Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 19 March
12:45 PM - 1:15 PM
Why is contemporary fiction increasingly obsessed with post-apocalyptic scenarios? Is it a straight reflection of the bad news stories about our worsening environmental situation, or is something else at play? Can there be hope at the end of the world?
Andrew Macrae is the author of Trucksong, a dystopian science-fiction novel about lost love, flesh-eating cyborg trucks and the search for meaning in a post-apocalyptic Australia. He’ll explore current themes in dystopian speculative fiction … and explain why he finds it all surprisingly cheery.
Featuring
Andrew Macrae
Andrew Macrae grew up in Toowoomba in regional Queensland, raised on the sound of prime movers grinding up and down the Great Dividing Range at night. He had a thing for the 1970s trucking movies that seemed to be on the black and white TV every Friday and Saturday night, and his first novel Trucksong grew out of these cultural memories, along with a healthy dose of Mad Max 2.
He now lives in Melbourne, where he runs a freelance writing and editing business called Magic Typewriter. His short fiction has appeared in Australian speculative fiction markets such as Agog!, Aurealis, Orb, Midnight Echo and Fantastical Journeys to Brisbane (edited by Zoran Zivkovic, Geoff Maloney and Trent Jamieson). Trucksong was nominated for three awards for Australian science fiction in 2014: the Aurealis, Ditmar and Norma K. Hemming.
Andrew also plays guitar in Melbourne instrumental rock band The Television Sky.