From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jul 30 1999 - 06:46:05 MDT
Fun for all the family! (brag, strut.)
Source: Publishers Weekly, June 21, 1999 v246 i25 p61.
Title: CENTAURUS: The Best of Australian Science Fiction.(Review)
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Hartwell, David G.
Broderick, Damien
Nmd Works: Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (Book) - Reviews
Electronic Collection: A55022513
RN: A55022513
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Cahners Publishing Company
Edited by David G. Hartwell and Damien Broderick. Tor, $29.95 (528p) ISBN
0-312-86556-2
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 "F lowering 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 info-dumps.
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.
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