Jake Wilson

Anson Cameron’s Lies I Told about a Girl may not bend the public record enough to qualify as ‘alternate history’, but it does take off from an intriguing speculative premise. What if the young Prince of Wales, sent ‘down under’ for a term at an exclusive boarding school deep in Victorian logging country, had arrived in 1975, the year of the Dismissal? And what if the prince – known here as Harold Romsey, or YR (‘Your Royal’) – had become romantically involved with a fellow student who happened to be the daughter of the federal opposition leader?

Those young people of today, with their iPods and mobile phones, their tight-knit friendship groups and brief romances, their social activism and distrust of big-P Politics, their yearning for independence and need to conform … what’s really going on in their minds? Not much that sets them apart from the rest of mainstream Australia, or so it appears from Rebecca Huntley’s The World According to Y, where the author’s 18-to-25-year-old interviewees register with few exceptions as cheerful, pragmatic and keen to get on with their lives, however uncertain the future.

The useful introduction to The Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy 2004 (the first volume in an intended new series) gives an idea of the less than adequate state of genre publishing in Australia. For the moment, it seems that science fiction (SF) authors in particular are mainly confined to semi-professional magazines and small presses, or are obliged to seek international markets for their work. Though the editors understandably do not say so, the fact of a small pond necessarily produces some relaxation of expectations. There is much amateurish writing in this collection, and a more serious lack of urgency: many contributors seem less interested in creating new myths than amusing themselves with borrowed ones, like fans dressing up for a convention.

There is a trick to the trite title of Death by Water, the fifteenth volume in Kerry Greenwood’s series about the hedonistic 1920s private detective Phryne Fisher. Contrary to expectations, no murder occurs for more than two hundred pages. In the meantime, the nominal plot involves the hunt for a jewel thief aboard a cruise ship bound for New Zealand, but far more attention is devoted to meals, cocktails, cigarettes, clothes, dance music, maritime scenery, anthropological chit-chat and recreational sex. Literary quotes of approximate relevance head each chapter, while ratiocination occurs as an accompaniment to life’s more sensual pleasures: ‘Phryne ate a thoughtful croissant.’

At the start, Catherine Jinks’s teen novel Evil Genius resembles a local edition of ‘cult’ blockbuster phenomena such as Harry Potter and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – wish-fulfilment fantasies about misfits initiated into a hidden élite. On page one, we are introduced to Jinks’s protagonist, Cadel (Welsh for ‘battle’), a brilliant but barely socialised young boy obsessed with computers. His adoptive parents are named Stuart and Lanna Piggott, which should tell you all you need to know. Aged eight, this outwardly placid but potentially vengeful nerd learns from his psychologist mentor that his true father is a mad scientist named Phineas Darkkon, who has made millions through scams such as a line of shonky vending machines, and who subsequently bankrolls a secret University of Evil located in central Sydney, where, a few years later, Cadel precociously winds up. Among the subjects on offer are Basic Lying, Forgery, Assassination and Guerrilla Skills; the other students include a Goth chemist who is trying to turn himself into a vampire, and a pair of bitchy, telepathic twins.