The summer months provide an excuse to steer off serious non-fiction to more escapist fare. Science fiction is one genre that is often viewed as a guide to where and how the world is heading.
Historian Niall Ferguson provided a handy summary in a recent Spectator article as a complement to his own account of the Covid-19 pandemic and previous outbreaks, Doom: The politics of disaster, reviewed last year. While Ferguson focuses on dystopian science fiction, which dominates most writing over the past century or so, it should be remembered that not all speculative fiction is negative.
The late Victorian age of the 19th century produced much more positive views of the future, both socialist and capitalist. The former saw an end to poverty in an egalitarian and non-property owning society where technological progress freed people from backbreaking labour.
Conservatives envisaged the opposite, with less regulation and widespread property ownership doing away with excessive government and self-serving elites.
Colonial New Zealand was no exception, with published titles including Robert Pemberton’s The Happy Colony (1854), Henry Crocker Robertson’s Erchomenon or the Republic of Materialism (1879) and Sir Julius Vogel’s Anno domini 2000; or Women’s Destiny (1889).
It may be noted, in case some think identity, racial and gender issues are recent phenomena, that Edward Tregar’s Hedged with Divinities (1895) features a world where all the men and boys die suddenly, leaving it occupied only by women. Except that one man is put to sleep by Māori medicine and wakes up three years later.
Contemporary concerns
Since that era, most speculative Kiwi fiction is definitively of the dystopian nature, affected by contemporary concerns about nuclear war, pollution of the environment (now climate change), persistent social issues and divisive politics. One memorable example of the latter is the country sliding into a fascist-style dictatorship in CK Stead’s Smith’s Dream (1971), filmed as Sleeping Dogs (1977).
This fear has hardly faded, and has been demonstrated from the left and the right – both before and after George Orwell’s seminal Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Another Kiwi novel, Craig Harrison’s The Quiet Earth (1981), also made into a movie (1985), is a variation on the one-man-left-alive theme.
While dystopian themes are now dominant, a gap exists for counterfactual fiction such as the evolution to a society based on pre-colonial values, as if the past two centuries had bypassed what would have been known as Aotearoa.
That would at least have a degree of uniqueness, as no other societies of scale or remoteness escaped the impact of imperialism, world wars and pandemics. Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) offered an alternative vision of a high-tech civilisation based in Africa.
Apocalyptic outlier
Kirsten McDougall’s She’s a Killer, published last October, is the latest to depict New Zealand as an outlier in a post-Apocalyptic world. Wellington-based McDougall has written two previous books, the romance novel Tess (2017) and linked short-story collection The Invisible Rider (2012). She has received several awards.
As Ferguson notes in his survey, dystopias have “always echoed present fears (or, to be more precise, the anxieties of the literary elite), [showing] us which worries of the past had a role in history”.
But usually these have overstated the dangers and have had a poor record of forcing policy changes. Sometimes they are completely wrong. Ferguson cites the 1930s policy of appeasement toward Germany as based on the exaggerated fear that the Luftwaffe could match HG Wells’s Martians in destroying London.
Those based on man-made environmental disasters have had more impact, such as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957, filmed in 1959, remade in 2000) and JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962).
Immigrant fears
Mass migration is another fear, notably in French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), in which an alliance of socialists and Islamic fundamentalists establish a shia-based state to avert a government led by right-wing nationalists.
Migration is also the starting point for She’s a Killer, with McDougall coining a neologism, “wealthugees,” as New Zealand becomes even more unequal society and a haven for the world’s rich seeking a bolt hole.
In reality, at least until the arrival of Covid-19 and closed borders, New Zealand had more attraction for low-paid migrants than bolthole billionaires, if reports of the many tens of thousands on short-stay work visas were any indication.
An apparent “wealthugee” is the protagonist of a plot to resist this division of New Zealand society. He befriends a low-level university employee, who recruits students for courses such as Russian literature, and entertains her at restaurants that locals can no longer afford. She has a high IQ but fits the slacker category as a woman falling well short of her potential. She agrees to take in the wealthugee’s teenage daughter, who is the polar opposite: a genius with the ambition and abilities to do anything.
The thriller plot is a great read over 400 pages but is embellished by the creative writing course syndrome of fitting in a a vast quantity of the author’s predilections.
I lost count where the topics covered filled more than the page of a notebook.
Apart from Russian literature, Tolstoy and how universities are run, you will learn about deficiencies in council services (Wellington, of course), water storage and management, Māori activism, anti-immigrant political populism, Asian wealth, beer, wine and coffee addiction, the profession of architecture, drama school, homeschooling, preserving food, an imaginary friend, jogging, martial arts and Morse code. And there’s lots, lots more of this, plucked presumably from the author’s daily lifestyle and the capital’s newspaper reports.
The author’s skill is that the slog through this creative-writing baggage is offset by an interesting collection of characters and a genuinely suspenseful plot that builds to an explosive ending.
She’s a Killer, by Kirsten McDougall (VUP).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor at large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not paid for by NBR.
