#80 = Volume 27, Part 1 = March 2000
Michael Levy
Science Fiction in Australia
Russell
Blackford, Van Ikin, and Sean McMullen. Strange
Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction.
Greenwood (800-225-5800), 1999. xiv + 247 pp. $65 cloth.
Paul Collins,
Steven Paulsen, and Sean McMullen, eds. The
MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Melbourne UP (fax: 61-3-9349-2527), 1998. xvi + 188 pp. $39.95 cloth; $29.95
trade pb.
David Hartwell
and Damien Broderick, eds. Centaurus: The
Best of Australian Science Fiction. Tor (800-288-2131), 1999. 525
pp. $29.95 cloth.
Timed to coincide with Aussiecon III,
the third World Science Fiction Convention held down under in Sept. 1999, these
three volumes, each in its own way, attempt to define the fantastic literature
of an entire continent. This is an enormous and daunting undertaking, of course,
but I’m happy to report that, despite a few minor imperfections, all three
volumes successfully accomplish what they set out to achieve.
The men involved in putting together
these books are a distinguished, versatile, and in some cases, rather dangerous
bunch. Veteran American editor David Hartwell needs no introduction. Russell
Blackford and Van Ikin are among Australia’s most widely respected critics,
members of the Science Fiction Research Association, and have both published
fiction with considerable success as well. Sean McMullen, author of the novels Voices
in the Light (1994) and The Centurion’s Empire (1998), stands
second only to Greg Egan among the current crop of outstanding new sf writers to
come out of Australia; he is also a distinguished bibliographer as well as a
computer scientist. Paul Collins is widely known as both a fiction writer and as
the editor of the influential Australian sf magazine Void. Damien
Broderick, author of such novels as The Dreaming Dragons (1980) and The
White Abacus (1997), as well as the critical study Reading by Starlight:
Postmodern Science Fiction (1995), may well be both Australia’s most
widely-published living sf writer and that nation’s most distinguished genre
literary critic. In addition, it should be noted that Collins and McMullen both
have black belts in various martial arts.
Blackford, Ikin, and McMullen’s Strange
Constellations is straightforward literary history centered, it should be
emphasized, exclusively on science fiction; works of fantasy and horror are
essentially outside the authors’ area of investigation unless some claim can
be made for them as borderline sf. Moving in roughly chronological order, the
book, following a brief introduction, is subdivided into five major historical
periods: "Australian Science Fiction to 1925"; "1926-59: The Rise
of Traditional Science Fiction in Australia"; "1960-74: International
Recognition and the New Wave"; "1975-84: Small Presses and Growing
Reputations"; and "1985-98: Serious Recognition." These major
chapters are followed by a brief conclusion; detailed and valuable
bibliographies of Australian sf novels, anthologies, and magazines; and an
equally extensive list of criticism. These bibliographies alone make the book a
must purchase for any library with serious holdings in either science fiction or
Australian literature. Each of the major chapters is further subdivided, with
sections on early fantastic romances, utopias and dystopias, racist speculative
fiction, various individual decades, and the effect of Aussiecons I and II on
the local product. Writers deemed worthy of entire brief chapters on their work
include one of my childhood favorites, A. Bertram Chandler, as well as Wynne
Whiteford, George Turner, Damien Broderick, and Greg Egan.
Readers interested in
nineteenth-century fantastic literature will find Strange Constellations
particularly valuable. Anyone familiar with such better-known British and
American works as Mary Griffith’s "Three Hundred Years Hence"
(1836), George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), Ignatius
Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890), or George Griffith’s The
Angel of the Revolution (1893), will find a variety of similar, equally
fascinating novels discussed here, including Samuel Albert Rosa’s The
Coming Terror: The Australian Revolution (1894), Joseph Fraser’s
Melbourne and Mars: My Mysterious Life on Two Planets (1889), and Catherine
Helen Spence’s Handfasted: A Romance, which was written as an entry in
a literary competition in 1879 but was not published until 1994 because, the
competition judge declared, its radical attitude toward male-female
relationships "was calculated to loosen the marriage tie—it was too
socialistic, and consequently dangerous" for publication (28). Equally
prominent in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australia were what
Blackford, Ikin, and McMullen call "Novels of Racial Invasion." Most
often aimed at the Chinese, but occasionally at the Japanese, Americans, French,
and Russians, these novels may have reflected the underlying paranoia of a
culture whose own none-too-distant conquest of an entire continent could not
bear close moral examination. Among the books discussed in this chapter are White
or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1888) by William Lane, a
man otherwise remembered for doing valuable work in the Australian labor
movement; Thomas Roydhouse’s The Coloured Conquest (1904); and C.H.
Kirmess’s truly obnoxious The Australian Crisis (1909). In this last
novel the Japanese secretly establish a colony in the Northern Territory and
then, when it is eventually discovered, claim that the babies born there are
native Australians and thus can’t be deported. When bleeding-heart Brits side
with the nefarious Japanese, loyal Australians are understandably outraged by
this "invasion." The Australian stock market immediately crashes, and,
to quote Blackford et al., "Soon Japanese prostitutes are burnt at
the stake in Sydney race riots, while a gallant group of paramilitary vigilantes
called The White Guard is decimated by Asian dumdum bullets in a futile attempt
to win back the north" (40). The whole novel sounds like an Australian
version of William Pierce’s notorious Turner Diaries (1978). This part
of Strange Constellations closes with a section devoted to the only
Australian sf novel of the period that can still be appreciated purely for its
literary quality (and, I must admit, the only Australian genre work of the
period that I’ve actually read), Erle Cox’s Out of the Silence (1925),
a morally complicated tale that concerns the discovery in the outback of a
gigantic vault or time capsule left by an ancient, superhuman, and viciously
racist civilization, and the beautiful woman found in suspended animation
therein.
In later chapters the authors discuss
the various ups and downs of Australian science fiction during the twentieth
century. Prior to the early 1970s there simply wasn’t very much to be proud
of, with the exception of such rare high points as James Morgan Walsh’s
dashing space opera Vandals of the Void (1931), M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow
and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (first published in 1947 as Tomorrow and
Tomorrow with most of its controversial socialist ideas excised), and the
work of such competent craftsmen and women as Norma Hemming, Alan Yates, Frank
Bryning, and Eric North. Nevil Shute’s In the Wet (1953) and his
brilliant On the Beach (1957) both qualify as borderline sf, but have
little obvious connection to genre science fiction per se. Then, of course,
there was A. Bertram Chandler.
Still the most successful science
fiction writer in Australian history, Chandler (1912-1984), a British merchant
seaman, did not officially emigrate to Australia until 1956, when he was already
a well-known professional, but much of his later work has a distinctly
down-under feel to it. Best known for his well-done "Rim World" series
of space operas centered on the dashing and highly competent Commander Grimes,
several dozen of which appeared as paperback originals from the US publishers
Ace and DAW in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, Chandler is the only Australian sf
writer to have been chosen as guest of honor at a World Science Fiction
Convention. His author entry and bibliography in the MUP Encyclopaedia of
Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy is by far the longest in the book.
Among Chandler’s works that Blackford et al. single out for special
consideration are Bring Back Yesterday (1961), The Way Back
(1976), and one of the author’s last tales, Frontier of the Dark
(1984). Also worthy of mention is perhaps his most clearly Australian novel, Kelly
Country (1983), an alternate universe tale in which the famous bandit Ned
Kelly takes over the entire continent. Although they were neither as popular nor
as prolific as Chandler, several other talented writers of the 1960s and 1970s
receive well-earned praise from Blackford et al., among them Wynne
Whiteford, John Baxter, David Lake, and Jack Wodhams. Also receiving due
consideration are the still active Cherry Wilder, Lee Hardin—who recently made
a return to the genre with Heartsease (1997) after more than a decade of
silence—and Peter Carey, who, despite an early career in the genre, has earned
his primary reputation of late as the author of such major mainstream novels as Illywhacker
(1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1989), and Jack Maggs (1997).
The last part of Strange
Constellations brings us to the current crop of Australian sf writers, names
contemporary genre readers are more likely to run into in the bookstores or at
their local libraries, both in Australia and abroad. The 1975 World Science
Fiction Convention, Aussiecon, which included a series of writing workshops run
by Ursula K. Le Guin and others, is seen as a major turning point for many young
writers. George Turner, already a major mainstream novelist in Australia, was
just beginning to write science fiction at this point, but he took an active
part in leading a workshop held in 1977. Thereafter, having produced a series of
superb sf novels, among them Beloved Son (1978), Yesterday’s Men
(1983), the award-winning The Sea and Summer (1987; published in the U.S.
as Drowning Towers), and Genetic Soldier (1994), he eventually
grew to outrank even A. Bertram Chandler in terms of critical acclaim if not
popularity, before his death in 1997. Other Australian sf writers who have
deservedly attained an international reputation in the 1970s and thereafter
include Damien Broderick (who began publishing in the 1960s), Terry Dowling,
Leanne Frahm, and John Brosnan. Even more recently, in the wake of Aussiecon II
(1985), such talented newcomers as Lucy Sussex, Rosaleen Love, Paul Voermans,
Sean McMullen, Stephen Dedman, and Sean Williams have appeared. Two major
figures of undoubted international importance are Jack Dann, author of The
Memory Cathedral (1995), an American who moved to Australia in 1995 and who
has taken an active role in the local sf scene; and Greg Egan, the award-winning
author of Quarantine (1992), Permutation City (1994), Distress (1995),
and Disapora (1997), as well as a string of highly-praised short stories.
Although the talented Damien Broderick has undoubtedly replaced George Turner as
the dean of Australian sf writers, it’s clear that the much more prolific and
pyrotechnic Egan has, in a remarkably short time, become the continent’s most
highly-regarded genre figure and, arguably, one of the half dozen most important
sf writers in the world today.
Strange Constellations is as
good a work of literary history as one could wish for. The book is concise,
judicious in its appraisal of the writers under consideration, and as clearly
written as one might expect from a work whose three authors all have strong
literary as well as scholarly credentials. I do have a few criticisms, but these
should be understood as minor, the kind of nitpicking any reviewer is expected
to partake in. First and foremost there is at least one error of fact (but how
could there not be in a work of this scope?): in their discussion of the science
fiction of the early 1990s, Blackford et al. refer to Alice Nunn’s
first novel, Illicit Passage (1992), as having "earned the
distinction of being the first Australian work to win the U.S. Tiptree
Award" (180). Illicit Passage is a fine novel but it did not win the
award that year; Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1992) did. I also feel
that the book’s coverage of Young Adult sf could have been improved. The
authors do discuss the work of Gillian Rubinstein and John Marsden, but ignore
that of the almost equally talented Victor Kelleher, who rates only one entry in
the bibliography, and that of Caroline MacDonald, whose name never appears in
the book. Also missing is the enormously talented F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre,
author of numerous short stories and the highly-successful sf horror novel, The
Woman Between the Worlds (1994).
In his Foreword to the MUP
Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Peter Nicholls goes
on at some length and with great good humor about two subjects. One is the much
remarked upon ability of Australia to produce high quality "genre
historians and critics" (vii). Indeed, as Nicholls notes, Australians have
won three Hugo Awards for their reference books, one by Don Tuck for his
three-volume bibliographic work The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and
Fantasy (1974, 1978, 1982), and the other two by Nicholls himself (along
with John Clute) for the two editions of his more critically oriented Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction (1979, 1993), the latest edition of which is generally
seen as the finest reference work in the field. The other major topic of
Nicholls’s Foreword concerns the necessity for the authors of reference works
to be "tough" (he puts great emphasis on Collins’s and McMullen’s
black belts). As Nicholls so entertainingly puts it, "You have to be tough
even to get a literary encyclopaedia off the ground. This is no business for
scrawny scholars; you need to be big. I, personally, am huge" (v). Moving
to more serious ground he emphasizes the many problems involved in producing
such a work, including the sometimes painful politics inherent in determining
the length of various authors’ entries; the impossibility of avoiding small
factual errors; the difficulty (particularly in a country like Australia where
so many writers are foreign born or now live elsewhere) in deciding who
qualifies for inclusion in the book; the type of information to include in the
authors’ biographies (suicides? sex-change operations?); whether or not to
list short stories; whether or not to list non-genre publications; and finally
whether or not to engage in literary criticism as well as biography and
bibliography. It’s a daunting list and, although Nicholls implies that he
doesn’t always agree with the decisions made by the editors of the MUP
Encyclopaedia, he makes it clear that he respects them for having the
audacity to plunge right in, especially, he says, because Australia is "a
nation that picks more nits than other countries twice its size" (v). I
have to admit that I also have a few nits to pick, but more on that later.
Abetted by Sean McMullen, whose
original bibliographic work (in conjunction with Graham Stone) evidently
provided the initial impetus for this much larger project, and by fiction writer
and critic Steven Paulsen, editor Paul Collins has here produced a reference
work that in format falls somewhere between Tuck’s bibliography-oriented
encyclopedia and the literary-critical reference work of Nicholls and Clute.
Collins has apparently attempted to include an entry for every writer who has
ever published a genre novel or more than a handful of genre short stories who
can reasonably be defined as Australian. He includes both science fiction and
fantasy, but excludes horror fiction unless it clearly overlaps with one of his
two primary genres. Entries for very minor authors sometimes consist of nothing
but birth and death dates and a standard bibliographic reference for each story,
augmented by a notation of whether the work is fantasy or science fiction, a
novel or a collection. When appropriate, Collins also notes that a work is
designed for young adults or juniors. Second level authors receive at most a
paragraph of biography. More important writers may be allocated several
paragraphs of mixed biography and plot summary. The truly major authors in the
field (Chandler, Broderick, Egan) are allotted essays of half a page or more,
although even in these cases the content is largely descriptive rather than
analytical.
Perhaps the most valuable feature in
the book, however, are the extensive, author-by-author bibliographies of short
stories, something not found in Clute/Nicholls or most other recent reference
works. In some cases, as for example with A. Bertram Chandler, the short-story
bibliographies can run to many times the length of the text entries themselves.
Traditionally, most research into science fiction has centered on novels; but
if, as noted sf historian Edward James insists, the heart of the genre lies in
its short fiction, then Collins’s short-story bibliographies may be of
enormous importance to future researchers in the field. Another notable feature
of the MUP Encyclopaedia is the thematic essays covering such subjects as
Bookshops, Cinema, Comics, Dark Fantasy, Early Australian Science Fiction and
Fantasy, Fandom, Feminism, Indigenous Mythology, and so forth. Although
detailed, thoughtful, and definitely valuable, these essays rarely attempt to
break new critical ground in the manner of the more challenging thematic essays
to be found in the Clute-Nicholls encyclopedia. Among the authors who
contributed pieces—some academics, some fiction writers, many both—are such
well-known names (most of whom rate their own entries) as John Baxter, Russell
Blackford, Bruce Gillespie, Phillip Mann (writing on the sf and fantasy of New
Zealand), Lucy Sussex, Michael Tolley, and Janeen Webb.
As I’ve already said, there are a few
things that bother me about The MUP Encyclopaedia. As much as I admire
the bibliographic completeness of the volume, I would have preferred it if the
editors had attempted to position their volume closer to Clute/Nicholls by
including critical analyses of the major Australian sf writers. Failing this,
they might have expanded the already quite wonderful bibliographic coverage to
include lists of key critical works for the major writers or for Australian sf
as a whole. As Peter Nicholls notes in his Foreword, Australia has a superb
critical tradition, but little is made of it here. Van Ikin’s entry, for
example, notes his distinguished career as an academic and mentions the fact
that he founded the highly-respected Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative
Literature in 1977, but tells us nothing very valuable about either its
contents or his criticism. John Bangsund, founder of the important early sercon
fanzine Australian Science Fiction Review, was not himself an sf writer
and thus, unlike Ikin, receives no entry in the encyclopaedia at all. Admittedly
his name and his fanzine do come up in Bruce Gillespie’s extended article on
Fandom, but no attempt is made in that piece to discuss the critical content of
the publication. Nor does Gillespie do much more than note the mere existence of
his own award-winning SF Commentary. Please note, I’m not asking here
for increased coverage of science fiction fandom; I would simply have liked more
information on the valuable literary criticism that has traditionally gone on in
Australia’s more serious fanzines.
I have another nit to pick on a related
topic. Collins states in his Preface that "The bibliographies cover the
period from 1950. It seems superfluous to go back beyond 1950, if only for the
reason that most of the works would now be unobtainable and that, apart from
being authoritative, such entries would add little to this work" (x).
Perhaps the problem here lies in a difference of opinion over the book’s
intended audience. If The MUP Encyclopaedia is intended exclusively or
primarily for casual readers whose purpose is to check to see if they’ve
missed any of the early fiction of their favorite writers, then perhaps
bibliographies of pre-1950 authors might be superfluous. On the other hand, if
the intended audience is, at least in part, scholarly, it’s much less clear
that those early authors are superfluous. As Blackford, Ikin, and McMullen’s
Strange Constellations makes abundantly clear, pre-1950s Australia produced
a fair amount of interesting (if not always high quality) material. Handfasted
and The Australian Crisis may not be fiction anyone would want to curl up
in the hammock with, but I can see these early novels providing topics for a
number of valuable scholarly works—witness, for example, Janeen Webb and
Andrew Enstice’s recent Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics, and
Prejudice in Australia (1998) [reviewed elsewhere in this issue—Ed.].
Graham Stone and Sean McMullen’s essay on Early Australian Science Fiction and
Fantasy in The MUP Encyclopaedia is indeed excellent, but I wouldn’t
have minded complete bibliographic references to supplement the Selected
Bibliography of Strange Constellations. To be even more picky, I would
have liked to see an entry on science fiction with Australian settings produced
by non-Australians—for example, Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia (1975)
or Michaela Roessner’s Walkabout Woman (1988)—and, once again,
separate entries or at least cross references for various important publishers,
magazines, events, and people who were not themselves sf writers.
It occurs to me that perhaps I’m
being unfair to Paul Collins. Perhaps I’m asking for a different book, one he
never intended to edit. Everyone wants his or her own book, and we academics, I
suppose, are the worst of the bunch. Which, I assume, is why Peter Nicholls
insists, once again, that people doing reference books "have to be
tough." Well, all right. The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science
Fiction and Fantasy isn’t exactly the book I would have edited, if I were
Australian and if anyone had asked me to take on the project. What Paul Collins’s
encyclopedia does have are some of the best and most valuable bibliographies in
the field, not to mention a number of useful historical and biographical essays.
Like Blackford, Ikin, and McMullen’s Strange Constellations, it belongs
in any serious library collection of either science fiction or Australian
Literature.
Then there’s the fiction itself.
Several best Australian sf collections have been published over the past decade
or two, among them Van Ikin’s original Australian Science Fiction
(1982) and Ikin and Terry Dowling’s Mortal Fire (1993), Paul Collins’s
Metaworlds (1994), and Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch’s Alien
Shores (1994). More recently, Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne have
edited two fine volumes of The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and
Fantasy (1997, 1998) and Jack Dann and Janeen Webb have produced an
outstanding anthology of original Australian sf entitled Dreaming Down-Under
(1998). The latest entry into the best Aussie sf sweepstakes is David Hartwell
and Damien Broderick’s Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction
(1999). I won’t pretend to compare or rank these anthologies, since I’m only
familiar with the Collins and Strahan volumes, but it has to be said that
Hartwell and Broderick have brought together a superb group of stories. Some,
like George Turner’s "Flowering Mandrake," Lucy Sussex’s "My
Lady Tongue," Greg Egan’s "Wang’s Carpet," and Broderick’s
own "The Magi" are likely to be familiar to audiences outside of
Australia. Others, by authors somewhat less well known, will be a pleasant
surprise. Among the authors represented here, besides those already mentioned,
are A. Bertram Chandler, Sean McMullen, Leanne Frahm, Terry Dowling, David Lake,
Rosaleen Love, Stephen Dedman, Cherry Wilder, and Peter Carey. My favorite story
in the book is Sean Williams’s mindbending "A Map of the Mines of Barnath."
Having been published in the United States, Centaurus is likely to have
the widest availability of any anthology of Australian sf ever produced. One can
only hope that the high quality of the book will attract a large number of new
readers to the wide range of fine science fiction being produced down under.
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