Science Fiction

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.

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.

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

Kenneth Cook’s latest book is a parable for adults. At the end of the second millennium A.D., God remembers the duty he has overlooked at the end of the first, destroys life on earth. However, no doubt due to his advanced age, he is a little careless, and in a valley in the in the middle of the United States, two mice survive. They and their rapidly multiplying descendants inherit man’s civilization, including thought and speech, but otherwise not memory. They have to develop theory and institutions from scratch, guided by reason and reading.