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The Children's Book Council of Australia
Notable Books Report 1999
Older Readers: Goodman, Alison
It's not necessary to be a fan of science fiction to enjoy this story. The plot is futuristic, but the theme is timeless. The need to be loved, to know your own identity, and to have freedom to follow your destiny is important to everyone. The author has created a very believable future world with many recognisable references to our own era. It's an original well-paced story with a feisty and engaging heroine. Here is a voice that sings.
Kirkus Reviews
A thrilling debut explores a richly textured future society.
Seventeen-year-old Joss is heading towards her expulsion number 13. When alien Mavkel becomes the first of his telepathic species to study at the Centre for Neo-Historical Studies, he chooses Joss as his study partner. Joss is relieved; Mavkel's diplomatic status should protect her from expulsion. But something is rotten on campus: an assassin is on the loose, with an unknown target. Joss's estranged journalist mother is – as always – unreachable. The Centre director is mysteriously determined to expel Joss. On top of everything else, Mavkel is telepathically crippled and occasionally suicidal as a result of an accident that claimed his alien twin. Will Joss choose to save Mavkel, or protect her own sense of self?
Joss's society has many elements of cyberpunk – virtual reality, a complex underworld, biology melded with technology – but her story is more satisfying than a typical cyberpunk mystery. In Joss's powerful coming-of-age, she learns her place among family, friends, and her larger society. Though secondary to the plot, Joss's changing relationship with her mother is heartbreakingly real.
A gripping tale in a fully-realized world. A winner.
(Science fiction, 13+)
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School Library Journal
Sharon Rawlins,
Piscataway Public Library, NJ
Grade 8 Up
This highly entertaining Australian novel is an unusual mixture of genres: time travel, comedic mystery thriller, and realistic portrayal of familial and alien relationships.
Surprisingly, it works extremely well entirely due to the fact that the main character is so perfectly drawn.
Joss Aaronson, 18, is an indpendent, spirited, and feisty young woman with a sarcastic mouth. She rarely sees her mother, a famous newscaster.
Joss was conceived via a gene donor: 'Straight from the petri dish to you.' She's been expelled from several schools and is close to expulsion from a prestigious university program in time-travel studies. For the first time, an alien from another planet has been admitted, and Joss is his study partner and roommate. A wicked harmonica player, she is intrigued that Mavkel's species communicates by harmonizing through song. His twin has died and he will, too, if he doesn't find someone with whom to join minds. He chooses Joss, although to help him, she needs to find out who her father was. Thus, the partners embark upon a dangerous, illegal journey back in time.
The plot and characterizations are well done; the book has lots of action, witty dialogue, and pop-culture references, and sensitively portrays complicated relationships between a mother and a daughter, and members of different cultures.
This book is more inventive than Mary Logue's Dancing with an Alien (HarperCollins, 2000) and, unlike M. T. Anderson's Feed (Candlewick, 2002), the tone of the made-up language is meant to be funny.
While easy to decipher, the language is a bit crude. This intriguing and exciting read had lots of teen appeal.
Australian Book Review
TIME TO FIND MYSELF
Bruce Gillespie
October 1988
Readers of science fiction tend to discover the genre during their early teens, which should make sf an ideal sub-genre of Young Adult fiction. But the mainstay of the Young Adults genre, as it has developed over the last thirty years, is the novel of family relationships. Science fiction writers are often uncomfortable with personal relationships. The stars are their destination, not the living room; transcendence is the game, not emotional sustenance.
It's refreshing then to read Alison Goodman's Singing the Dogstar Blues, which demonstrates its author's familiarity with both science fiction and Young Adult fiction and her ability to achieve originality in both genres.
On the surface, Singing the Dogstar Blues is a compendium of familiar science fiction ideas. She shows us Melbourne in the middle of the next century. Non-threatening aliens (The Chorians) have landed on earth, wanting to trade technologies. They offer instantaneous space travel. Melbourne offers time travel, developed by the Sunawa-Harrod Centre of Neo-Historical Studies.
Goodman does not waste space drawing laborious pictures of this near-future society. Sketches are more interesting; these sketches are provided by Joss Aaronson, the book's seventeen-(nearly eighteen-)year-old storyteller. Joss is sitting in the Buzz Bar, centre of her social underworld. The conversation with the barman and his son reveals much about the stratified social structure of Goodman's future Australia, tells of Joss' uncomfortable relationship with her mother Ingrid and begins the story of Joss' career as a time jumper.
Joss has been accepted as one of the twelve students of the Centre of Neo-Historical Studies who will be trained to become time jumpers. She faces career problems, especially Professor Joseph Camden-Stone, head of the Centre. For reasons unknown, he wants Joss to fail the course and leave the Centre. Time jumpers train in pairs. Joss is selected as a partner by Mavkel, the first Chorian to take the course, so Camden-Stone is forced to let her stay.
Joss is a 'comp' (composite), tomorrow's equivalent of today's test-tube babies. Fifty years from now there will be large numbers of comps, treated by many as a subclass within society. Joss does not know the name of her sperm-donor 'father'. Her rich mother sends her money and otherwise ignores her most of the time. Sardonic and free-wheeling though she likes to appear, Joss knows that her position in this future society is very vulnerable.
The complications of Joss' family background are not merely bits of characterisation, but are central to the practical problems of becoming a time jumper. Mavkel, whose hermaphroditic partner Kelmarv has been killed, needs to bond with Joss at a telepathic level before the new partnership can work. This cannot happen until 'bloodlines' are established: Joss must find out who her father was, although all official records of his name have long since been erased. At the same time she needs to find out why she is being followed by two threatening types, a muscly mystery man, and Tori Suka, a well-known professional assassin.
Usually Joss would have to survive two years of training before being allowed to time jump. The urgent need to travel backwards eighteen years to find out her father's name impels her and her friends to hijack a time machine. Goodman is particularly good at putting the reader through the experience of time travel, travelling to a place that is familiar but in which everything is suddenly unfamiliar.
Family problems are as pressing as time travel problems. From Joss'viewpoint, her mother Ingrid is a cold careerist, who sends presents rather than turning up for her daughter's birthday. But Ingrid's ex-partner Louise, who meets Joss for her eighteenth birthday, tells her that Ingrid has always been afraid of Joss. 'Isn't it time,' she asks, 'you saw your mother as a real person instead of Godzilla?'
Mavkel becomes part of Joss' life in uncomfortable and hilarious ways. Joss' one consolation in life is playing twentieth century blues on the mouth harp. To Mavkel, human music is deeply disturbing. On Choria, it is used only for healing. Mavkel wants to stay physically close to his new partner because he cannot 'talk' to her telepathically. Joss, ever the loner, has great difficulty with this closeness.
The tense and superbly managed mystery story is one of the book's strengths. The other is Joss' voice. Time and again, she will relate a bit of the story, only to sum up the situation with a deft phrase or piece of future slang. The Chorians have voices 'kind of like Billie Holiday with a cold'. When Mavkel is moved to embrace her 'it was like being kissed by a mildmannered vacuum cleaner'.
Singing the Dogstar Blues is a mystery story, a thriller, and a family drama, told in a vivid, sardonic, constantly hilarious style that swings the reader straight into the middle of this future society without distracting us with uncomfortable lumps of science fictional explanations. It is an exhilarating novel that escapes the limitation of genre.
Bruce Gillespie is a specialist in SF.
Magpies
Vol. 13 No. 5 November 1998
New Books – Extending Readers
Neville Barnard
It could be argued that science fiction is the most difficult genre to write well. Added to the usual components of a story such as plot, characters and setting are the challenges of predicting/inventing technology and the society of the future. On top of this the reader must be encouraged to suspend belief – something most other genres don't need to do. This task is made more difficult when features such as alien lifeforms and time travel are introduced.
Singing the Dogstar Blues successfully manages the task. The complexities of the plot are not easily encapsulated – an eighteen-year-old girl living in the future begins training as a time traveller. Conceived artificially, emotionally scarred by the breakdown of the same sex relationship of her carers and street-wise beyond her years, she is far from comfortable with her life. Into this mix comes the first alien enrolled into the university – an alien destined to become her training partner. Add an assassin, scientific fraud, conspiracy and lots of believable technology and you have an engrossing tale where all the threads come together in a satisfying conclusion.
The strength of the book lies in the genuine depth given to the main characters. Despite the ever present technology this book is about people and their relationships. The characters are always more important then the gadgets.
The target audience, adolescents with fully functional literacy skills and an open mind on social issues, will find this light-years ahead of much of the dross served up to them.
Reading Time
Vol. 42 No. 4
A.H.
Joss is a student undertaking a prestigious time-travelling course and although often rebellious, she is chosen to partner Mavkel, the first Chorian to study on Earth. The harmonica that Joss plays to sooth her troubled soul acts as a conduit between her and the Chorian who, like others of his species, uses harmony to communicate. Even so, Mavkel pines for his twin Chorian, and Joss realises that only she can prevent his death, so together they travel back in time to discover essential information that has a significant impact on both their lives.
This is a fascinating story which explores the possibilities of the future and of the people who live in it in a creative but realistic way. Security and communicaiton systems, organic computers control many people's lives in a way that we can already visualise. Time travel seems a real possibility, but despite all the technological developments, people are still insecure, greedy, jealous, and still search for fulfilment and companionship just as they have always done.
Goodman develops plot and character skilfully, and creates settings that are down to earth but also futuristic and imaginative. Many young readers will be intrigued by this novel, and will look for more by this accomplished writer.
Viewpoint
Vol. 6 (4) Summer 1998
S.L.
Those who have read the SF short story anthology The Patternmaker may recall Goodman's 'One Last Zoom at the Buzz Bar'. Some of the action of Singing the Dogstar Blues happens in the Buzz Bar, and this novel arose out of that story.
Joss is a seventeen-year-old who can't stand attempts to regulate her life; a determined rebel with a mother whose career is taking her further and further away from any decent relationship with Joss, and a father whom she knows only as a nameless sperm donor.
Starting her studies at the University of Australia in Melbourne, Joss is specialising in time travel. Fortuitously, the Chorians, aliens who have just made contact with Earth, want to swap Earth's knowledge of time travel with their knowledge of time/space warping. Their representative student, Mavkel, is allocated to Joss as her partner. As a pair, they set out to discover Joss' father and outwit the Director of the Centre for Neo-Historical Studies, Professor Camden-Stone.
The plot roles along with pace and some surprising twists, the outcome is achieved in a last minute cliffhanger, and the ideas behind contact with extraterrestials are explored with finesse.
What lifts Singing the Dogstar Blues well out of the run-of-the-mill SF is Goodman's ironic and cheeky humour and her control over character development. Joss is like a young female version of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout: street-wise, quick thinking, smart talking. Singing the Dogster Blues will appeal beyond the dedicated SF fans to other readers who want wit, action and some very inventive language.
