science fiction
Damien Broderick
Paul Collins (ed)
The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian
Science Fiction & Fantasy
MUP $39.95hb, $29.95pb, 188pp
0 522 84771 4, 0 522 84802 8
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 publsihed 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.
In fact, though, it's seemed rather thin on the ground. In the last decade we have seen a burst of talented activity in both sf proper and commercial fantasy (usually fat novels or trilogies set in a variant Middle Earth, with dashing derrring-do among semi-divine characters enacting mythic themes). Still, you could easily get the impression that Australian's don't care to dream about the stars and their strange inhabitants -- unless they speak in American accents, of course, in which case we eagerly gulp down X Files , Star Wars , Star Trek , a hundred gaudy movies , a thousand imported paperbacks.
How genuinely startling, then, to find that a whole volume can properly be devoted to Aussie sf, fantasy (and commercial horror, an adjacent genre). It is no surprise that Australians are notable critics -- not just carping complainers, either, but astute anatomists and cataloguers of this strange new literary fruit. The first major encyclopaedia of sf, in three parts (1974,1978, 1983), was written by a Tasmanian amateur scholar, Don Tuck. Now 76, Tuck was 1984 winner of sf's premier award, the Hugo. The field's most important volume ever, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, was also the brainchild of an Australian, Peter Nicholls, who won a Hugo in 1980 and then again for its even larger revision, in 1995. (But this being Australia, Nicholls was not even nominated for the equivalent local award for sf criticism.)
If that volume ran to a fact-and-opinionated-chocked 1370 pages, Paul Collins' MUP book is more modest in every way, but instantly invaluable. Like the Nicholls' encyclopaedia, it emphasises biographical author entries, typically between a quarter and one column long with extra space as needed to list every relevant novel, short story, radio play or advertising jingle ever produced by an Aussie or by visitors to Australia or indeed, one begins to think, by everyone who has ever heard of the country.
As well there are useful thematic entries on, for example, 'Indigenous Mythology' (Archie Weller), 'Fandom', organisations of sf enthusiasts (Bruce Gillespie), 'Early Australian SF' (fan scholar Graham Stone and assistant editor Sean McMullen whose work provides the book's spine), 'Feminism' (Lucy Sussex), 'Fantasy' and 'Dark Fantasy' or horror (assistant editor Steven Paulsen), 'Radio' (Robert Jan), 'Television' (the indefatigable McMullen and Paulsen)...and yet, incredibly, no concerted entry on 'Science Fiction' itself.
The lapse is typical of the strengths and weaknesses of this important book. It tracks down every pseudonym used by Aussie sf writers, however briefly (seven of mine are given individual and entirely pointless listings), but leaves out the one entry everyone who wants a sense of sf's local landscape will wish to consult. It's sense of proportion, in short, is oddly skewed. Peter Nicholls' charming and knowledgable introduction mentions a deplorable practice of envious writers: they count the lines in their entry and compare the amount allotted their rivals. I thought I'd try it.
Starting at the front, I find that sf bookseller Justin Ackroyd, briefly an assistant sf editor at Hodder Headline, gets twice the space granted 'Cordwainer Smith', perhaps the most important writer ever to produce sf written here and set in Australia -- or, in his case, the brutal planet Old North Australia, or Norstrilia. (Sean McMullen's grievously abbreviated entry on Smith incorrectly labels that setting 'a future northern Australia'.) But then, what is an Aussie writer? 'Smith' (Dr Paul Linebarger) was a visiting scholar at the ANU on several occasions, but never moved here. Still, his fiction snared a weirdly Australian quality that seared into world sf's growing textuality to a degree no native Aussie has yet managed.