Paul Voermans (born 4 June 1960) is an Australian performer, community IT advocate, and writer of prose and poetry, whose work includes a number of novels. Published as science fiction, the novels contain elements of surrealism, horror, and humour. They have been compared to RA Lafferty and Douglas Adams.
Paul Voermans was born in Traralgon, Victoria, in 1960. The son of Indo refugees, Voermans was brought up in suburban Melbourne under the White Australia Policy and during a wave of European immigration. In the 1970s, while still a teenager, he studied writing with Vonda McIntyre, Christopher Priest, and George Turner at a Clarion-style workshop held at Monash University. [1]
After studying drama at Melbourne State College, Voermans helped found B'Spell Performance Troupe, [2] a community puppet and Commedia dell'arte theatre company, associated with Handspan Theatre, Suitcase Theatre, and the Magic Mushroom Mime Troupe, performing at festivals around Australia, in schools, on streets, and a number of alternative Melbourne venues such as the Why Not Theatre and The Universal Theatre in the 1970s and 1980s.
Voermans exhibited masks and puppets at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Arts Centre Melbourne and taught mime at the Victorian College of the Arts. He played the silent character Max Box in Trapp, Winkle & Box for ABC TV, appearing with Wendy Harmer, Robert Forza, and Lynda Gibson, before moving to the United Kingdom for a number of years, where he wrote his first novel while working as a butler and in the kitchen of a psychiatric institution in the late 1980s.
Returning to Australia in the 1990s, Voermans helped launch VICNET, a proto-Internet service provider and community web publisher at the State Library of Victoria, leading the technical team that produced early versions of the genealogy database, social media (My Connected Community [3] ), and intranet, installing free public internet in libraries based on a direct US satellite service, and advocating for information equality for regional and other disadvantaged groups. He has since worked for the Victorian Government in Information Technology innovation, cloud computing and remote working.
Voermans has recently returned to publishing novels. He lives in South Gippsland, near Meeniyan.
Theatre, colonialism, natural history, insanity, the dynamics of friendship groups, along with off-the-wall and often scatological humour, are all preoccupations for Paul Voermans. Chantal Zabus [4] has described And Disregards the Rest, a novel involving The Tempest and alien invasion, as being about "ecocide", saying "Voermans is aware of the intertext that emerged, in the 1980s, strata from sci-fi texts and 'high art' postmodernist fiction", asserting that "And Disregards the Rest indubitably draws on the cyberpunk repertoire".
Critic and novelist George Turner once wrote about Voermans's work that "there are enough things wrong with this novel to sink the collected writings of Tolstoy and Dickens", noting that these faults might not stand in the way of Voermans's writing career.
Paul Voermans's themes are more directly accessible in his poetry.
"Manipulating Reality, Puppetry and Mask in Australia" at the National Gallery of Victoria (1981) [7]
B'Spell Performance Troupe:
Jika Jika Puppets: The Adventures of Platypus Phil
Aaargh! Solo Performance
Dobba (with Karl Presser).
"Wild Thing" Darebin Arts Centre, The Five O'Clock Shadows [8]
"Trapp, Winkle & Box", ABC TV [9]
Dunning-Kruger Dance Mirror, the website of Paul Voermans. [10]
The novels And Disregards the Rest and The Weird Colonial Boy were shortlisted for the Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award, the Ditmar Award.
Sean Christopher McMullen is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author.
Damien Francis Broderick is an Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books. His science fiction novel The Dreaming Dragons (1980) introduced the trope of the generation time machine, his The Judas Mandala (1982) contains the first appearance of the term "virtual reality" in science fiction, and his 1997 popular science book The Spike was the first to investigate the technological singularity in detail.
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George Reginald Turner was an Australian writer and critic, best known for the science fiction novels written in the later part of his career. His first science fiction story and novel appeared in 1978, when he was in his early sixties. By this point, however, he had already achieved success as a mainstream novelist, including a Miles Franklin Award, and as a literary critic.
The Ditmar Award is Australia's oldest and best-known science fiction, fantasy and horror award, presented annually since 1969, usually at the Australian "Natcon". The historical nominations and results of the Award follow.
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Erle Cox was an Australian journalist and science fiction writer.
Terence William (Terry) Dowling, is an Australian writer and journalist. He writes primarily speculative fiction though he considers himself an "imagier" – one who imagines, a term which liberates his writing from the constraints of specific genres. He has been called "among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia, a writer who stubbornly hews his own path ."
Lee John Harding was an Australian freelance photographer, who became a writer of science fiction novels and short stories.
Rick Kennett is an Australian writer of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. He is the most prolific and widely published genre author in Australia after Paul Collins, Terry Dowling and Greg Egan, with stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies in Australia, the US and the UK.
Van Ikin is an academic and science fiction writer and editor. A professor in English at the University of Western Australia, he retired from teaching in 2015 and is now a senior honorary research fellow. He has acted as supervisor for several Australian writers completing their post-graduate degrees and doctorates — including science fiction and fantasy writers Terry Dowling, Stephen Dedman, and Dave Luckett — and received the university's Excellence in Teaching Award for Postgraduate Research Supervision in 2000.
Australia, unlike Europe, does not have a long history in the genre of science fiction. Nevil Shute's On the Beach, published in 1957, and filmed in 1959, was perhaps the first notable international success. Though not born in Australia, Shute spent his latter years there, and the book was set in Australia. It might have been worse had the imports of American pulp magazines not been restricted during World War II, forcing local writers into the field. Various compilation magazines began appearing in the 1960s and the field has continued to expand into some significance. Today Australia has a thriving SF/Fantasy genre with names recognised around the world. In 2013 a trilogy by Sydney-born Ben Peek was sold at auction to a UK publisher for a six-figure deal.
Barry Hill is an Australian historian, writer, and academic.
Bruce Gillespie is a prominent Australian science fiction fan best known for his long-running sf fanzine SF Commentary. Along with Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand, he was a founding editor of Norstrilia Press, which published Greg Egan's first novel.
Frank Harvey was a British-born actor, producer, and writer, best known for his work in Australia.
The Ditmar Award has been awarded annually since 1969 at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention to recognise achievement in Australian science fiction and science fiction fandom. The award is similar to the Hugo Award but on a national rather than international scale.
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Paul Mitchell is an author of five books in Melbourne.
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