Space Age Genre

Science Fiction (speculative fiction, sf, sci-fi, whatever) is not much more than a century old. H.G. Wells called his pioneering efforts ‘scientific romances’, still a good name, and his wonderfully fecund The Time Machine and War of the Worlds were published as late as 1895 and 1898. So Australia as a Europeanised nation is even younger than this ‘space age’ genre. If you push it back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, its birth coincides with white settlement. Time enough, you’d think, to grow plenty of Aussie sf. In fact, though, it’s seemed rather thin on the ground. In the last decade we have seen a burst of talented activity in both sf proper and commercial fantasy (usually fat novels or trilogies set in a variant of Middle Earth, with dashing derring-do among semi-divine characters enacting mythic themes). Still, you could easily get the impression than Australians don’t care to dream about the stars and their strange inhabitants – unless they speak in American accents, of course, in which case we eagerly gulp down X Files, Star Wars, Star Trek, a hundred gaudy movies, a thousand imported paperbacks. How genuinely startling, then, to find that a whole volume can properly be devoted to Aussie sf, fantasy (and commercial horror, an adjacent genre). It is no surprise that Australians are notable critics – not just carping complainers, either, but astute anatomists and cataloguers of this strange new literary fruit. The first major encyclopaedia of sf, in three parts (1974, 1978, 1983), was written by a Tasmanian amateur scholar, Don Tuck. Now 76, Tuck was 1984 winner of sf’s premier award, the Hugo. The field’s most important volume ever, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, was also the brainchild of an Australian, Peter Nicholls, who won a Hugo in 1980 and then again, for its even larger revision, in 1995. (But, this being Australia; Nicholls was not even nominated for the equivalent local award for sf criticism.) If that volume ran to a fact- and opinion-chocked 1,370 pages, Paul Collins’ MUP book is more modest in every way, but instantly invaluable. Like the Nicholls’ encyclopaedia, it emphasises biographical author entries, typically between a quarter and one column long with extra space as needed to list every relevant novel, short story, radio play, or advertising jingle ever produced by an Aussie or by visitors to Australia or indeed, one begins to think, by everyone who has ever heard of the country. As well, there are useful thematic entries on, for example, ‘Indigenous Mythology’ (Archie Weller), ‘Fandom’, organisations of sf enthusiasts (Bruce Gillespie), ‘Early Australian SF’ (fan scholar Graham Stone and assistant editor Sean McMullen whose work provides the book’s spine), ‘Feminism’ (Lucy Sussex), ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Dark Fantasy’ or horror (assistant editor Steven Paulsen), ‘Radio’ (Robert Jan), ‘Television’ (the indefatigable McMullen and Paulsen) … and yet, incredibly, no concerted entry on ‘Science Fiction’ itself. That lapse is typical of the strengths and weaknesses of this important book. It tracks down every pseudonym used by Aussie sf writers, however briefly (seven of mine are given· individual and entirely pointless listings), but leaves out the one entry everyone who wants a sense of sf’s local landscape will wish to consult. Its sense of proportion, in short, is oddly skewed. Peter Nicholls’ charming and knowledgeable introduction mentions a deplorable practice of envious writers: they count the lines in their entry and compare the amount allotted their rivals. I thought I’d try it. Starting at the front, I find that sf bookseller Justin Ackroyd, briefly an assistant sf editor at Hodder Headline, gets twice the space granted ‘Cordwainer Smith’, perhaps the most important writer ever to produce sf written here and set in Australia – or, in his case, the brutal planet Old North Australia, or Norstrilia. (Sean McMullen’s grievously abbreviated entry on Smith incorrectly labels that setting ‘a future northern Australia’.) But then, what is an Aussie writer? ‘Smith’ (Dr Paul Linebarger) was a visiting scholar at the ANU on several occasions, but never moved here. Still, his fiction snared a weirdly Australian quality that seared into world sf’s growing textuality to a degree no native Aussie has yet managed. On the other hand, this is no proof of a bias against those born elsewhere. Perhaps the longest author entry is for my pal Jack Dann, who’s been here on and off since, uh, 1993. A well-known American literary sf fantasist and compulsive anthologist, Dann arrived at forty-eight to marry academic and writer, Janeen Webb. George Turner, who died last year and is widely regarded as the most worthy sf writer ever to have come out of Australia (he shared the 1963 Miles Franklin, and 1987’s The Sea and Summer won the Arthur Clarke award and was in the running for the Commonwealth Prize) apparently deserves only two-thirds Dann’s quota. (The individuals mentioned, needless to say, had nothing to do with these odd imbalances.) Most author entries are comprehensive and fair – certainly I have no complaints about my own – although some seem based rather too directly on the authors’ own drafts. That can’t be said of editor Collins’ regrettable treatment of Terry Dowling, whose work is ‘surrealistic and obscure’ such that ‘many readers find these stories at best impenetrable and at worst obtuse’. Dowling, in fact, is among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia. It’s the new, young writers, of course, who are especially interesting, making their mark on the world stage. Greg Egan is the most significant of these, and manages to score nearly as much space as Dann. It’s a pity that his most recent novel, Diaspora, merely listed in the huge tally of his work in English and translation, is omitted from Janeen Webb’s deft assessment. It’s also a mark of some editorial carelessness than some of his stories are shown as having appeared in Azimov’s magazine, a solecism the late Isaac Asimov was especially wroth to behold. Despite these lapses, the book is immediately a necessity, and must be purchased by every library and school, and any lover of these remarkable new ways of turning our convulsively changing history into richly transformed fiction.

Damien Broderick

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