Science Fiction

Australian author Max Barry specialises in satirising the profit-obsessed world of corporate enterprise in his sharply observed, easily digestible novels, of which Company is his third. Syrup, his first book, published in 1999, told the story of Scat, a character whose name more than broadly hinted at the author’s jaundiced view of the career he had previously been engaged in (Barry was a salesman for Hewlett-Packard while he was writing the novel). A venomous satire about corporate rivalry and marketing squarely aimed at Coca-Cola, Syrup was also an easily marketable product. Thanks to the American branch of Penguin Books’ interest in the manuscript, Syrup established Barry as that classic Australian success story, the artist who was better known overseas than in his own country.

This speculative novel is of the Zeitgeist. S.A. Jones imagines a civilisation of women – the Vaik – committed to ‘Work. History. Sex. Justice.’ Although they live apart, in ‘The Fortress’, there is a history of exchange between the Vaik and the outside world. All women are entitled to Vaik justice if they have been violated and ...

As contemporary author fan bases go, Margaret Atwood’s must be among the broadest. She is read at crèches, on university campuses, and in nursing homes. Feminists, birders, and would-be writers jostle to see her perform at literary festivals. Yet despite an Arthur C. Clarke Award and, in her own words ...

Every book implicitly asks its reader a question: What am I? Sometimes this is an easy question to answer, but at other times, as with Andrew McGahan’s new novel, one must reply, ‘I have no idea; I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

The setting of Wonders of a Godless World is an old hospital housing the mad. Somehow the old-fashioned notion of ‘madness’ suits this story; it’s the word McGahan uses most often to describe the patients, and there is more than a whiff about this isolated hospital of the medieval Narrenschiff – the Ship of Fools. The hospital is under a volcano on a tropical island with a harbour city. We are not told the names of any of these places, and, like everything and everyone else in this book, its heroine also has no name; rather, she is identified, as are all the other characters, by her defining characteristic, and is thus exclusively referred to as ‘the orphan’. Other key characters are identified by their roles in a mundanely realistic way: the police captain, the old doctor, the night nurse. Still others have labels more redolent of fairytale and myth: the duke, the witch, the archangel, the virgin. And then there is the mastermind and perhaps the villain of the piece: the foreigner. As far as archetypal characters and symbolic settings are concerned, this book contains an embarrassment of riches, and the fact that none of them is individually identified or named means that all kinds of significance can be projected onto them.

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.

Writers of contemporary fiction are often novelists only; writers of heroic fantasy, a genre that increasingly overlaps with science fiction, tend to write very long novels only. Science fiction is different; the short story has been important for most of its practitioners, though it sets taxing formal problems when the writer has to cram the details of an alternative or future world into a short compass. The first of the stories in this big anthology of Australian science fiction was published in 1955, the most recent in 2001, so it offers a good sense of the path the genre has traced.

There is often a speculative dimension to Rodney Hall’s fiction. Throughout his long career, he has tended to build his novels around alternative histories or unusual possibilities. Past works have imagined scenarios as diverse as Adolf Hitler arriving on the south coast of New South Wales and (where does he get his ideas?) Australia becoming a republic. The Last Love Story is in some respects unrepresentative of Hall’s vivid and expansive body of work. Compared to some of his earlier novels, it is concise and the natural flamboyance of his writing seems a little subdued. The novel does, however, develop from a typically interesting ‘what if?’

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.

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.