Laying Down the Lore of First Nations speculative fiction
Leading voice in Indigenous storytelling, Dr Mykaela Saunders, explored her groundbreaking research on First Nations speculative fiction at our annual Hugh D.T. Williamson Lecture.
“If we consider that all First Nations creation stories begin in similar ways, with life-giving climate change, where ancestor spirits create waterways, animals and people from the formless void, then it would be correct to say that contemporary Western cli-fi texts tend to explore life-destroying climate change. ”
Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, researcher, and educator Dr Mykaela Saunders explores how First Nations writers and readers use speculative fiction to reimagine and reflect on past, present, and future issues in inventive and unfamiliar ways. She delves into seven key subgenres—fantasy, horror, climate fiction, science fiction, ghost stories & the gothic, futurism, and weird & slipstream fiction.
Drawing from long-standing storytelling traditions, Mykaela reads these texts through a cultural genre lens, not a Western one.
Watch the recording to hear how First Nations voices are employing speculative fiction, and challenging the idea that speculative, visionary or imaginative storytelling is anything new. Explore the reading list below.
“The thing is, for its early history, the stuff of science fiction was our realities – think first contact with alien cultures and subsequent invasions, annihilations from advanced technology and biological weapons, experiments in eugenics – so think about the function of monsters and superheroes. Early western science fiction and colonial expansion went hand in hand, justifying and informing each other.”
Laying Down the Lore: a survey of First Nations speculative, visionary and imaginative fiction with Dr Mykaela Saunders.
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Jingi wallah, with bayun?
Good to see you all here tonight. I'm very grateful to be here in Naarm, grateful to the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung community and the broader Kulin Nation as I walk with respect on this beautiful Country. I'm also grateful to the Dharug and Bundjalung Nations where this research and writing took form. Especially to Elders and all the ancestors, some of whom are mine too, who nourished their Countries and each other for millennia, and still do to this day, despite the last few hundred apocalyptic years. It's because of their care of Country through culture that we're all able to enjoy being here today in spite of colonial destruction of land, water, and people's liberty and sovereignty.
Yoway, I'm especially grateful to my community, the Tweed Gooris of Bundjalung jugun, who brought me up in Bundjalung culture. Bugalbeh!
I want to thank everybody—Matt and Stephen—for your beautiful introduction. The board members and everybody at Science Gallery. These talks don't just happen. There's a lot of moving parts, and they're often set in motion months and months beforehand. So thanks to everyone who worked to bring me here today.
My name is Mykaela Saunders, and I'm a postdoc research fellow at Macquarie University. My project is called Laying Down the Lore: a survey of speculative, visionary and imaginative fiction. Over three years, I'm very lucky to be researching, writing and critiquing blackfella spec fic, and I'm currently writing a scholarly book on the subject. Each of the seven chapters of my book corresponds to a subgenre of spec fic, and in this talk, I want to outline these chapters and discuss some of the key texts within them and what they tell us about the subgenre, how our writers are using it to tell our stories, and some of the common themes and tropes that seem to be part of the collective consciousness of black authors in these genres.
Wiradjuri scholar-critic Jeanine Leane argues that literary movements flourish and become strong through critique and scholarship that grows with it and around it. Wulli Wulli writer Lisa Fuller agrees with her that it's important that robust and culturally grounded Indigenous spec fic scholarship develops alongside the creative work, so that the nascent fields are nurtured within a healthy discourse. And so, to answer Jeanine and Lisa, for each of my seven chapters, I'm developing some cultural genre theory, and I'll touch on that tonight and how it differs from mainstream genre theory that tends to supersede other readings of our work.
I want to highlight that there's often a lot of overlap with the genres that I'm going to talk about. So rather than thinking of them as discrete categories, let's think of them as fuzzy sets with permeable borders that are often seeping across each other. For example, there's often a lot of overlap between science fiction and futurism, though sci-fi isn't always futuristic, and futurism isn't always focused on tech, so we can parse these apart to a degree.
Many black spec fic texts cross commonly agreed boundaries too—not really respecting the white man's fences, if you can believe it. For example, the first published spec fic text, The Kadaitcha Sung from 1990 by Sam Watson, who was a staunch Birri Gubba and Munanjali author and activist who passed away in 2019. His novel actually draws on almost every one of the subgenres of spec fic. The fantastic elements are very cultural, although they are made up. There are horror and gothic elements, and climate speaks through Country in the book.
Another early example is Land of the Golden Clouds by Archie Weller, a Noongar writer, from 1998. This is a science fantasy novel with horror elements and also a very critical climate world too. A more recent example is Alexis Wright's The Swan Book, which is set 100 years into a climate change future. And it's apocalyptic and dystopian, also with gothic and weird elements such as the swans.
So I'm going to discuss these texts and many others from my edited anthology, This All Come Back Now, as well as other texts. And my anthology, This All Come Back Now—I published it because I am very passionate about this topic, and I put it out in the world to show the incredible work that our writers have been doing for over 30 years in this space.
Let's look at these seven specific subgenres now, some of which I've thought about very deeply, and others I'm still figuring out what I think. I'm going to start with climate fiction or cli-fi, because for Indigenous peoples, all stories begin with Country. And as climate change reveals, all stories will end with Country.
Cli-fi might be thought of as a new genre, but let's go back much further in time to our cultural stories. The role of Country in shaping Indigenous literature is as old as time itself. All of our creation stories tell of life-giving climate change. In the beautiful and powerful introductory chapter of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, from 2006, the ancestral rainbow serpent comes down and scores its body into the land and creates waterways and new life in its wake.
If we consider that all First Nations creation stories begin in similar ways—with life-giving climate change, where ancestor spirits create water, animals and people from the formless void—then it would be correct to say that contemporary Western cli-fi texts tend to feature life-destroying climate change. And actually, many of our ancient cultural stories do warn about what can go wrong—like these contemporary stories—when Country is abused.
A very well-known example is a Dreaming story called ‘Tiddalik the Frog’. It's from the Gunnai/Kurnai people, which shows the devastation that can happen when greedy entities hoard water meant for the land and all other life. Common cli-fi definitions focus on disaster, right? For our people, climate catastrophe is nothing new and it's not the stuff of fiction.
If we take cli-fi to be any story that features a changing or threatening climate as inextricable from the story, then to Aboriginal people, all stories set on our continent after 1788 are climate stories. The climate grief that many Australians increasingly share with us, and feel in the wake of local bushfires, floods and global warming, has been felt acutely by Aboriginal people since 1788, when the first swathes of forests were cut down to make houses and farmland in eastern Dharug Country—polluting freshwater, annihilating abundant populations of fish, birds and other animals, destroying the intricate cultural systems that kept it all in balance.
For more than two centuries, Aboriginal people—in our deep relationships to Country, encompassing attendant rights and responsibilities—have seen unfathomable ecocide enacted hand in glove with our own attempted genocide, and we've collectively mourned and fought for Country the whole time. So really, any Aboriginal story that focuses on Country deals with climate too. Our ancestral, life-making climate change or colonial capitalism's destructive changes.
For our people, Country has consciousness, and our writers imagine this in different ways, as well as Country's response to its own killing. Country often has agency through climate and weather events, through the actions of plant and animal emissaries, and through ancestral spirits and other creatures.
Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven’s novella ‘Water’ is set in a near-future Russell Island off the coast of Brisbane. The government in this story is about to create a separate ‘Australia2’ where Aboriginal people will soon be segregated – at the expense of the islands’ ancestral inhabitants. Water focuses on the relationship between the human Kaden and the plantperson Larapinta, showing how their fascination with each other grows as its own story within the broader saga.
Climate change is central to blackfella spec fic works, such as the aforementioned The Swan Book, and Krystal Hurst’s haunting and beautiful story ‘Lake Mindi’, which follows a small family of climate refugees across a burnt and desolate Country as they seek the fabled Lake Mindi, where they believe rebirth and renewal will be waiting for them. Hurst’s story collapses multiple genres together, like climate fiction and ghost story, and offers us a fresh and cultural take on the apocalypse—particularly in the ways that the characters comfort each other in crisis.
Let’s now look at science fiction, or sci-fi, one of the more recognisable spec fic subgenres. Sci-fi generally looks at the impacts of new technologies, or novum, on people, on society. Let’s think about our cultural stories where the first people were given fire, or taught to hunt, or fish, or weave. The characters are transformed by the tech, and the impacts are what make the narrative move along.
Contemporary sci-fi is also the stuff of exciting, forward-thinking technology and its impacts on the world of the story. Often they can be philosophical exercises or experiments, considering the ethics and implications of technology—say for space travel or time travel—really no different to our cultural stories. And the thing is, for its early history, the stuff of science fiction was our realities. Think: first contact with alien cultures and subsequent invasions, annihilations from advanced technology and biological weapons, experiments in eugenics.
So think about the function of monsters and superheroes. Early Western science fiction and colonial expansion went hand in hand, justifying and informing each other.
With many common space stories, it’s often an escapist story—set when life on Earth is too much, or not possible. I took this trope on in my own story, Future in the Stars, where two lovers muse about how most of these stories were written by whitefellas, and why, for Indigenous people, leaving our Countries, our homelands, our planet is unthinkable. The characters compare it to the dispossessions our old people faced in recent memory.
Interesting for me is that when our writers do write into first contact themes, it’s often us being visited by different humans or other creatures, rather than us exploring, invading, making contact with unknown people on their lands. Below The Line by Eric Willmott from 1991 explores a violent military invasion and dividing of the continent by some of our human neighbours. Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds has a more friendly group of technologically advanced Jamaicans coming in peace.
Merryana Salem’s sci-fi story ‘When From’ is a contact story too, but with our own people, in the past. It’s a satirical corporate dystopia. Salem extrapolated from the COVID pandemic and Hollywood’s proclivity for filming in Australia at the time, and added some time travel and mixed in a strong dose of Aboriginal cynicism for good measure.
Carceral technologies have been explored by Alison Whittaker, Sharlene Allsop and myself, which I think is part of understanding our recent cultural load. Set in a future urban Redfern, ‘The Centre’ by Alison Whittaker is a disturbing thought experiment, grounded in cultural and historical fact, that grapples with a truly blackfella future in ways that poke fun at the present. In the story, blackfellas are incarcerated in a VR cloud, but they soon come to prefer this place over real life. And particularly, I think, cutting is Whittaker’s climate-changed future in this world. She reckons with abolition in a gamified reality, which is reminiscent of all the quick-fix sloganistic government programs that are constantly dreamt up to solve our problems.
Sharlene Allsop, in The Great Undoing, her recent novel, conceives of a nanotechnology called bloodtalk which is injected into people from birth, and allows them to conduct business in this new hypertech world. Think about everything that you can do on your phone—but it’s kind of in your blood. Banking, travel, study, communication—you name it. What could go wrong, right? Well, Allsop says everything, and the whole world shuts down once this tech is taken out.
Some of our writers use sci-fi to think about posthumanism, asking: who or what is human? This All Come Back Nowends with two considerations of these futures.
Hannah Donnelly’s micro-fiction ‘After the End of Their World ‘encapsulates a whole world in less than five hundred words. Sometime in the past, disappearing humans created the sisters of the Skylands—non-human custodians of Country. When these sisters visit Earth to conduct a cultural burn, they are forced to feel grief for the first time, and they learn of its transformative power.
The anthology closes with the beautiful, lyrical story ‘Protocols of Transference’ by Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, who’s a Noongar tech activist. The way the narrator yarns to the AI in the story with such affection, sadness and gravity in this post-human future is really moving. In the author’s words, this story, quote:
“...comes from attempting to reconcile cultural protocols of knowledge sharing with the enormous capacity for technology to consume, learn, proliferate beyond our intentions. There is some convergence too with the mechanisms of cultural protocols and the technical protocols computers use to exchange data.”
End quote.
Indigenous Futurism is a term coined by Grace L. Dillon in 2003 to describe a subgenre of spec fic that grapples with issues Indigenous peoples might face in the future. It’s a nod to Afrofuturism, and Dillon further theorised in her edited collection Walking the Clouds—which is brilliant—that these are stories that toy with linear temporality as a way to talk about all times and how they are woven together, the way we conceive of time in our cultural way as blackfellas.
A few years ago, I theorised blackfella futurism as a local offspring of a global Indigenous Futurism and a sovereign-minded genre of spec fic. Of course, blackfella futurism can straddle other genres, but these are stories that explicitly think of us as a people in the future—futures that can loosely be grouped as utopian, dystopian, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, or a combination of these.
Studying these texts, we can think about our hopes and fears for who and how we might be in the future. The few utopian stories our people have written tend to present uncolonised communities—living lifestyles similar to how our ancestors would have lived. However, many blackfella futurism texts are essentially dystopian, either replicating social structures that are similar to our past or present world, or exaggerating our realities into satire. In these stories, we are often dispossessed, oppressed, or otherwise struggling for sovereignty.
The post/apocalyptic genre can also be dystopian or utopian, depending on who you are—and it can play with these assumptions. As history has shown, one group’s apocalypse is another group’s golden age. In many of the post/apocalypse stories, the precipitating events are catastrophic. So this could be read as an equalising genre, where colonising cultures may soon share an experience of world-shattering with us, rather than them inflicting it on us.
Archie Weller’s sprawling futurist novel Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) is set on a hot, irradiated continent 3,000 years into the future, where people live in distinct cultural clans. It’s a fantastic example of a hopeful yet post-apocalyptic future, with aspects of utopia and dystopia too. His chapter ‘The Purple Plains’ focuses on the Aboriginal Keepers of the Trees, who Weller imagines living far into the future the way our ancestors did. This chapter is full of creation stories from all over the continent, showing the survivance of our cultures through time—with a bit of romance and danger thrown in.
I was inspired by Weller, Ellen van Neerven and other black spec fic writers when I wrote my first spec fic story, ‘Terranora’, which is set in my own community—in a future Tweed, in a saltwater mangrove world. ‘Terranora’ is my queer take on the classic a-stranger-comes-to-town set-up. The story explores belonging and relationships inside a tight-knit Goori clan who’ve reasserted their sovereignty in a dizzyingly climate-changed future.
Okay. We’re moving now into territory that I haven’t thought as deeply about, that I’m still thinking through. And to me this is some of the more exciting stuff, ’cause when I’m beginning research, I always find the questions more interesting than the answers.
Fantasy can be quite a contentious label, I think, for our people—though many of our writers are using it intentionally.The problem comes from history, again. When many of our cultural stories are labelled myths and legends, those labels carry the weight of denigration, like old dust.
Stories of powerful spirits, magic, sorcery, talking animals—you name it. Our cultural stories have these. But the difference with contemporary fantasy is that the author has created a new world, or totally reimagined our real one, replete with new magic or supernatural content. Stuff that can’t be explained by the science of the world, that operates outside its laws.
This might nod to or draw from traditional culture, but couldn’t be classed as traditional culture by any stretch of the imagination. These stories are invented by one writer, rather than a collective community of storytellers passing the story down through tens of thousands of years like our cultural stories.
Still, often when our writers are writing fantasy, they do use cultural elements—though this is no different to any other culture that writes fantasy.
Ambellin Kwaymullina’s recent young adult novel Liar’s Test is set in a different world to ours, though in the Treesingers, there are many parallels to our own histories and cultures. Kwaymullina uses this other world to look at ours in a clear and simplified way.
I mentored an incredible emerging Broome writer, Tarnee Carter, on her fantasy manuscript, which is also set in a made-up world. She looks at these issues in a defamiliarised way, and I hope this story finds publication soon—there’s not a lot of black fantasy. So yeah, it’s an exciting, I think, new genre.
In contrast with Merryana Salem’s sci-fi time travel story I spoke about earlier, sometimes our writers use fantasy to visit our old people in the past.
Lystra Rose’s The Upwelling is set in the here and now, near where I grew up in Yugambeh Country, on Jellurgal or Burleigh Headland. It’s also set in that same place, but sometime long ago, as the protagonist Kirra opens a portal to the past by surfing the perfect barrel.
Another portal-to-the-past story is ‘Song of the Nawardina’ by Maree McCarthy Yoelu, where the storyteller glimpses a vision of her old people and then is able to cross over and visit with them for a while.
Our people seem to love superheroes too, with the TV show Cleverman being a really good example, where two brothers fight for the title in a real-world futuristic Redfern, and cultural forces and powers have been made real.
Loki Liddle’s short story ‘Snake of Light’ is set in a country pub—a place often associated with small minds and big violence. Loki plays with audience expectations of where the danger comes from through his queer antihero protagonist. This unearthly urban fantasy speaks to both our ancient spiritual ways and to contemporary small-town problems, while also being a satisfying tale of revenge.
I haven’t gone too far in my exploration of blackfella horror yet, but one question I keep chewing over as I read is: What does horror mean to people whose real life histories are horror stories?
When I think about my family, my community history, I see the violence of massacres and the gore of head hunting and taking body parts as trophies. The terror of stealing children from their families. The body horror of eugenicist logic—of blood quantum legislation, of forced sterilisation.
On one hand, horror is the most realistic language we can use to express ourselves. Yet, as Black American novelist and critic Brandon Taylor says:
“Why would we need horror as a genre when it’s our reality?”
Speaking of his own people, I can draw parallels when Taylor says:
“Black people have already experienced all the horrors of slavery and historical abuse—why do we need to exaggerate it?”
Maybe it’s best to invent new horrors, or tap into old ones, rather than using horror tropes as allegory for racism—which is all too real and mundane.
Still, like other subgenres, our cultural horror stories predate the horrors of colonial abuses. Many of our stories use creatures as warnings: to stay away from certain places, or to be home at certain times.
Kalem Murray explores the father-son dynamic in his very fun and creepy bush horror story ‘In His Father’s Footsteps’. This story is based in Murray’s home Country, up north of Broome, and the texture of his world is really finely rendered. It’s a beautiful invocation of the bush and the mangroves, and the delights of crabbing seen through the eyes of a moody teen. A cultural creature from stories Murray heard growing up kind of features—but not really. I’ll get to that in a second.
In Lisa Fuller’s story ‘Myth This!’, a Murri family goes camping on a cold winter weekend. This is another bush horror story that speaks to some of the same themes as Murray’s, but with a slight shift in tone. This too is really a story about family, and Fuller’s characters are vibrant and relatable.
Both stories allude to cultural creatures while respectfully not exploiting them for outsider audiences—which I think is a problem some of our writers have, or not a problem exactly, but an ethical conundrum that we face when we’re writing culturally for outsiders.
Two urban horror stories I want to mention are ‘The Boundary’ by Nicole Watson and ‘Borderland’ by Graham Akhurst. Both of these stories feature cultural entities that wreak revenge on behalf of blackfellas in the story—and often against other blackfellas who turn on Country and community.
In The Boundary’, Red Feather is a Cleverman spirit who kills judges, lawyers and sellout blackfellas on behalf of his human descendants when their Native Title claim is dismissed.
‘Borderland’s’ terrifying spirit dogman haunts the protagonist and another character when they both become involved in producing propaganda for a mining company intent on fracking their ancestral Country.
While we think of horror as inspiring terror, dread and fear, ghost stories and the gothic tend to invoke sadness and despair. Ghosts in spec fic often represent unfinished business—like unresolved guilt, anger, or sadness. The gothic is a genre perfect for us as wronged people on brutalised land.
‘Closing Time’ by Samuel Wagan Watson—who is the son of Sam Watson, who wrote the first spec fic novel—is an urban ghost story. It’s an atmospheric exploration of a father-son relationship and the ways that the past seeps into the present, perhaps alluding to some of the author’s feelings about his own dad having passed recently. It’s set in autumn 2020, which is another very gothic time, because it channels the global ambient anxiety from the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
Evelyn Araluen’s moving and mythic story ‘Muyum, a Transgression’ is set in between this world and the other one. It’s a haunting story, narrated by a young ghost, written in Araluen’s unique and powerful prose. This is Aboriginal gothic—where the sadness is born from intimate knowledge of place and people and what has been done to both. Not horror arising from the land itself as mysterious entity, as with regular Australian or Western gothic.
Plains of Promise, which is Alexis Wright’s first novel from 1997, is another example of Aboriginal gothic—where white ways have run so roughshod over black ways that land and people are haunted, and to be feared by even our own people. The Aboriginal character Elliot embarks on an ancestral journey but is terrified of the land and spirits, as white religion has brainwashed him. Also, white treatment of land and people has ruined both in nightmarish ways. Quote:
“The night might have been enjoyed once. He thought of the days when the spirits and the black people would have spoken to each other. But the black man's enforced absence from his traditional land had inspired fear of it. They had to alter old, ongoing relationship with the spirits that had created man and once connected him to the earth.”
End quote.
‘Tommy Norli’, a short story by John Morrissey, works brilliantly as gothic—where trespassers, both settlers and blackfellas alike, live in fear of the land and the menacing natives that belong to it, whose violent deeds torment them thereafter.
This story was told to John by his father and presumably originates from the Kalkadoon community where they’re from. Tommy Norli, the character, is born to a black mother and an absent white father on a north Queensland station, where he grows up and later works, before leaving to travel with a new white boss.
One night on the road, deep in some other blackfella’s Country — they’ve never been there before — the pair hear a song of warning emanating from the bush, and suddenly a warrior comes out of the darkness and attacks Tommy’s boss. Tommy kills the warrior, and then he and his boss tie the warrior’s body to the nearby mangroves. The song that comes from the bush has now turned to one of mourning, and Tommy begins to envision black hands coming for him in the darkness.
He and the boss soon part ways, with Tommy making his way back to the station, resuming his old job, and starting a family. But he remains haunted by his deed, and watchful too, especially when he hears news of his old boss’s very unfortunate accidental death — which he knows to be the work of those black hands that once tormented him.
As allegory and as gothic, ‘Tommy Norli’ reminds us that colonial violence entangles us all, as its effects reverberate across time and across space, through land and people, and nobody gets to pretend otherwise.
My last chapter, my last subgenre: we have weird fiction, a term reserved for those speculative stories that are rooted in cosmic horror and skim across other, non-realist genres without being beholden to their conventions. It’s the spec fic stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the other genres, or it borrows from them while completely being its own thing. It’s sometimes snobbishly thought of as the most literary of the spec fic genres.
Many of you will be familiar with Jeff VanderMeer? I think his Southern Reach tetralogy — four books — is the contemporary weird exemplar. And not racially problematic like some of his predecessors in the genre.
I want to discuss two more stories by John Morrissey — ‘Five Minutes’ and ‘Ivy’ — as very good examples of black weird fiction. And just like the flawed protagonists of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books, the rich interiority of his protagonists in ‘Five Minutes’ and ‘Ivy’ holds just as much narrative weight as the stories’ immediate external action.
Each story echoes the other too, in terms of character and plot. Both protagonists are reclusive young men whose rich inner lives eventually take over their realities. They’re antisocial weirdos who are preoccupied with health and hygiene. They both avoid their parents, and both have unattainable romantic interests — perhaps reflecting the racial anxieties of black men dating white girls who are perceived to be above their station.
‘Five Minutes’ is hyper-conscious of genre and structure, and plays with both through its two layers of reality. The primary story concerns Mikey, a misanthropic public servant who writes sci-fi — or rather, mostly thinks about writing it. And the other takes place within the cosmic horror story he’s imagining, of insectoid aliens coming to annihilate humanity, which then starts to take over his waking life.
The "five minutes" of the title refers to the extra time on Earth the aliens agree to give blackfellas as acknowledgement of our long, peace-loving existence, after they extinguish the rest of humanity from the planet. When that time is up, our people are not killed, but abducted together and placed into a life-sized diorama, complete with the lost megafauna. It’s as gorgeous as it is weird.
While Mikey earns a salary and is preoccupied with aliens, the insomniac protagonist of ‘Ivy’ is broke and unemployed, and slowly merges his consciousness with the creeping plant of the title. He too creeps around, stalking people at a distance, and he only experiences genuine peace lying rooted to the earth with his eyes to the sky. As above, so below — soon ivy is all that makes sense. Its fractal logic is symbolised by the tessellating vegetal patterns of the vine. He feels the plant as its spirit seems to flower and grow within him, and he also sees it everywhere without.
Quote:
“Often he was surprised by his own image in the glass doors that led from the kitchen to the garden. Behind his reflection he could see dark foliage and swollen, ghostly-white flowers.”
End quote.The ivy has a real but alien autonomy in this story — quote:
“straining and growing, as if it had adapted, like him, to feed on moonlight.”
End quote.These two fictional loners are both nihilists who suffer from repression and split personalities. They have unconventional romances — or lopsided infatuations, depending on who’s asking — and they experience such extreme mental instability that they can’t keep their actions and their fantasies totally straight. In the collision between their inner and outer worlds, John Morrissey shows the power that lurks beneath the surface of all people — which, I think, is a really important hallmark of black weird fiction, as our people have little to no power in the real world.
Well, that’s been a rundown of my thinking about the different subgenres of blackfella spec fic so far, and some of the research I’ve been lucky enough to do. It probably goes without saying that blackfella spec fic is very exciting to me. This field of literature is still small but growing exponentially.
In the last 5 to 10 years, it's exploded in all genres. Our writers are increasingly finding more experimental and interesting ways to tell stories about who we are, where we have come from, and where we might be going. Black spec fic writers are publishing some truly fresh and nuanced stories about our Countries, communities, and cultures — past, present, and future. And across all cultures, spec fic readers are lapping these stories up, and critics and scholars are increasingly engaging with our work too.
I hope that my research not only generates interest in black spec fic and promotes our work being read widely, but — like Jeanine Leane and Lisa Fuller called for — helps inform readers as I provide entry points for everyone to understand our stories in their proper cultural contexts.
Bugalwan, thank you for your presence and listening to me tonight.
Bugalbeh and ngarmbul to all of you.
“The problem comes from history – again – when many of our cultural stories are labelled myths and legends with the denigration those labels have accumulated like old dust. ”
READING LIST
GENERAL
Mykaela Saunders (editor) This All Come Back Now (TACBN) (2022). University of Queensland Press. (anthology)
Sam Watson The Kadaitcha Sung (1990). Penguin. (First published First Nations spec fic text)
CLI-FI
Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006). Giramondo Publishing. (novel)
Gunnai/Kurnai Dreaming story ‘Tiddalik the Frog’. (story)
Ellen van Neerven, ‘Water’ (2014). In Heat and Light. University of Queensland Press – Modified version appears in TACBN. (novella)
Alexis Wright, The Swan Book (2013). Giramondo Publishing. – Excerpt appears in TACBN. (novel)
Krystal Hurt, ‘Lake Mindi’, (2019) - Appears in TACBN. (story)
SCI-FI
Mykaela Saunders, ‘Our Future in the Stars’ in Always Will Be (2024) University of Queensland Press (story)
Eric Willmott, Below The Line (1991) Hutchinson Australia. (novel)
Archie Weller, Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) Allen & Unwin – Excerpt appears in TACBN. (novel)
Merryana Salem, ‘When From’ (2022) – Appears in TACBN (story)
Alison Whittaker, ‘The Centre’ in Blakwork (2022) Magabala Books – Appears in TACBN (story)
Sharlene Allsop, The Great Undoing (2024) Ultimo Press (novel)
Hannah Donnelly, ‘After the End of Their World’ (2022) – Appears in TACBN (story)
Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, ‘Protocols of Transference’ (2022) – Appears in TACBN (story)
FUTURES: UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS AND APOCALYPSE
Grace L Dillon (editor), Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction(2012). University of Arizona Press. (anthology)
Archie Weller, Land of the Golden Clouds (1998). Allen & Unwin. (novel)
Mykaela Saunders, ‘Terranora’ (2022). In This All Come Back Now. University of Queensland Press. (story)
FANTASY
Ambellin Kwaymullina, Liar’s Test (2024). The Text Publishing Company. (novel)
Tahnee Carter, (fantasy manuscript in development)
Lystra Rose, The Upwelling (2022). Hachette Australia.
Maree McCarthy Yoelnu, ‘Song of the Nawardina’ (2022) In Rafeif Ismail, Ellen Van Neerven (eds) Unlimited Futures: Speculative, Visionary Blak And Black Fiction. Fremantle Press. (story)
Cleverman (TV show)
Loki Liddle, ‘Snake of Light’ (2022). – Appears in TACBN (story)
HORROR
Kalem Murray, ‘In His Father’s Footsteps’ (2022). – Appears in TACBN (story)
Lisa Fuller, ‘Myth This!’ (2022). – Appears in TACBN (story)
Nicole Watson, The Boundary (2011). University of Queensland Press. (novel)
Graham Akhurst, ‘Borderland’ (2023). UWA Publishing. (novel)
GHOST STORIES AND THE GOTHIC
Samuel Wagan Watson, ‘Closing Time’ (2022). – Appears in TACBN (story)
Evelyn Araluen, ‘Muyum, a Transgression’ (2022). – Appears in TACBN (story)
Alexis Wright, Plains of Promise (1997). University of Queensland Press. (novel)
John Morrissey, ‘Tommy Norli’ (2017) – In Firelight. The Text Publishing Company.
WEIRD AND SLIPSTREAM FICTION
Jeff VanderMeer, Southern Reach (tetralogy)
John Morrissey, ‘Five Minutes’ (2022). – Appears in TACBN (story)
John Morrissey, ‘Ivy’ (2023). In Firelight. The Text Publishing Company.
This lecture is proudly supported by The Hugh D.T. Williamson Foundation. Find out more about the lecture series.