Fiction

Archangels of Evolution

Item: All This Is So
Author: Stephanie Trigg

by Stephanie Trigg •

April 2003, no. 250

All This Is So: A future history by John F. Roe

Wakefield Press, $27.50 pb, 505 pp

Fiction

Archangels of Evolution

by Stephanie Trigg •

April 2003, no. 250

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.

Stephanie Trigg

Stephanie Trigg is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne, where she works on medieval and modern literature. She is author of Gwen Harwood (Oup, 1994) and several books on Chaucer and medieval studies: most recently, Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent (2019), and 30 Great Myths about Chaucer (2020), both co-written with Thomas A. Prendergast. She is currently working on a cultural history of the face in literature, with Joe Hughes, Tyne Sumner, and Guillemette Bolens; and a study of Melbourne’s relationship with bluestone.