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6 The Sea and Eternal Summer An Australian Apocalypse andrew milner Despite the international success of individual writers like Greg Egan and of individual novels like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach,1 Australian SF remains essentially peripheral to the wider contours of the genre. Yet there is a long history of what Adam Roberts describes as “works that located utopias and satirical dystopias on the opposite side of the globe,”2 that is, in Australia. The earliest example he gives is Joseph Hall’s 1605 Mundus alter et idem sive Terra Australis ante hac semper incognita lustrata (A world other and the same, or the land of Australia until now unknown), the last, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne’s 1781 La découverte australe par une homme-volant (The discovery of Australia by a flying man).3 Lyman Tower Sargent’s bibliography begins slightly later, with Peter Heglin’s 1667 An Appendix to the Former Work, Endeavouring a Discovery of the Unknown Parts of the World. Especially of Terra Australis Incognita, or the Southern Continent, and proceeds to list something like three hundred “Australian ” print utopias and dystopias published during the period 1667–1999.4 There are yet others overlooked by even Sargent and Roberts: neither mention Denis Veiras’s L’histoire des Sévarambes, for example, first published in part in English in 1675, in whole in French in 1679.5 European writers made very extensive use of Australia as a site for utopian imaginings well before the continent ’s conquest, exploration, and colonization; even Marx’s Capital ends its first volume with an unexpected vision of Australia as an open frontier beyond capital’s grasp.6 There are two reasons for this, the one obvious, the other less so. First, Australia remained one of very few real-world terrae incognitae available for appropriation by European fantasy as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. And second, although Australia is conventionally described as a continent, it is also in fact an island,7 possessed of all the properties of selfcontainment and isolation that have proven so helpful to the authors of utopia ever since Thomas More. 116 Brav e Ne w wo rl ds & l aNds o f t h e fl ie s Most of the earlier Australian utopian fictions took the form of an imaginary voyage narrated by travelers on their return home. Such imaginings became increasingly implausible as European explorers brought back increasingly detailed accounts of Australia’s climate, topography, and people. The utopias were therefore progressively relocated farther into the interior, until the realities of inland exploration eventually proved equally disappointing. Thereafter, in Australia as elsewhere, utopias were increasingly superseded by future-fictional “uchronias.” Robyn Walton cites Robert Ellis Dudgeon’s Colymbia, published in 1873, as the first Australian SF utopia,8 although Joseph Fraser’s Melbourne and Mars is probably better known.9 In Australia, again as elsewhere, as the twentieth century proceeded utopias were also increasingly displaced by dystopias. The best-known Australian examples are almost certainly Shute’s On the Beach, a nuclear doomsday novel, and George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, one of the first novels to explore the fictional possibilities of the effects of global warming. Both make powerful, albeit often scientifically implausible, use of Australia’s self-contained isolation. Much SF has been both deliberately intended by its authors and deliberately received by its readers as value-relevant. Some, but not all, science fiction consists in future stories; and some, but not all, is concerned either to advocate what its authors and readers see as desirable possible futures or to urge against what they see as undesirable ones. In short, the future story can be used as a kind of futurology. Science fiction of this kind is intended to be politically or morally effective—that is, to be socially useful. “We badly need a literature of considered ideas,” Turner himself argued in 1990: “Science fiction could be a useful tool for serious consideration, on the level of the non-specialist reader, of a future rushing on us at unstoppable speed.”10 Three years earlier, in the “Postscript” to The Sea and Summer, he had written, “We talk of leaving a better world to our children, but in fact do little more than rub along with day-to-day problems and hope that the long-range catastrophes will never happen.” This novel, he explained, “is about the possible cost of complacency.”11 Much radical SF scholarship...

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