AustLit

'The article documents the editorial relationship between Peter Carey and his New York based editor for Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, who worked with Carey on his True History of the Kelly Gang. This account provides the basis for a discussion of how globalised publishing, while promising unity—a single text across all territories—has instead introduced a tension into the previously cohesive triad of author, editor, and the single authorized text. As Fisketjon's experience lays bare, major contemporary texts that are published in multiple editions in different global centers may well proceed through competing or at least parallel editing processes with different presses, different editors, and in different publishing territories. The authorized single edition, even of major literary texts, has been replaced by competing editions. The single edit and editor have been replaced by competing "servant[s] of the writer" (to use Fisketjon's phrase). Cohesion, while not quite giving way to disunity, gives way to multiplicity and plurality. The experience of the Kelly Gang book is cast against a longer narrative of Carey's interactions with editors including the University of Queensland Press (UQP) from the 1970s and Faber from the 1980s.

'Science fiction is popular in Australia. Yet very little science fiction is published in Australia. This essay establishes and examines the paradoxical truth of these two statements. Australian interest in science fiction is shown by reviewing local bookshops, authors, literary events and fan culture. The lack of Australian-published science fiction is shown by examining accounts of local publishing, sampling what is stocked in bookshops and surveying the output of publishing houses. The reasons for this lack are literary snobbishness, the success of the related genre of fantasy, and the importation of foreign-published science fiction.' (Publisher's abstract)