Descendants

Lee Hana: Descendants (2026)

Mass hysteria overwhelms an Australian shopping mall. A Burmese monk recalls a strange path to enlightenment. An ancient professor serves as his tribe’s frontal cortex. A firebrand lawmaker discovers what’s left after her soul is stolen. And everywhere, in this wild panorama of the next five centuries, we find the spectral traces of ourselves. These are worlds, sometimes disturbing, where you may not recognise your descendants …

• A mindbending new story collection from the Pōneke writer, Lee Hana.
• Majestic postpunk sci-fi page turner, grounded in places throughout Asia Pacific.
• Perfect for readers of LeGuin, Ballard, Butler, Borges, Atwood, Frame, Chiang, Pip Adam.

It's difficult to know just how to approach the art of the blurb. If you take it too far, casual readers tend to dismiss it as hyperbole. But then, if you dial it back too much, nobody bothers to open the book - even after your carefully curated cover-image has encouraged them to pick it up in the first place!

I'm not sure if the word "majestic" is precisely the one I would have chosen: and that list of authors sounds a little scattershot, also, but that's not to say that I didn't enjoy reading Lee Hana's debut collection of stories, launched on the 9th of May this year at the PSY FI gig advertised below:

Under the Radar: PSY FI (2026)

I'll be honest. At first I wasn't too sure about these "literary speculative" stories - as their author describes them. The opening piece, "Matsuri" - an account of a series of disturbances at a suburban shopping mall - seemed a bit inconclusive to me. It read more like notes towards a story than the story itself: "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction," as Wallace Stevens might have put it.

But there the book was, sitting on my bedside table, and I found myself picking it up from time to time to read further stories. Gradually I began to feel that odd sensation of learning how to read again. Sometimes things just click into place; other times you have to re-educate yourself in a more systematic way. John Ashbery, for me, was an example of the first experience; Lee Hana of the second.

I'm not sure if all these stories are of equal merit. It doesn't seem to me to be quite the right question. What I began to feel was that they added up to something: a certain way of perceiving things. Sure, I have my favourites. I empathise greatly with the hapless book collector in "Bushfire." I like "Queen," too - that fine last line: "This was an unimagined new century and the queen was not pleased with what she saw" seems, in a sense, to sum up the whole book.

Sunday Star-Times: Lee Hana (2026)

Descendants, though - the title he's chosen: descendants of what, of whom? There was an interesting appendix to an email I received from Lee Hana early in the process of writing this blogpost:

Science fiction = surrealism + plausibility
Crime = sociology + sociopathy
Romance = blowing on dying embers
Fantasy = the opposite of your life
Horror = what you fear you might deserve
Literary = the white page wants to be invisible

I don't know if this is original or not, but - in either case - I like it. I like it a lot. It's an intriguing set of definitions, and betrays an author who's been thinking hard about the parameters of genre fiction: presumably with the intention of breaking, or at the very least trespassing across them.

It also confirms my suspicion that this is a book which is more than the sum of its parts. What may seem tentative and under-written at first turns out to mask a subtlety of indirection: a philosophy of things not just as they are, but as they soon might be, compiled in deadly earnest.

So, rather than simply listing the 14 stories Lee Hana has included in his book, with a metaphorical tick or cross against each one, I thought it might be more interesting to contrast it with another collection I've been reading recently, also for the first time, although it was published almost half a century ago.

It's not that I think Lee Hana has read it too, but rather that he is, in a sense, its descendant - in whatever sense you like to take that:

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Edward Hamilton Waldo ["Theodore Sturgeon"] (1918-1985)

Back in the mid-1970s, SF maven Theodore Sturgeon edited a series called "The Best of Soviet Science Fiction". It included, inevitably, quite a few titles by the Strugatsky brothers, but there were a number of other authors involved as well.

I was fortunate enough to find a whole bunch of them on a remainders table some years ago. This was the result:

1. Igor Vsevolodovich Mozheyko ['Kirill Bulychev'] (1934-2003)

   Bulychev, Kirill. Half a Life and Other Stories. Trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977.


2. Viktor Dmitrievič Kolupaev (1936-2001)

   Kolupaev, Victor. Hermit’s Swing. Trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.


3. Vladimir Ivanovich Savchenko (1933-2005)

   Savchenko, Vladimir. Self-Discovery. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1979.


4. Vadim Sergeevich Shefner (1915-2002)

   Shefner, Vadim. The Unman / Kovrigin’s Chronicles. Trans. Alice Stone & Alexander Nakhimovsky, Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.


5. Arkady Strugatsky (1925-1991) & Boris Strugatsky (1933-2012)

   Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Noon: 22nd Century. 1962. Trans. Patrick L. MacGuire. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
   
   

   

   Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Far Rainbow / The Second Invasion from Mars. 1963 & 1967. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis & Gary Kern. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. 1979. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.
   
   

   

   Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Roadside Picnic / Tale of the Troika. 1972 & 1968. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977.
   
   

   

   Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Unusual Circumstances. 1977. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978.

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Andrei Tarkovsky, dir.: Stalker (1979)

The most obvious manifestation of these books - for me, at least - was Tarkovsky's strange, late movie Stalker, the last film he directed in the Soviet Union before leaving for the West.

Despite the fact that the film's screenplay was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, it bears little resemblance to their novel Roadside Picnic, one of the gems of the "Best of Soviet Science Fiction" series. The conceit of their original story is (as one of the characters describes it):

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around ... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind ... And of course, the usual mess — apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

The book is about the "stalkers" who visit the site - known as the Zone - of this alien picnic, looking for scraps to pick up, at constant risk of their lives if it turns out to be toxic or deadly in some other way.

Out of this Tarkovsky wove a complex parable about the moral cost of achieving your heart's desire. It's probably my favourite among all of his films - much though I love Andrei Rublev and his other SF masterpiece Solaris - but there's a certain hard SF grittiness about the original story that I like nearly as much.

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Kirill Bulychev: Half a Life (1977)

But it wasn't the Strugatsky brothers I was reading at the same time as Descendants. No, it was the collection above, by the less-well known Kirill (or "Kir") Bulychev, a Russian Orientalist who doubled as an immensely prolific science fiction writer. His work is not as philosophically testing as that of Stanislaw Lem or the Strugatskys - the most successful of the many SF writers behind the Iron Curtain - but it, too, has its appeal.

There are time-slip stories, alien abduction stories, and various other manifestations of "the whole threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel" (as Lem once characterised the commercial SF of his time). It is, however, the quotidian background of Soviet life - phones that don't work, compulsory group picnics by the river, shoddy city apartments - that lend Bulychev's work a curious patina of difference: for a Western reader, at any rate.

The alien backgrounds may be similar, but the everyday foreground was divergent enough to dislocate me significantly in time as well as space as I read. The sixties and seventies seem increasingly strange to us, in any case - even for those of us who lived through them. Recasting that strangeness to a threatening universe of (alleged) ideological constraint beyond the Iron Curtain can have the result of pushing you quite off balance.

It's not so much that life there does sound all that different. It's just that it is, still, unknown and unpredictable: far more so, paradoxically, than the stereotyped backdrops of the SF environments we've grown so used to over the years.

Borges, Ocampo, Bioy Casares, Le Guin, et al.: The Book of Fantasy (1990)

I imagine you can see the point I'm making. It's hard to "make it new" in so well-trodden a field as Fantasy/SF, but that doesn't mean that the effort's not worth it. I was a bit taken aback when I read that list of authors Lee Hana's work was, implicitly, being compared to:

Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Ted Chiang, Pip Adam

These are some pretty awe-inspiring names to invoke! But I think I can now see the point he was making. It's not so much the eminence as the divergence of these names that's significant. Some could be said to be writing New Wave Sci fi; others Metafictional puzzles of various kinds, but all of them inhabit the disturbing far ranges of the Fantastic: "Psy Fi" as the conference organisers call it. J. G. Ballard would have referred to it as exploration of inner space.

Having now read his book, I'm inclined to agree that this is the territory Lee Hana, too, is traversing. And I'm very impressed with this, his first concerted venture into unknown lands. I'd like to read more, and I'm confident that we'll be hearing more, much more from him in the future - whatever eldritch Lovecraftian future that might turn out to be ...

Lee Hana: Descendants Launch (2026)

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Other Worlds: An Exhibition

(Auckland Central Library: 19/2-2/8/25)

Frederick Pohl: The Way the Future Was (1979)

The Way the Future Was. Ever since I first came across it, I've felt that the title of Frederick Pohl's mid-career memoir summed up the field of Science Fiction pretty exactly.

For all its emphasis on futuristic prediction and the pending triumphs of technology, SF (whether you read that acronym as "Science Fiction" or the more inclusive "Speculative Fiction") has always been an intensely nostalgic genre.

Other Worlds, curated by Andrew Henry & Renee Orr (19 February - 2 August 2025)

You feel it the moment you walk in the door of Other Worlds, the latest exhibition in the Rare Books Room at Auckland's Central City Library, an exploration of the "imaginative worlds of science fiction ... featuring books, magazines, comics and posters from Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections."

Simon Tate: Auckland Council Libraries (2025)

The curators' decision to focus on old SF magazine covers to create an immediate visual effect was an inspired one. The exuberance and inventiveness of the artists who illustrated these old pulp magazines was propelled not so much by aesthetic considerations as by the sheer strength of the competition.

They had to stand out against all the other possibilities on the newstand: the toney, uptown slicks; the plethora of True Crime and True Detective titles; and even the last few remaining shockers: the EC horror comics or Weird Tales - almost all of them equally attractive (or garish, depending on your taste).

Frank Herbert: The Prophet of Dune (1965)

And yet, look at this cover from the original run of Dune in Analog in the early 1960s. Has there ever been a more majestic rendition of a Sandworm in any of the subsequent book-covers or movies?

"Shai Hulud!" I found myself intoning as I saw it, "Bless the Maker and His water. May His passage cleanse the world." I am, as you may have gathered, an abject fan of the grandeur of Frank Herbert's conception, ever since I first read it more years ago than I care to mention ...

Fritz Lang, dir. Metropolis, music by Giorgio Moroder (1924 / 1984)

That's not all you see when you first go in, though. In accordance with that sense of nostalgia I mentioned above, there was an old flickering black-and-white movie being projected on the back wall: possibly the greatest SF movie ever made - certainly among the most influential - Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

It's a masterpiece no matter which version you watch it in (there are many - of varying lengths and degrees of completeness). It's probably a relic of having come of age in the 1980s, but I still can't get past the experience of first seeing it in full in the 1984 version scored by Giorgio Moroder.

Moroder colourised the scenes, which might sound sacrilegious if you didn't realise that that was how feature films were generally projected in the 1920s - just like those classical marble nudes we admire so much which were originally covered in brightly coloured paint by their creators.

Check it out for yourself at the youtube link above.

Simon Tate: Auckland Council Libraries (2025)

Which brings me to my next point. What exactly are we intended to take away from this assemblage of artefacts? Once you've got over the security blanket feeling of seeing so many old friends among the books displayed in the vitrines - Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - you begin to wonder about the rationale behind them.

Of course the standard themes are gestured towards: Robots and Monsters, Inner Worlds, the planet Mars ... these are a few of the labels included in the exhibition brochure. And, yes, artificial life and artificial intelligence are now subjects which impact on us everyday, as do the consequences of ignoring the ecological warnings of earlier SF.

“It’s a celebration of the imagination of writers and artists – of imaginative literature,” says Andrew Henry, Curator of Auckland Collections, Auckland Council Libraries.

“There’s a huge variety of other worlds that these writers have created, from outer space to cyberspace. We want to invite Aucklanders to come and check out science fiction’s early beginnings and how it’s progressed since then; to consider how this might be topical in the modern day and what some of the wildest predictions of technology have been – did they get it right? Come find out!”

Quite so. But in keeping with that invitation, I guess what excited me most about the show were the few, subversive signs it contained of a new lease of life for this now venerable genre.

Gina Cole: Na Viro (2022)

It's not actually included in any of the vitrines, but I see that local author Gina Cole has been asked to come and speak about her work at one of the public programmes associated with the exhibition. When I first read her novel Na Viro a few years ago, I was hugely impressed by the skill with which it integrated both colonial and dystopian themes into a new construct she referred to as "Pasifikafuturism."

Gina Cole

Building on her earlier collection Black Ice Matter (2017), Cole has expertly transposed some of the ideas behind the embattled concept of Afrofuturism to a Pacific context.

But it's the inclusion of works by Octavia Butler and that supreme maverick Samuel R. Delany in the cabinet marked "Colonisation" that gives us a possible lead towards seeing how these themes ought to stand front and centre in any consideration of the meaning of SF in Aotearoa now.

Samuel Delany & Octavia Butler (1998)

While neither of these authors felt exactly comfortable about the possible limiting implications of the term, there's no doubt that present-day Afrofuturism - and its offshoot, Africanfuturism - owe a great debt to their pioneering work in the SF genre. Nor did they shy away from controversy or cultural politics: the lifeblood of any engaged artform.

I'd like to see what's included here, then, as not so much a nostalgia-fest as a blueprint for further progress. Where do we go from here? For Gina Cole, that has meant conceiving of travel through space as the same leap into the unknown her ancestors undertook in setting out across the moana.

Or, as T. S. Eliot once said:

... the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

- "The Dry Salvages." Four Quartets (1941)

Geoff Murphy, dir. The Quiet Earth (1985)

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For those interested in pursuing this topic, there are a number of sites you might like to check out:

• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

  notable for its excellent essays on SF themes, as well as its individual author studies

• The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

  again, an indispensable source of information on the genre

• ISFDB: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database

  a constantly growing repository of mostly bibliographical information on the field

• NZSF: Essays on New Zealand Speculative Fiction

  a website containing most of my own essays on the local product, from Samuel Butler to the present day

• SFFANZ: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand

  an invaluable resource for those wanting to explore the history of SF in New Zealand, as well as the latest developments in the field

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Other Worlds, curated by Andrew Henry & Renee Orr (2025)
[Mike Hinge: Analog cover design (1967)]

SF Luminaries: John Wyndham

John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (1951 / 2009)

Plan for Chaos is a very odd book. It's certainly not without interest. However, I think one can see why no publishers actually leapt at the chance of putting it out back in the early 1950s when veteran Sci-fi writer Frederik Pohl (then moonlighting as a literary agent for John Wyndham and various other clients) was shopping it around New York.

There's the Nazi angle. In that respect, it serves as a precursor to Philip K. Dick's alternative history classic The Man in the High Castle (1962), or - for that matter - M. K. Joseph's Tomorrow the World, written in the late 1970s but only published posthumously in 2020.

There's the evil clone angle. In some ways it's very like Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976), only this time with flying saucers thrown in: quite a novel plot-twist for 1951, given that the expression wasn't actually coined until 1947, as a result of Kenneth Arnold's claim that the objects he saw on June 24 of that year "moved like saucers skipping across the water."

Amazing Stories (1946)

One can see so much in it, and yet it somehow doesn't quite work - it isn't visceral, actual, like his breakthrough title The Day of the Triffids (1951), or even its successor The Kraken Wakes (1953).

I'm not sure how much I need to say about them. I wrote a piece focussing on my early reading of The Day of the Triffids, in particular, in the introduction to my New Zealand Speculative Fiction website. I doubt that it's necessary to repeat all that here.

John Beynon: The Secret People (1935)

Nevertheless, having recently reread as much of his earlier work as I can easily access, it is facinating to see how many false starts one writer can have before settling into their mature style. There are flashes of Wyndham in all of the early novels, but the instinctively colonial attitudes displayed in both The Secret People (1935) and Planet Plane (1936) seem pretty repellent now.

John Beynon: Planet Plane (1936)

The John Wyndham heroine - smart, stylish, witty - familiar from later books begins to make an appearance quite early on, which is really the main attraction of these pre-war pulp serials and short stories. For those curious about how he came to create this character in the first place, Amy Binns' recent biography provides a number of new insights.

Amy Binns: Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters (2019)

It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that without her book, the so-called "invisible man of Science Fiction" would have remained a shadowy figure, accessible only through his witty prose and a set of curiously repetitive ideas. Fatherless children, wiser than their elders (Chocky, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos); alien invasions of the British countryside ("The Puff-Ball menace", The Day of the Triffids, Trouble with Lichen); the oppressive nature of conventional domesticity ("Dumb Martian," "Survival," "Compassion Circuit") ... Binns supplies vital information about Jack Harris's early life which make seem these far less unaccountable.

But literary talent is, of course, not readily reducible to any such set of causes. Why did it take him so long to break through? Why did he persevere in the face of such steady discouragement? Where did those Triffids really come from?

H. G. Wells: SF Masterworks Series

We'll never know. It is, however, safe to say that without H. G. Wells, there would have been no John Wyndham. So many of his ideas - not to mention the ease of his story telling - find their roots in the vast turbulent sea of Wells's oeuvre (particularly the early SF romances and short stories). But Wyndham is not Wells: he lacks his didactic bent, and has a healthy cynicism about the expression of great ideas. His appeal was to as much to the readers of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse as it was to hard-core Sci-fi fans.

I suppose that John Wyndham's real tragedy was that his success came so late, and that he died so young. But then, that's more our tragedy than his. There's no doubt that he had more to say, but the few books he did write remain classics of the genre. The fact that they're still in print after half a century rather speaks for itself.

The John Wyndham Omnibus (1979)

A great deal of incidental information about him is available online at the John Wyndham Archive website. Beyond that, much though I would recommend Amy Binns's well-written and insightful biography, your first stopping-place should be the books themselves - from the Triffids onwards, at any rate. If you don't find them charming and absorbing at first sight, chances are he's not for you.

Brian AldissBillion Year Spree (1973)

In his 1973 history of the SF genre, Billion (later revised to 'Trillion') Year Spree, Brian Aldiss described John Wyndham's breakout books as ‘cosy catastrophes’:

Both novels [The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes] were totally devoid of ideas but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, who enjoyed cosy disasters. Either it was something to do with the collapse of the British Empire, or the back-to-nature movement, or a general feeling that industrialization had gone too far, or all three.

Aldiss goes on to describe the characteristics of this ‘urbane and pleasing’ SF subgenre as follows:

The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off … Such novels are anxiety fantasies. They shade off towards the greater immediacy of World War III novels, a specialist branch of catastrophe more usually practiced by American writers.

He concludes with a rather premature epitaph on Wyndham and his ilk: ‘the race is not always to the swift, etc.’ Unfortunately, such dismissive judgements on a possible trade rival can cut both ways. Has Brian Aldiss himself fared much better?

Who (besides myself) now reads Non-stop (1958) or Hothouse (1962)? Who wades through The Malacia Tapestry or the Helliconia trilogy? Who remembers that one of Stanley Kubrick’s last film projects was an adaptation of Aldiss’s short story ‘Super-Toys Last All Season Long,’ which he delegated instead to Steven Spielberg, who turned it into the flawed, though not uninteresting, A.I.?

Steven Spielberg, dir.: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

John Wyndham, by contrast, continues to be read. It seems safe to say now that he probably always will be. Aldiss's rather self-conscious attempts to be mod and up-to-the-minute sound even more uncomfortably dated now than what he saw as Wyndham's perverse determination to write "a kind of country-house science fiction."

And, as Hilaire Belloc once put it, speaking (perhaps) for all such writers who pop in and out of fashion with the passing years:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

Amy Binns: Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters (2019)

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John Wyndham (1903-1969)

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris
(1903-1969)

[His work appeared under a variety of pseudonyms, mostly constructed from his various initials: John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, John B. Harris, Johnson Harris, J. W. B. Harris, Lucas Parkes, Wyndham Parkes, & John Wyndham among them]

Novels:


1. [as 'John B. Harris']: The Curse of the Burdens. Aldine Mystery Novels No. 17 (London: Aldine Publishing Co. Ltd. 1927)


2. [as 'John Beynon']: The Secret People (1935)
   • The Secret People. 1935. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1972.


3. Foul Play Suspected (London: Newnes, 1935)


4. Planet Plane [aka 'The Space Machine'] (1936)
   • Stowaway to Mars. 1935. Coronet Books. 1972. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1977.


5. [as 'John Wyndham']: The Day of the Triffids [aka 'Revolt of the Triffids']. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.


6. The Kraken Wakes [aka 'Out of the Deeps']. 1953. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


7. The Chrysalids [aka 'Re-Birth']. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.


8. The Midwich Cuckoos. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.


9. Trouble with Lichen. 1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.


10. Chocky. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.


11. Web. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.


12. Plan for Chaos. Ed. David Ketterer & Andy Sawyer. 2009. Introduction by Christopher Priest. London: Penguin, 2010.


Short Story Collections:


13. Jizzle. 1954. Four Square. London: New English Library, 1973.
    1. Jizzle
    2. Technical Slip
    3. A Present from Brunswick
    4. Chinese Puzzle
    5. Esmeralda
    6. How Do I Do?
    7. Una
    8. Affair of the Heart
    9. Confidence Trick
    10. The Wheel
    11. Look Natural, Please!
    12. Perforce to Dream
    13. Reservation Deferred
    14. Heaven Scent
    15. More Spinned Against


14. The Seeds of Time. 1956. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
    1. Foreword by John Wyndham
    2. Chronoclasm
    3. Time To Rest
    4. Meteor
    5. Survival
    6. Pawley's Peepholes
    7. Opposite Number
    8. Pillar To Post
    9. Dumb Martian
    10. Compassion Circuit
    11. Wild Flower


15. Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter [US selection from 'Jizzle' and 'The Seeds of Time'] (1956)
    1. Chinese Puzzle
    2. Una
    3. The Wheel
    4. Jizzle
    5. Heaven Scent
    6. Compassion Circuit
    7. More Spinned Against
    8. A Present from Brunswick
    9. Confidence Trick
    10. Opposite Numbers
    11. Wild Flower


16. [with 'Lucas Parkes']: The Outward Urge. 1959 & 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
    1. The Space Station A.D. 1994 [aka 'For All the Night'] (1958)
    2. The Moon A.D. 2044 [aka 'Idiot’s Delight'] (1958)
    3. Mars A.D. 2094 [aka 'The Thin Gnat-Voices'] (1958)
    4. Venus A.D. 2144 [aka 'Space Is a Province of Brazil'] (1958)
    5. The Asteroids A.D. 2194 [aka 'The Emptiness of Space'] (1960)


17. Consider Her Ways and Others. 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
    1. Consider Her Ways
    2. Odd
    3. Stitch in Time
    4. Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty?
    5. Random Quest
    6. A Long Spoon


18. The Infinite Moment [US edition of 'Consider Her Ways and Others', with two stories replaced] (1961)
    1. Consider Her Ways
    2. Odd
    3. How Do I Do
    4. Stitch In Time
    5. Random Quest
    6. Time Out


19. The Best of John Wyndham. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Lost Machine (1932)
    2. The Man from Beyond (1934)
    3. The Perfect Creature (1937)
    4. The Trojan Beam (1939)
    5. Vengeance by Proxy (1940)
    6. Adaptation (1949)
    7. Pawley's Peepholes (1951)
    8. The Red Stuff (1951)
    9. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1951)
    10. Dumb Martian (1952)
    11. Close Behind Him (1952)
    12. The Emptiness of Space (1960)


20. [as ‘John Beynon’]: Sleepers of Mars. Introduction by Walter Gillings. Coronet Books. 1973. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Fate of the Martians, by Walter Gillings
    2. Sleepers of Mars (1939)
    3. Worlds to Barter (1931)
    4. Invisible Monster (1933)
    5. The Man from Earth (1934)
    6. The Third Vibrator (1933)


21. [as ‘John Beynon Harris’]: Wanderers of Time. Introduction by Walter Gillings. Coronet Books. 1973. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1974.
    1. Before the Triffids, by Walter Gillings
    2. Wanderers of Time [aka 'Love in Time'] (1933)
    3. Derelict of Space (1939)
    4. Child of Power (1939)
    5. The Last Lunarians (1934)
    6. The Puff-Ball Menace [aka 'Spheres of Hell'] (1933)


22. [as ‘John Beynon’]: Exiles on Asperus. Coronet Books. 1979. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1980.
    1. Exiles on Asperus (1933)
    2. No Place Like Earth (1951)
    3. The Venus Adventure (1932)


23. No Place Like Earth [Some stories previously published in 'Jizzle', 'The Seeds of Time', 'Consider Her Ways and Others', Wanderers of Time' and 'Exiles on Asperus'] (2003)
    1. Derelict of Space
    2. Time to Rest
    3. No Place Like Earth
    4. In Outer Space There Shone a Star
    5. But a Kind of a Ghost
    6. The Cathedral Crypt
    7. A Life Postponed
    8. Technical Slip
    9. Una
    10. It's a Wise Child
    11. Pillar to Post
    12. The Stare
    13. Time Stops Today
    14. The Meddler
    15. Blackmoil
    16. A Long Spoon

Short stories:

[Included in Jizzle (1954); The Seeds of Time (1956);
Consider Her Ways and Others / The Infinite Moment {CW / IM} (1961);
Sleepers of Mars / Wanderers of Time / Exiles on Asperus {SM / WT / EA} (1973, 1974, 1979);
The Best of John Wyndham / No Place Like Earth {Best / NPE} (1973, 2003)]


1. Worlds to Barter {SM} (1931)
2. The Lost Machine {Best} (1932)
3. The Stare {NPE} (1932)
4. The Venus Adventure {EA} (1932)
5. Exiles on Asperus {EA} (1933)
6. Invisible Monster {SM} (1933)
7. The Puff-Ball Menace {WT} [aka 'Spheres of Hell'] (1933)
8. The Third Vibrator {SM} (1933)
9. Wanderers of Time {WT} [aka 'Love in Time'] (1933)
10. The Man from Earth {SM} [aka 'The Man from Beyond' {Best}] (1934)
11. The Last Lunarians {WT} [aka 'The Moon Devils'] (1934)
12. The Cathedral Crypt {NPE} (1935)
13. The Perfect Creature {Best} (1937)
14. Judson's Annihilator [aka 'Beyond the Screen'] (1938)
15. Sleepers of Mars {SM} (1938)
16. Child of Power {WT} (1939)
17. Derelict of Space {WT} {NPE} (1939)
18. The Trojan Beam {Best} (1939)
19. Vengeance by Proxy {Best} (1940)
20. Meteor (1941)
21. The Living Lies (1946)
22. Technical Slip {NPE} (1949)
23. Jizzle (1949)
24. Adaptation {Best} (1949)
25. Time to Rest {NPE} (1949)
26. The Eternal Eve (1950)
27. Pawley's Peepholes {Best} (1951)
28. The Red Stuff {Best} (1951)
29. No Place Like Earth {EA} {NPE} [aka 'Tyrant and Slave-Girl on Planet Venus'] (1951)
30. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down {Best} (1951)
31. A Present from Brunswick [aka 'Bargain from Brunswick'] (1951)
32. Pillar to Post {NPE} (1951)
33. The Wheel (1952)
34. Survival (1952)
35. Dumb Martian {Best} (1952)
36. Time Out {IM} (1953)
37. Close Behind Him {Best} (1953)
38. Time Stops Today {NPE} (1953)
39. Chinese Puzzle [aka 'A Stray from Cathay'] (1953)
40. Chronoclasm (1953)
41. Reservation Deferred (1953)
42. More Spinned Against (1953)
43. Confidence Trick (1953)
44. How Do I Do? {IM} (1953)
45. Affair of the Heart (1954)
46. Esmeralda (1954)
47. Heaven Scent (1954)
48. Look Natural, Please! (1954)
49. Never on Mars (1954)
50. Perforce to Dream (1954)
51. Una {NPE} (1954)
52. Opposite Number (1954)
53. Compassion Circuit (1954)
54. Wild Flower (1955)
55. Consider Her Ways {CW / IM} (1956)
56. But a Kind of Ghost {NPE} (1957)
57. The Meddler {NPE} (1958)
58. For All the Night [aka 'The Space Station A.D. 1994' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
59. Idiot’s Delight [aka 'The Moon A.D. 2044' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
60. The Thin Gnat-Voices [aka 'Mars A.D. 2094' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
61. Space Is a Province of Brazil [aka 'Venus A.D. 2144' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
62. A Long Spoon {CW} {NPE} (1960)
63. The Emptiness of Space [aka 'The Asteroids A.D. 2194' - from The Outward Urge] {Best} (1960)
64. Odd {CW / IM} (1961)
65. Oh, Where, Now, Is Peggy MacRafferty? {CW} (1961)
66. Random Quest {CW / IM} (1961)
67. Stitch in Time {CW / IM} (1961)
68. It's a Wise Child {NPE} (1962)
69. Chocky (1963)
70. In Outer Space There Shone a Star {NPE} (1965)
71. A Life Postponed {NPE} (1968)
72. 'Phase Two': Excerpt (1973)
73. Vivisection (2000)
74. Blackmoil {NPE} (2003)

Secondary:


24. Amy Binns. Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters. London: Grace Judson Press, 2019.

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John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (2009)

Fifteenth Anniversary (Crystal)

Crystal

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is the fifteenth anniversary of The Imaginary Museum. Ten years ago I put up a post which listed five major web projects I'd undertaken in the first five years of the blog's existence, and five years ago I published a follow-up, with five more projects undertaken between 2011 and 2016.

The statistics on the blog are interesting. It took till December 2018 for it to break the "Million-hit Barrier", and another two years after that to reap another quarter million hits, so I guess I must be averaging a fairly consistent 125,000 per year (10,400 per month / 2,400 per week / 340 per day). I only have 100-odd followers, so there must be a pretty consistent number of returns on online searches to build up that amount of traffic.

Pageviews (6/12/2018)

Comments are way down from what they used to be. I don't take that too personally, as that seems to be the case for most blogs nowadays - certainly ones that include moderation. I get a large number of comments from spammers pretending to be successful members of the Illuminati every since I put up a mildly sarcastic post on the subject a few years ago now ("Worried about the Illuminati?"). You'd think that the date it was posted - April 1, 2016 - would offer some clue to its nature, but apparently not.

My web-based endeavours do seem to have slowed down a bit, but there are still some reasonably substantial ones to list below. Here they are, then, in (rough) chronological order:

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2016:




1. (December 2, 2016- ) Jack Ross: Showcase.



This ... is meant more as a vitrine than a catalogue: the closest simulacrum I can achieve online to my own personal cabinet of curiosities.

- Jack Ross. "Site-map" (2016)

For a long time now I've maintained a large, quite complex site called Works and Days as a combination curriculum vitae / comprehensive list of publications (and reviews of same). Even I find it a bit difficult to navigate at times, though, so I decided to make a more streamlined showcase site where I could display my major publications in a convenient, easy-to-reference style.

The idea is to maintain both sites in tandem: to put everything of interest on the first site, and to select only those few details likely to concern others on the second. It's a bit difficult to gauge the success of the endeavour so far, but I do feel the medley of covers and titles combine to make an attractive design.




•


2017:




2. (September 19, 2017- ) Paper Table.



A few years ago I participated in a fairly haphazard and poorly organised book fair ... The book table that I was helping out at was decorated with a selection of paper models I had made, designed to catch people’s attention, make our table seem more welcoming, and hopefully generate a few sales as a result ...
At a certain point in the day, a little girl approached us. She was about eight years old and she asked if she could buy the paper table from our display. She held out $15.00 to pay for it. Of course, I gladly gave her the table for free, and for some time afterwards I glimpsed her walking around the large room, the paper table carefully balanced on the palm of her hand, staring at it with an expression of utter delight.

- Bronwyn Lloyd. "Mission Statement" (2017)

Having published a number of books through our Arts-oriented small publisher Pania Press, Bronwyn Lloyd and I decided to move into fiction publishing with this new endeavour. Specifically, we hoped to put out a series of novellas which could contribute to the richness of this form in New Zealand writing.

Unfortunately the costs and organisation involved proved more than anticipated, and we were forced to suspend the series after the first three volumes had appeared. It was a nice idea while it lasted, though, and we may well return to it at some point in the future if the commercial balance of such initiatives tips our way again.

The three books that did appear were as follows:



• Leicester Kyle. Letters to a Psychiatrist. Afterword by Jack Ross. Paper Table Novellas, 1. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.
• Jack Ross. The Annotated Tree Worship: Draft Research Portfolio. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (i). Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.
• Jack Ross. The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (ii). Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.




•


2018:




3. (September 20, 2017-March 2019) Poetry NZ Review: Local Poetry Books in Review.



As in the print edition of the magazine, there are a lot of opinions on display in the Poetry New Zealand Review. Some of them the editors may happen to agree with, others not. A well-argued point merits its own space, however, and we see our function on this site more as curators than as advocates of particular views.

- Jack Ross. "Guiding Principles" (2017)

I had hoped to make this a more substantial site, featuring year-round reviews of poetry books which weren't able to be fitted in the annual volumes of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. However, my interest in the project began to wane after I decided to give up the managing editorship of the magazine after six years and six issues (five edited by me directly, one edited by Dr Jo Emeney).

It's a shame, as I think it could have been a useful resource for recording the immense stream of published poetry - much of it of high quality - which appears each year in New Zealand from small presses as well as established publishers. Now that Poetry New Zealand has moved to Waikato under Tracey Slaughter's editorship, I feel that I might just leave the site as it is for the present. Who knows? The time may come to revive it in one form or another.




•


2019:




4. (October, 2019) The Lonesome Death of Brigid Furey. Ka Mate Ka Ora 17: 62-79.



It is some years now since I tried to contact Bridget Furey, the elusive and enigmatic poet whom Jack Ross discusses in his beguilingly performative essay ‘The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey or: Pessoa Down Under.’ The nearest I got, when I wrote to the only and clearly out-of-date address I had, was to reach Bridget’s older, doting sister, Maud (Maudlin) Furey. Maud replied to me by snail mail (as I had written to Bridget). She explained that her brilliant, but implicitly erratic, sister had long since done with poetry. And the next sentence hinted that she might have long since done with life itself, too. But Maud did not elaborate or unpick her dark hints. All she added was: “I wish she hadn’t!” Then Maud had copied out by hand into the letter a text message, which she said was the last communication she had received, quite a while ago now, from her sister, and that she feared that would be the final: “Out on the margins the oddballs bounce the highest.” And that was all. Except for a PS added in tiny letters (Maud’s hand-writing was very neat and small) beneath her signature: “My sister overdosed on life – I wish I had.”
Bridget Furey’s characteristically enigmatic text comes into sharp and meaningful focus when applied to this issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora. This is an issue of high-bouncing oddballs ...

- Murray Edmond, "Editorial Notes: Out on the Margins the Oddballs Bounce Highest." Ka Mate Ka Ora 17 (October 2019)

This article - in full: "The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey, Or: Pessoa Down Under,” & (ed.) ‘The Complete Poetical Works of Bridget Furey (1966-c.1997)'" - started off as a paper on the influence of Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa on a number of Antipodean writers, which I delivered in mid-2018 at the 15th International Conference on the Short Story in English in Lisbon, Portugal.

I had originally intended to write it up for the Conference Proceedings, but the editors felt (not unreasonably) that it was more focussed on poetry than short fiction. I therefore rewrote it substantially for our local New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Ka Mate Ka Ora, based at my old alma mater the University of Auckland.




•


2020:




5. (January 1, 2018 - September 4, 2020) NZSF: The Psychogeography of New Zealand Speculative Fiction.



George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster were great admirers of the later Samuel Butler, who brought a new tone into Victorian literature and began a long tradition of New Zealand utopian/dystopian literature that would culminate in works by Jack Ross, William Direen, Alan Marshall and Scott Hamilton.

- "Samuel Butler (novelist)." Wikipedia (accessed 17 August 2020)

I originally planned to collect all the various articles and reviews I've written about NZSF between covers as a rather discursive history of the topic, but the publishers I submitted it to seemed to feel that it fell between two stools: two nerdy to appeal to "general readers" (whoever they may be), and too anecdotal and personal to please an Academic public.

However, I think they might have done me a favour, as I feel far more comfortable with this online version of the project. It has the great virtue of being able to be expanded and revised continuously, and it's also far more colourful and image-rich than anything short of a coffee-table book would have allowed me to be.

•

So what does the future hold for this blog - and for the bloggy empire to which it constitutes the gateway (38 at last count)? Who can truly say? These are deep waters, Watson.

More of the same, no doubt, but perhaps it might be a good idea to learn to expend my energy in ways which make more sense to the Academic authorities presiding over my professional development: PBRF [Performance-Based Research Funding, for those of you lucky enough not to be in the know], for instance ...

Nah, just kidding.

Geoff Murphy, dir. The Quiet Earth (1985)

•

M. K. Joseph: Tomorrow the World

M. K. Joseph: Tomorrow the World (2020)
[cover design: Ellen Portch]

So yesterday I went along to the launch, at the Grey Lynn Returned Servicemen's Club, of M. K. Joseph's latest novel, published now for the first time, forty years after his death, by that determined champion of the obscure and avant-garde, publisher Brett Cross of Atuanui Press and its sister-imprint Titus Books.

Brett Cross

The book was launched by celebrated ceramic artist Chuck Joseph, the son of 'Mick' or 'Mike' or 'M.K.' (Chuck explained that all of these various sobriquets were used at different times by different sets of friends).

Chuck Joseph

Perhaps the most fascinating part of his speech was a series of extracts from his father's letters home about (first) his rather truncated 1939 tour of Western Europe with a couple of friends in an old car - how often do you read in a letter: 'we had to cut things short owing to the invasion of Poland,' as he quipped. This was followed by more letters about Joseph's 1944-45 traverse of the same territory, which seems to have included an active part in virtually every battle during this punishing campaign.

Chuck made the point that this posthumous alternate-history novel about the possible consequences of a Nazi victory in the second world war could be regarded as the third part of his War Trilogy: a follow-up to I'll Soldier No More (1958) and A Soldier's Tale (1976). The knowledge of Nazism and of the war itself it demonstrates was no mere Academic book-learning, but the lived experience of an extraordinarily multi-faceted man.

Scott Hamilton

The other speaker was my good friend, polymathic cultural commentator Dr Scott Hamilton. Scott sees the book as the culmination of yet another trilogy: the set of Sci-fi novels comprising space-adventure The Hole in the Zero (1967) and his time-travel opus The Time of Achamoth (1977) - which I've written about here.

The Cosmos, Time itself, and now a complete Alternate History ... no-one could claim that Joseph was unambitious as a writer. Scott speculated that after a hard day at Auckland Uni, and his various duties as a family-man, it was in his study that M. K. Joseph really let rip: this, the seventh in his tally of published novels, is no less wild than any of the others.

M. K. Joseph: The Hole in the Zero (1967)

I was asked to write a letter in support of Atuanui Press's Creative New Zealand funding application for the publication of this novel, and read the whole book in typescript then. I'd like to quote a bit of that letter here, written more than a year ago when it was still fresh in my mind:

It’s no mere Academic curiosity that leads me to recommend your support of the publication of this work ... On one level – probably the most superficial – Joseph’s novel is a rattling good yarn (possibly the best he ever wrote in that respect). It’s an excellent thriller, with well-managed suspense and a nail-biting plot.

Besides that, though (as one would expect of so groundbreaking and influential a writer) it’s a fascinating meditation on the nature of Nazism and Nazi rule, which picks up on various themes already inherent in The Time of Achamoth, and shows signs of profound knowledge not just of mid-twentieth century history, but also of the mid-European landscapes traversed by the hero and heroine.

Mind you, I think it complements rather than surpasses Philip K. Dick’s classic SF novel The Man in the High Castle (1962). Joseph and Dick have very different concerns, but both clearly spent a great deal of time studying the minutiae of German culture and Nazi nomenclature. (Now, of course, there are online games which foresee similar situations – one, described to me by a student the other day, presupposes a German victory in WW1, which leads to the same Churchill-in-Canada scenario Tomorrow the World envisages).

It's not so much the originality of the particular alternate history behind this novel as the literary quality of the novel itself which leads me to recommend it so highly. I think contemporary readers will enjoy it as much (or more) than readers in 1981 would have done. In a sense, Joseph’s underlying ideas are more in accord with the zeitgeist of this time than they were with his own.

Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

The comparison with Dick's Hugo-award-winning novel is, I guess, inevitable. It was an unusual project for him, written in a more 'formal' style than much of his other work, and the first of his novels to be picked up by a major publisher. It's certainly a masterpiece, but one that hinges more on his then fascination with the oracular wisdom of the ancient Chinese I-Ching (he claimed, in fact, that the book was co-written by the oracle) and the complexities of the Japanese occupiers of the Pacific Coast of the former United States than with the far-off horrors of Nazi rule.

Joseph shares his philosophical bent, but with more of a Eurocentric focus. His novel is probably - unfortunately - less out of place in the world we now inhabit, with its naked white supremacism and neo-fascism at the highest levels of government, than it was when he was writing it fifty-odd years ago.

It's probably no secret that I see New Zealand's own home-grown brand of literary SF, composed by some of our most famous writers, but regarded by most critics - still - as an aberrant outgrowth of the rest of their basically realist writing, as the secret figure in the carpet underlying the apparent conservatism of NZld lit over the past half century. This novel is a major part of that story - it's very readable, and it's well worth your time.

Congratulations, then, to Scott and Brett - and, above all, Chuck - for championing it. Nor is it the last treasure hidden away among Joseph's posthumous papers, I'm told ...

Tomorrow the World