Oh, if tomorrow comes

[dolorosa_12]

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 23: Made to read at school

I have always hated this framing, as if being required to read books for class was somehow way more unreasonable than being required to, for example, learn quadratic equations for maths class, or learn organic chemistry for science. Sure, some parts of compulsory education were boring, or poorly taught — including some of my English classes — but that didn't mean they were a grave injustice.

That little rant aside, I'm going to talk about The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher for this day of the meme. We read this in Year 8 advanced English class (so when I was thirteen), and it was one of my favourite and most formative things read for school. Kelleher is mostly known as a YA author (one of his YA dystopian novels, Taronga, was commonly taught in secondary school in the '90s when I was a school student, and indeed we studied it as well), but The Beast of Heaven is dystopian fiction aimed at an adult readership. It is at once incredibly '80s, and incredibly Australian — a pair of sentient computers wake up, and continue an argument they've been programmed to have, about whether humanity deserves to continue to exist, with one computer programmed to argue in favour of humanity's ongoing survival and the other that it would be the best thing for all concerned if the massive nuclear weapons it controls would be set off and wipe humanity off the map. Against the backdrop of this argument is a group of what we think are the last human survivors on Earth, eking out an impoverished existence in a blasted, post-apocalypic desert landscape. The twist, if you've read a lot of dystopian SF, is probably fairly obvious, although it absolutely blew my thirteen-year-old mind, and the book as a whole made me think in a more structured way about Australian dystopian literature as a subgenre distinct from its literary cousins in other countries. It wasn't the first book by Kelleher that I read, but it was the one that really made me sit up and take notice of him as an author, and I think his body of work is incredible. I've always felt a sense of regret that he's not really known outside of Australia.


24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.

Comments

[thawrecka]

I'd love to get more of your thoughts on "Australian dystopian literature as a subgenre distinct from its literary cousins in other countries" because it's something I've pondered myself and haven't yet come to clear conclusions on.

[dolorosa_12]

I actually wrote about this several years ago, although I'm not sure I'm still in full agreement with everything I said. Basically, I think most Australian dystopian literature, although obviously not works written by Indigenous authors, is about white Australians' uneasiness in the land, about dealing with a harsh and terrifying environment, and with an overarching sense that it's wrong of us to be there in the first place, and the land is punishing us, justifiably, for the iniquities of colonisation.

I haven't read quite enough, say, US dystopian fiction to say conclusively that this is not a common theme, although most US stuff I've read is more about oppressive governments enforcing conformity, or consumerist nightmares, so from my reading experiences at least the Australian stuff is very different.

[thawrecka]

That makes a lot of sense.

[incognitajones]

I don't know that we have enough of a dystopian literature to analyze it as a subgenre, but a lot of non-indigenous Canadian litfic & horror draws from the same themes - fear of the environment, isolation, the severe cold.

There's a recent post-apocalyptic novel by an Anishinaabe author (Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow) that I want to read, it would be interesting to see how/whether it subverts that trope.

[dolorosa_12]

I wouldn't be surprised that there are similarities between Australian and Canadian dystopian fiction, given the overarching similarities in our countries' histories. I would also be interested in reading Indigenous authors' takes on dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction; there are some authors in Australia who have written it, and I remember at least one panel where it was being discussed and they made the point that for Indigenous people in Australia (and, I'd guess, elsewhere too), colonisation and European settlement was essentially apocalyptic, and everything they've experienced afterward is therefore post-apocalyptic in reality.