Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction

An original anthology of works from writers living down-under includes pieces by Peter Carey, Terry Dowling, Rosaleen Love, Sean McMullen, George Turner, Lucy Sussex, Greg Egan, Phillippa C. Maddern and A. Bertram Chandler. 15,000 first printing.

Not the first volume of Australian SF (editor Van Iken's rather indiscriminate collection arrived here in 1984) but by far the most significant: 20 substantial tales from the modern era, the majority of whose authors will be familiar to Kirkus regulars and SF-story buffs. A. Bertram Chandler (191284) offers an ingenious explanation for why Australian Aborigines revere Ayer's Rock. From George Turner (191697) comes an interstellar war/alien contact yarn. David J. Lake's ingenious time-machine travels only into the future, but his time traveler encounters only civilizations that roll time backward. Sean Williams describes a mine where the deeper you go, the weirder things get. Leann Frahm battles interdimensional invaders; Stephen Dedman's alternate-worlds yarn is guaranteed to upset the bigots; and Sean McMullen posits a genetically engineered, stable Earth in the future. People develop new perceptions of time in Cherry Wilder's post-disaster story, and Greg Egan's brilliant alien-contact yarn, ``Wang's Carpets,'' was incorporated into his magnificent 1998 novel, Diaspora. Other prospects include religion and DNA, cyberpunk, a story set in a universe created by Larry Niven, and a genetic lottery. A substantial and impressive showcase. If you considered Australia too remote and sparsely populated to be science fictionally importantwell, think again. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The wordcraft and imagination at play in this collection of 20 SF stories by Australian writers is quite extraordinary. The book is full of gorgeously imagined scenes on a transgalactic scale and challenging extrapolations of cutting-edge science. Hidden in the grandeur are meditations on the meaning of reality (Greg Egan's "Wang's Carpets"), motherhood (Rosaleen Love's "The Total Devotion Machine" and Shane Dix's "Matters of Consequence"), the social worth of religions (editor Broderick's own "The Magi") and gender dominance (a future lesbian society in Lucy Sussex's "My Lady Tongue," menstrual sacraments on an alternate world in Stephen Dedman's Swiftian "From Whom All Blessings Flow"). The question of tolerance comes up again and again: Islamic zealots encode the Qur'an in their DNA in Chris Lawson's "Written in Blood"; lumpen-loving ideologues take on the bodies of the underclass via a genetic lottery in Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's intimately human and poetic "The Chance." George Turner's classic "Flowering Mandrake" pits a plant-descended "green-blood" against xenophobic Earthmen. There is enough of the quotidian, charming and homey to ground all this exotica, and there are a few neat japes, like David Lake's unique tale of time travel gone wrong, "Re-deem the Time." A few clunkers appear as well, but no stiff prose, no cloddish infodumps. Broderick's introduction is itself a fine and illuminating piece of writing, and his and Hartwell's author profiles are unusually personal. It may arise from Down Under, but this anthology is a world-class treasure. (July) FYI: The 1999 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Melbourne in August.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.