Join us for an evening with Garth Nix, New York Times bestseller and master of Australian speculative fiction, as he chats to fellow writer James Bradley about his first foray into adult science fiction, Massif — a brilliant and poignant stand-alone story of sentient starships, galactic warfare, and the bonds a crew forms far, far from Earth. An expert in world-building, Garth Nix will take us on a behind-the-scenes journey of one of the biggest science fiction novels of 2026.

6:30pm arrivals for a 7pm start.

Tickets: $10 per person (+ GST and Humanitix fee)

Please note: Your $10 ticket fee is redeemable on night towards any book purchase. Please see staff on the night.

About the book:

It’s business as usual for Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla and the crew of the corvette Sassafras. Ride a Massif to a new system, fight the enemy, repeat. For more than two hundred years, humans have been hitching rides on these sentient, starfaring mountain ranges, colonising planets and exporting an on-again, off-again war between Earth and Mars.

But the big questions are always there, behind every battle, every new colony, every new star system discovery.

Why do the Massifs carry humans to the stars?
Why do they help us export our wars?
What’s in it for the Massifs?

Ship crews aren’t supposed to ask these questions, they aren’t supposed to think about these questions, and they definitely aren’t supposed to go deep and talk to Massif avatars. But now Parnell and his tight-knit crew must try to find the answers, to save not only themselves but the future of humanity.

About the authors:

Garth Nix has been a full-time writer since 2001. More than seven million copies of Garth’s books have been sold around the world, appearing on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, and others. His work has been translated into 42 languages, and he has won multiple Aurealis Awards, the ABIA Award, Ditmar Award, the Mythopoeic Award, CBCA Honour Book, and has been shortlisted for the Lodestar Award, the Locus Awards, the Shirley Jackson Award, and others. In 2025, Garth was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for ‘services to literature’.

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His books include the novels Landfall, Wrack, The Deep Field, Clade, and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and a work of non-fiction, Deep Water. His essays and articles have appeared in The Monthly, The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Weekend Australian, and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2012, he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. He lives in Sydney.

Contact the host of An Evening with Garth Nix