Damien Broderick

Since 1990 Australian science fiction (SF) has undergone an extraordinary renaissance. Previously, only a small number of writers, notably Damien Broderick, George Turner and A. Bertram Chandler, had achieved regular success in the major overseas markets of the UK and USA. Local publication of SF was largely restricted to small presses, such as Norstrilia and Cory & Collins, with sporadic support from mainstream and genre magazines.

From its mix of fiction and criticism to the format of its contents page, this collection is clearly a follow-up to Helen Merrick and Tess Williams’s feminist science fiction anthology, Women of Other Worlds (1999). There are, however, major differences. Women emerged from a unique and unrepeatable event, a meeting of live minds at the twentieth WisCon Feminist SF Convention. It is wildly eclectic, often irreverent, ranging from recipes and e-mail debates on gender to full-blown critical articles on female fan culture, united only by the feminist perspective and the contributor’s presence at WisCon. Its reprints go back no further than 1986. The reader is encouraged to dip. In contrast, Earth is united by its ostensible theme, ‘far futures’, with reprints from as far back as the 1930s, but only ‘proper’ fiction – stories, excerpts from novels – and ‘proper’ critical pieces. The overall tone is sober if not solemn, and the single-minded thematic focus produces a strong similarity to Vegemite. Small dips are quite enough.

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.

The epigraph to The Dreaming Dragons suggests that melodrama can accomplish ‘the articulation of the unsayable’.

Accordingly, this book evokes transpersonal consciousness through the medium of a gripping plot, whose effect of conveying ‘the unsayable’ is only heightened by the fact that the writer and his words sometimes seem at odds with one another. Thus, ‘the midday sun took barrenness into its fists and shook it’ is like Roger Zelazny impossibly faltering; and ‘wholly in the dimensions of tactual  and haptic space’ involves adjectival tautology. Overall, the writing seems designed to make readers stand back (melodramatically), rather than to lead them into enlightenment.