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Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction
Australia has long been thought of by Europeans as an exotic and mysterious land. During the nineteenth century, it was envisioned much as the moon and Mars are today: a distant and uncharted place with hidden possibilities for explorations and adventures. The continent captured the imagination of European writers in the 1800s, and with its settlement, Australia became the setting for tales of lost worlds and ancient civilizations. Australia has since developed a rich national literature, and perhaps because of its novelty and wilderness, it has inspired numerous science fiction writers. This book provides a critical survey of the history of Australian science fiction from its nineteenth century origins to the present.
The volume proceeds chronologically, with an introductory section on the origins of Australian science fiction before 1925. It then turns to the rise of traditional science fiction in Australia from 1926 to 1959, with discussions of such writers as James Morgan Walsh, Norma Hemming, and Wynne Whiteford. A section on the period from 1960 to 1974 examines the growing national recognition given to such Australian science fiction writers as David Rome and Jack Wodhams, while a section on science fiction between 1975 and 1984 reviews the rise of small presses and the growth of literary criticism of the genre in Australia. A final section addresses the maturation of Australian science fiction from 1985 to 1998 with attention to Aussiecon Two. Extensive bibliographic information concludes the volume.
The volume proceeds chronologically, with an introductory section on the origins of Australian science fiction before 1925. It then turns to the rise of traditional science fiction in Australia from 1926 to 1959, with discussions of such writers as James Morgan Walsh, Norma Hemming, and Wynne Whiteford. A section on the period from 1960 to 1974 examines the growing national recognition given to such Australian science fiction writers as David Rome and Jack Wodhams, while a section on science fiction between 1975 and 1984 reviews the rise of small presses and the growth of literary criticism of the genre in Australia. A final section addresses the maturation of Australian science fiction from 1985 to 1998 with attention to Aussiecon Two. Extensive bibliographic information concludes the volume.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published May 30, 1999
10 people want to read
About the author
Russell Blackford
57 books33 followersRussell Blackford is an Australian writer, philosopher, and critic, based for many years in Melbourne, Victoria. He was born in Sydney, and grew up in Lake Macquarie district, near Newcastle, NSW. He moved to Melbourne in 1979, but returned to Newcastle to live and work in 2009.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 30, 2022
The big question for critics who review the history of SF in Australia is: what, if anything, makes Australian SF Australian? Greg Egan--the most successful writer of SF from Down Under--offered a succinct answer in a short essay published some years ago: nothing. For his work that's undoubtedly true; his books, which sell well throughout the English-speaking world, treat complex questions of human identity in futures where personality uploads and virtual societies proffer an alternative to flesh-and-blood reality. Egan could be writing in the US, the UK, or, like Arthur C. Clarke, Sri Lanka; his location in physical space wouldn't matter.
The challenge of the question vibrates at the core of Strange Constellations and, ironically, grows less salient as Australian SF becomes more successful. The early chapters, which treat the 19th century's "lost civilization" and "race wars" tales that dominated what can be regarded as SF (even though there is a case to be made that they are not SF at all, as Blackford, Ikin, and McMullen admit), offer a strong argument that refracted through this work are efforts to come to terms with Australia's weird--to a European eye--landscape and to shape an identity for the settler colonists living there. (Though the authors don't canvass this, surely embarrassment at descent from convicts propelled some of the anxiety about identity: today's Australians take pride in having a crook as an ancestor, but in the 19th century that history was a shameful fact to hide.) This argument is quite cogent and goes far to account for the character of books like The Last Lemurian (1898) or The Yellow Wave (1894).
The breakout for Australians writing SF came in the 1950s, when the wartime ban on imports was lifted and the continent's readers could again access fairly easily work written in the US and UK. The impetus of quality SF from the outside, Blackford and his co-authors suggest, challenged Australian writers to abandon the low-quality fluff they'd been producing for a closed market and try instead to compete for space in American and British SF periodicals. Without quite saying so they suggest that one major consequence of this shift was a turn away from features of Australian SF that made it "Australian"--the market was global in which the new work looked for readers, and Australian anxieties that charged the 19th century fiction just did find traction.
There is much truth to this view, but it does not quite tell the whole story. Some Australian writers continued to grapple with the old conundra, though now shifted thanks to social change. Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980)--surely still one of the most profound SF books to come out of Oz--treats the racial oppression of the Indigenous population, centers its powerful mythology of the Dreaming at the heart of the book, and, by flipping the hierarchies of power, reimagines an Australian identity for both Europeans and Indigenous. Terry Dowling's Tom Tyson stories, first appearing in 1990 as Rynosseros, likewise revise the relations between Indigenous and European while also exploiting the unique character of the Australian landscape.
In a sense, then, Australian SF underwent a bifurcation in the decades starting in the 1950s. Some writers simply adopted international standards and concerns, in effect abandoning anything strctly "Australian" in their work in favor of other, often very profound, matters (see the excellent critique of Egan's difficult work at pp. 190-200). Others grafted new writing onto old local questions to produce powerful new meditations on identity and landscape, including Sean McMullen himself, in whose books much purely Australian comes to the fore. And still others, like Tess Williams in Map of Power (1996), melded the two streams.
Strange Constellations was published in 1999. Since then there's been better than 20 years of Australian SF. It's invidious to single out some instead of others, but I will just mention two newer women writers: Marianne de Pierres, with Nylon Angel (2004) and its successors and her Dark Space series, begun in 2007, or the mesmerizing Black Glass by Meg Mundell (2011). Truck Song (2013) by Andrew Macrae surely offers one of the strangest premises on which an SF book has been built. And then there are more and more Indigenous writers, the most famous of whom is Alexis Wright, author of the brilliant Carpentaria (2006--some might quibble with the assignment to SF). There have been new critical studies too: Damien Broderick has published a raft of books following up on Reading by Starlight (1994), many published by Wildside Press in the US; I'll just mention also Iva Polak's Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction (2014) and Roslyn Weaver's Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film (2011).
As a work of criticism, Strange Constellations is a bit uneven. Some writers get brief but perspicacious analyses; at other times the book descends into little more than lists of names and titles. A very valuable aspect is the long bibliography of "Book-Length Works by Single Authors" (221-230), which provides a great reading list for anyone who wants to delve deeply into the history and variety of Australian SF. Unfortunately, as so often in SF, lots of important stories have never been anthologized, published originally in short-run pulps now almost impossible to find. In any case, though, for a newcomer to Australian SF, there's no better place to start the journey than Strange Constellations.
The challenge of the question vibrates at the core of Strange Constellations and, ironically, grows less salient as Australian SF becomes more successful. The early chapters, which treat the 19th century's "lost civilization" and "race wars" tales that dominated what can be regarded as SF (even though there is a case to be made that they are not SF at all, as Blackford, Ikin, and McMullen admit), offer a strong argument that refracted through this work are efforts to come to terms with Australia's weird--to a European eye--landscape and to shape an identity for the settler colonists living there. (Though the authors don't canvass this, surely embarrassment at descent from convicts propelled some of the anxiety about identity: today's Australians take pride in having a crook as an ancestor, but in the 19th century that history was a shameful fact to hide.) This argument is quite cogent and goes far to account for the character of books like The Last Lemurian (1898) or The Yellow Wave (1894).
The breakout for Australians writing SF came in the 1950s, when the wartime ban on imports was lifted and the continent's readers could again access fairly easily work written in the US and UK. The impetus of quality SF from the outside, Blackford and his co-authors suggest, challenged Australian writers to abandon the low-quality fluff they'd been producing for a closed market and try instead to compete for space in American and British SF periodicals. Without quite saying so they suggest that one major consequence of this shift was a turn away from features of Australian SF that made it "Australian"--the market was global in which the new work looked for readers, and Australian anxieties that charged the 19th century fiction just did find traction.
There is much truth to this view, but it does not quite tell the whole story. Some Australian writers continued to grapple with the old conundra, though now shifted thanks to social change. Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980)--surely still one of the most profound SF books to come out of Oz--treats the racial oppression of the Indigenous population, centers its powerful mythology of the Dreaming at the heart of the book, and, by flipping the hierarchies of power, reimagines an Australian identity for both Europeans and Indigenous. Terry Dowling's Tom Tyson stories, first appearing in 1990 as Rynosseros, likewise revise the relations between Indigenous and European while also exploiting the unique character of the Australian landscape.
In a sense, then, Australian SF underwent a bifurcation in the decades starting in the 1950s. Some writers simply adopted international standards and concerns, in effect abandoning anything strctly "Australian" in their work in favor of other, often very profound, matters (see the excellent critique of Egan's difficult work at pp. 190-200). Others grafted new writing onto old local questions to produce powerful new meditations on identity and landscape, including Sean McMullen himself, in whose books much purely Australian comes to the fore. And still others, like Tess Williams in Map of Power (1996), melded the two streams.
Strange Constellations was published in 1999. Since then there's been better than 20 years of Australian SF. It's invidious to single out some instead of others, but I will just mention two newer women writers: Marianne de Pierres, with Nylon Angel (2004) and its successors and her Dark Space series, begun in 2007, or the mesmerizing Black Glass by Meg Mundell (2011). Truck Song (2013) by Andrew Macrae surely offers one of the strangest premises on which an SF book has been built. And then there are more and more Indigenous writers, the most famous of whom is Alexis Wright, author of the brilliant Carpentaria (2006--some might quibble with the assignment to SF). There have been new critical studies too: Damien Broderick has published a raft of books following up on Reading by Starlight (1994), many published by Wildside Press in the US; I'll just mention also Iva Polak's Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction (2014) and Roslyn Weaver's Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film (2011).
As a work of criticism, Strange Constellations is a bit uneven. Some writers get brief but perspicacious analyses; at other times the book descends into little more than lists of names and titles. A very valuable aspect is the long bibliography of "Book-Length Works by Single Authors" (221-230), which provides a great reading list for anyone who wants to delve deeply into the history and variety of Australian SF. Unfortunately, as so often in SF, lots of important stories have never been anthologized, published originally in short-run pulps now almost impossible to find. In any case, though, for a newcomer to Australian SF, there's no better place to start the journey than Strange Constellations.
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