Jacob Coates is a Brisbane publisher, who started Jaffa Books in 2011. He has about 15 authors, mainly of speculative fiction with some surrealist fiction. One of his authors is Jess E. Owen who wrote Song of the Summer King. In this novel, Shard is a young gryphon in danger. Mainly because is a threat to the red gryphon king.
Mr Coates liked British author Maggie Furey’s books, which he said were underrated. He liked the series The Shadowleague and the tetralogy, The Artefacts of Power.
He liked Y by Shane Jason Taylor, which is set in a dystopian future where men are kept as breeders. Rohan Mathews is a young student at the tower, trying to pass his classes and keep secret his relationship with his male best friend Kaden. Then he finds that his mother is on the run from security. He takes a flash drive and is told to escape. The overseer at the tower is in pursuit of Rohan and the data.
He also liked Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovski in which the last remnants of the human race set out to inhabit a new world, already prepared and terraformed for them. But new masters control this world and an arachnid nightmare awaits thanks to an Uplift project. Lots of large and intelligent arachnids.
Avril Sabine is a prolific author of young adult fantasy novels like Dragon Blood 1: Pliethin, Stone Warrior, Elf Sight, Earth Bound, and the Plea of the Damned series.
Ms Sabine liked Tamora Pierce books like Circle of Magic, which is a quartet of fantasy novels set in Emelan, a realm in a pseudo-medieval and renaissance era. Four young mages each with different magical powers, have to learn to control their powers and put them to use. Ms Sabine also liked the quartet of novels that followed, The Circle Opens.
Phil Noto was going to return to his hotel room after the Supanova and continue illustrating Star Wars: Poe Dameron comics. He has worked for Disney animation and many comics titles at DC. He liked Matheson’s I am Legend.
On an similar dystopian note, he also liked Winterworld, a comic written by Chuck Dixon with art work by Jorge Zaffino. It was originally published in the 1980s. The world is completely encased in ice in this post apocalyptic age. An amoral hero, Scully, scavenges in this ice world, excavating malls and other places beneath the ice and selling what he finds.
When he takes in a young orphan girl, Wynn, he and the girl form an alliance trying to survive bandit gangs, a tyrant and seeking a fabled lost people with the secrets of the ancients.

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– copyright Simon Sandall.