Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction

by David G. Hartwell (Editor), Damien Broderick (Editor), Leanne Frahm (Contributor)

Science fiction is a world-wide literature, as World Fantasy Award-winning editor David G. Hartwell has often shown. Now Hartwell and acclaimed Australian anthologist Damien Broderick are bringing a higher profile to Australian SF with Centaurus, a showcase of some of the most original voices in SF.

Included are stories from Peter Carey, Greg Egan, Terry Dowling, A. Bertram Chandler, Phillippa C. Maddern, Rosaleen Love, Sean McMullen, Lucy Sussex, and George Turner. For both avid followers of Australian SF and genre readers who have not yet discovered our southern stars, Centaurus is an anthology no SF fan will want to miss.

9 • Introduction (Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction) • (1999) • essay by Damien Broderick
• 22 • The Other Editor's Introduction (Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction) • (1999) • essay by David G. Hartwell
• 26 • Flowering Mandrake • (1994) • novelette by George Turner
• 63 • The Mountain Movers • [John Grimes Rimworld] • (1971) • novelette by A. Bertram Chandler
• 82 • Things Fall Apart • (1988) • novelette by Philippa C. Maddern
• 101 • Written in Blood • (1999) • shortstory by Chris Lawson
• 116 • Pie Row Joe • (1978) • shortstory by Kevin McKay
• 127 • A Map of the Mines of Barnath • (1995) • shortstory by Sean Williams
• 150 • My Lady Tongue • (1988) • novelette by Lucy Sussex
• 188 • Wang's Carpets • (1995) • novelette by Greg Egan
• 220 • The Dominant Style • (1991) • shortstory by Sean McMullen
• 233 • Borderline • (1996) • novella by Leanne Frahm
• 272 • Privateers' Moon • [The Adventures of Tom Rynosseros] • (1992) • novelette by Terry Dowling
• 299 • Re-deem the Time • (1978) • shortstory by David J. Lake
• 313 • Matters of Consequence • (1992) • shortstory by Shane Dix
• 321 • The Total Devotion Machine • (1989) • shortstory by Rosaleen Love
• 329 • The Colonel's Tiger • [Man-Kzin Wars] • (1995) • novella by Hal Colebatch
• 388 • The Soldier in the Machine • (1998) • novelette by Russell Blackford
• 411 • From Whom All Blessings Flow • (1995) • novelette by Stephen Dedman
• 431 • Looking Forward to the Harvest • (1991) • novelette by Cherry Wilder
• 456 • The Magi • (1982) • novelette by Damien Broderick
• 494 • The Chance • (1979) • novelette by Peter Carey

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction

525 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 1999

About the author

David Geddes Hartwell was an American editor of science fiction and fantasy. He worked for Signet (1971-1973), Berkley Putnam (1973-1978), Pocket (where he founded the Timescape imprint, 1978-1983, and created the Pocket Books Star Trek publishing line), and Tor (where he spearheaded Tor's Canadian publishing initiative, and was also influential in bringing many Australian writers to the US market, 1984-date), and has published numerous anthologies. He chaired the board of directors of the World Fantasy Convention and, with Gordon Van Gelder, was the administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award. He held a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature.

He lived in Pleasantville, New York with his wife Kathryn Cramer and their two children.

Reviews

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Flowering Mandrake," by George Turner (1994): 9.5
- strangely elegiac and even a bit moving this one--this fleshed out tale of first contact and vastly different xenobiology and the near-impossibility of careful communication between thoughtful beings differently evolved.

"Wang's Carpets," by Greg Egan (1995): 9.5
- About as good, about as impressive a work as I can imagine this genre creating. And there, I don’t mean simply ‘Hard SciFi,’ so much as the general Very-Not-Humans genre, which need not be SF, necessarily (thinking of Karin Tidbeck’s deep fantasy tale in the Time Travelers book [in which an alt-universe jaded aristocracy are arbitrarily killing pages with lawn croquet balls and more], or the Michael Moorcock one in the same collection), although it is often most relevant to the so-called far-future sci-fi works, especially those dealing with post-humanism. Here, all of that is combined with the general ‘Hard’ thing, although edged throughout, and at all times, by an, if not literary, deeply humane sense of how to extrapolate emotion and response outwards from our own subjective spot. The STORY: several cloned post-humanists search for the first signs of alien life, finding what at first appears to be an interesting, if very primitive, single-cell based life form, before realizing that, in fact, it’s much more complex, and strange, than they could have imagined. All of this progresses against the backdrop of a thorough, subtle, and very skilled fleshing-out of the nature of post-human life for these beings as individuals and, more broadly, as members of post-human societies. The story is chock full of treasures along this way, such as the wonderful, and main, human-based fulcrum in the story, which is basically all about nihilism and human existential angst, even extant among now-immortal, now-near-omniscent groups. What this does, then, is take the quite literally inexplicable and make it explicable, whereas others get away with just detailing the ways in which this is actually not relatable at all (i.e. that Tidbeck, whose story I remember feeling cold to the touch and completely alien for being so devoid of humanity, although that was largely the point). Here, though, in this perfectly small story, in retrospect, the shifts turn on petty squabbles and academic points of contention.

[Loren C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it a bit presumptuous to assert that Australian sci-fi had it's own flavor and deserved its own region-specific collection, but damned if I didn't agree with the editors by the time I finished the stories.

Also, for people who are less sure that mere sci-fi-ness will be able to carry the book for them, this collection featured authors with real writing chops, not just a bunch of basement dudes with space on the brain.

Nice work, Australia.

[Brentman99 · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I really liked two or three of the stories, this book was a pain almost from start to finish. I rarely, if ever, give up on a book, but this one challenged me a few times.

In hindsight, I should have flipped through and committed to reading only those that seemed interesting, rather than making myself read it from cover to cover. Don't make the same mistake.