Science Fiction

Much science and fantasy fiction is written in a predominantly realist mode. This is the most economical means of signifying the internal truth of its fictional worlds, no matter how strange its aliens, or how superhuman the powers of its heroes. So, for example, Tolkien writes, ‘Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other; and moved them to the edge of the shelf.’ Whatever his nature – half-Ent, half-tree – Treebeard comfortably occupies the grammatical subject position.

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.

For a reviewer, there’s always a temptation to seek a link when writing about more than one book at a time. In this instance, the link, if there is one, is that both these novels for young adults attempt to recreate other worlds, albeit in one case an imagined one, in the other a ‘real’ one. In other respects, however, they could hardly be more different. One credits its readers with intelligence and stamina, the other condescends to them.

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.

Readers of science fiction tend to discover the genre during their early teens, which should make sf an ideal sub-genre of Young Adult fiction. But the mainstay of the Young Adults genre, as it has developed over the last thirty years, is the novel of family relationships. Science fiction writers are often uncomfortable with personal relationships. The stars are their destination, not the living room; transcendence is the game, not emotional sustenance.

The apocalypse might have seemed like pretty stimulating stuff when St John was writing about it, but these days. the post-Apocalyptic landscape is a well-trodden literary territory. This fact notwithstanding, Colleen McCullough’s latest screen-fodder epic, A Creed for the Third Millennium, goes back to the future one more time, to the year 2032, when mankind is under threat, not from nuclear war but from an incipient ice age. This is because the world’s glaciers have put on an uncharacteristic turn of speed, but curiously, this improbable and unexplained phenomenon is one of the few indications that the setting is the future – otherwise the impression one gains is that technology has stood still for fifty years. As is so often the case it is the Department of Environment, which is fostering a secret plan to find a man of charisma and use him as a messiah to bolster the flagging morale of the people of America. The person in charge of this program is Dr Judith Carriol, and the man eventually chosen for the job of messiah is Dr Joshua Christian. If the significance of those names goes unnoticed, it should be remarked that Dr Christian lives with, among others, his brothers, James and Andrew, and his sister Mary. McCullough is very much a proponent of the bludgeon approach to symbolism, as if the difficulties inherent in successfully rewriting the story of Christ’s preaching years weren’t great enough without this fatal tendency to make every allusion so painfully clear, and to drag the plot out in a similarly unsubtle fashion.

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.

Science-fiction short stories traditionally made their first appearance in American and British pulp magazines. The best stories then appeared in anthologies. In recent years more stories have been published for the first time in all-new anthologies, skipping the preliminary magazine stage. This in turn has led to the growth of science fiction publication in those countries, such as Australia, which do not have sufficient population to support specialist science fiction magazines of their own. Other Worlds and Rooms of Paradise are each all-new anthologies of science fiction. Rooms of Paradise is the more polished collection. Six of its twelve stories are by established overseas writers – including stars like Brian Aldiss and R.A. Lafferty – and the other six are by Australians. The local product is not overshadowed in this company; I think that in general the Australian stories are as well written and more original.

This is an interesting first novel about a writer of Science Fiction stories, Juniper, who has a recurring nightmare about floating around the moon in a space unit. It begins and ends with one of those sequences, which alternate with sharply observed scenes of student life. Hector, Juniper’s oldest friend, is the eternal student, flitting from religion to religion and from ideology to ideology. His wife, Matty, gets fed up with him and goes to live with Juniper. The friendship between the men continues, the strain showing more in Juny’s recurring nightmare than in actual confrontations. Hector takes to drugs and violent films and in the last scene of the book thinks he’s watching a rather repetitious film while he sees Juny being beaten up and nearly kicked to death.