Envisaged Worlds is an important anthology, not for the claims it makes, but for the claims it doesn’t.

Australian science-fiction has existed for a long time, taken from the time of the first publication of A. Bertram Chandler’s work, but as a body, an entity with something of a recognisable tone and viewpoint its emergence is relatively recent, depending on the quiet, unknown work of the writers in John Baxter’s two Anthologies of Pacific Science Fiction (A&R, 1968 and 1971 respectively), and the silent struggles of those people who were still alive and struggling enough by 1975 to attend the writers’ workshop held by Ursula Le Guin that year. That workshop was crucial to the development of a certain kind of S-F in Australia – in some ways a ‘tricks of the trade’ affair (judging from the evidence of The Altered I), it led inevitably to the second workshop at Monash in February 1977 – which consciously Australianised some of the concerns of the trade. (The View From The Edge, 1977).