Skyhorse. The same issue applies, Sparks says, with novels as well. 'Now our top quality short story writers need to send their work overseas to get a broad readership,' she says. Sparks was the fiction editor at Cosmos, a popular science magazine, until 2016, when the magazine stopped publishing short fiction.

'It's quite difficult to get a science fiction novel published by an Australian publisher,' says Cat Sparks, a publisher of science fiction anthologies. While the overall Australian publishing scene is robust, Australian science fiction writers believe their work is not being adequately supported by the industry.

Tor publishing australia