Sparks, Cat
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1965- ) Australian publisher, editor, illustrator and author, most of whose early fiction – which she began publishing with "The Invasion of the Latte Snatcher" in Mitch?: Tales of the New Millennium (anth 2001) edited by Anthony Mitchell as Mitch? – is horror. She has won several Ditmar Awards for short fiction and for her publishing and editing work. Agog! Press, founded in 2002 with her husband, horror author Robert Hood (1951- ), survived as an independent operation until 2006, and was notable for the Agog! series of Original Anthologies beginning with Agog!: Fantastic Fiction (anth 2002), which published a large number of Australian authors of the new century, in a roster that includes creators of Fantastika worldwide. She was fiction editor of the Australian popular science magazine Cosmos (which see) from 2011 to 2016. Sparks is of sf interest for Lotus Blue (2017), set in a distant Near Future Ruined Earth version of the Australian outback, the narrative almost inevitably evoking aspects of the Mad Max Post-Holocaust series, though with a deft embeddedness in a world imaginable beyond the claws of the road topos, though encounters with weaponized semi-sentient Robots fail to strike a new note. The eponymous Weapon, an extremely ancient war Machine, is, however, cunningly deployed. Some tales set in the same world appear in Dark Harvest (coll 2020). [JC]
Catriona Sparks
born Sydney, New South Wales: 11 September 1965
works
- Lotus Blur (New York: Skyhorse Publishing/Talos Press, 2017) [pb/Lauren Saint-Onge]
collections
- The Bride Price (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2013) [coll: pb/Cat Sparks]
- Dark Harvest (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2020) [coll: hb/Cat Sparks]
works as editor
series
Agog
- Agog!: Fantastic Fiction (Wollongong, New South Wales: Agog! Press, 2002) [anth: pb/Cat Sparks]
- Agog!: Terrific Tales (Wollongong, New South Wales: Agog! Press, 2003) [anth: pb/Cat Sparks]
- Agog!: Smashing Stories (Wollongong, New South Wales: Agog! Press, 2004) [anth: pb/Cat Sparks]
- Agog!: Ripping Reads (Wollongong, New South Wales: Agog! Press, 2006) [anth: pb/Cat Sparks]
individual titles as editor
- Ecopunk! (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2017) with Liz Grzyb [anth: pb/Peggy Hewitt]
links
previous versions of this entry