This is the official site of Australian speculative fiction writer Marianne de Pierres, award-wining author of the Parrish Plessis and Sentients of Orion series. She also writes the Davitt award-wining Tara Sharp humorous crime series under the pseudonym, Marianne Delacourt.

If you’re a reader of Marianne’s The Night Creatures trilogy (Burn Bright, Angel Arias and Shine Light) you might like to visit the Burn Bright website.

Marianne is represented by Tara Wynne of the Curtis Brown Literary Agency, Sydney.

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Reviewed by Jamie Marriage

If given the opportunity to avoid extinction would you take it? Even if it meant abandoning or even destroying everything you know?

This is the major question that David Brin’s novel Existence doesn’t so much try to answer as investigate from every angle.

During a routine space-junk collection mission astronaut Gerald Livingstone goes against protocol and lassos a crystalline object that has been drifting in Earth’s orbit for longer than anyone imagined. And when the crystal egg begins to speak with the voices of alien entities, welcoming humans to join them, the already precarious balance of Earth society is thrown into chaos.

Existence is a complex entity built primarily CyberPunk and Hard Sci-Fi components, but they aren’t the only elements that have been crafted together to tell this tale, and with stunning cohesion.

Hamish Brookeman, acclaimed novelist and director, is tasked with unravelling a plot that risks the plans of his secret society. And in turn exposes far more than he expects.

Hacker, an eccentric playboy, ends up in an extreme sporting accident that results in falling into a world of strangeness and grants him a new sense of purpose.

And Tor Pavlov, pop-culture reporter extraordinaire, prevents a terrorist bombing and becomes immersed in an online culture of unimaginable proportions.

But these are only a few of the many varied characters intertwined within Existence; each of whom have a vital part to play in the overall scheme of things. The tangle weave of betrayal, suspicion and subterfuge is constantly tinged with the hint of hope and progress. Especially when a second egg is discovered that refutes the grim tale of the first.

The writing of Existence is amazing, the characters flawless in their scope and the setting a fascinatingly erratic ride through worlds often difficult to comprehend, but never hard to picture with this level of storytelling. But be warned, this is a dense parable; filled from end to end with twisting points of views and narrators-a-plenty.

It isn’t a fast book, but it is a great book. And one worth taking the time to enjoy.

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There’s something very compelling about survivor stories. Probably because we all have moments when we wonder what we would do if … any number of things happened to us.

In this new series hosted by Charisma Carpenter, we get to hear  stories from women who’ve survived violent attacks.

The series begins with Charisma’s own personal recount of fighting back when she and some friends were attacked in San Diego by a then police officer.

You only have to spend a moment speaking with Charisma (and her wonderful mum) to know that she’s a woman with enormous spirit and perfect to host this kind of show. I wish her the best of luck with it, I have a feeling it will be incredibly successful …

SURVIVING EVIL (from TV Mole)
Featuring dramatically and emotional stories of women who fought back against their attackers and survived against
amazing odds, SURVIVING EVIL is hosted by Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia Chase on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel.) Carpenter is the survivor of a real-life incident that she endured more than 20 years ago and the series begins with her story. The actress and two friends were swimming at San Diego’s Torrey Pines State Beach in 1991 when they were violently attacked by an armed, rogue police officer. Carpenter fought for her survival after being held at gunpoint, but her two friends were both shot by the attacker and seriously wounded. The police officer was sentenced to 56 years in prison for the attacks in addition to a series of rapes and robberies.

Charisma tells TV Line: 

“It’s about empowerment, about victims who take fate into their own hands and rescue themselves, or seek justice and find it,” Carpenter says of I Survived Evil‘s mission. “It’s about heroes, stories of survival. And happy endings.”

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