Author Ben Peek offers an insight into the vibrant world of Australian science-fiction and fantasy.

In 2015, George Miller’s post-apocalypse cult icon Mad Max returned gloriously to cinema in Mad Max: Fury Road, but in late 2013, the literary child of Max — which was begun in Australia in 1979 in Miller’s Mad Max — was Andrew Macrae’s Trucksong, published by Twelfth Planet Press.

Set in the unforgiving landscapes of empty deserts and broken societies, in a world where actions are fuelled not by reason but desire, Macrae’s first novel created its own, unique language for its narrator, John Ra. A phonetic rendition of working-class Australia, Macrae’s choice was not just a success in the novel, but also representative of what Australian science fiction and fantasy needs to define itself in a market dominated by the largest producers of English language genre fiction, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The books that are produced abroad by non-Australian authors pour into the broad emptiness of the Australian market daily, ferried in on the old colonial tracks of trade, for the most part. The local market and its authors, like all subjects of colonization, do not get to travel the same routes out with any ease. This has two impacts, one that impacts established authors, and one that defines new ones. For the first, it is harder for authors to make money from their work. For the second, it feeds generations of new authors the lie that they cannot write unless they adopt the mannerisms of their international peers.

It is important to challenge the last. A country cannot show to the world cheap reflections. It is both bad for art, and bad for the national identity.

Fortunately, there are authors and publishers who do seek to craft unique, Australian fiction.

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book — following on from her wonderful, award winning Carpentaria — is published by Giramondo Publishing. It is set in a future Australia ravaged by climate change. It is an angry book, one that follows the life of a mute woman, Oblivia, who is married to the first Indigenous President of Australia, and confined to a tower. Wright’s book is one that arises out of the heart of Australia’s Indigenous population — from their concerns, their desires, their anger — and focuses on a culture that has lost so much in the colonization of their nation. It is a dark book, one that is often bleak, but also hilarious.

The Australian sense of humour — dry, laconic and dark — is an integral part of Anna Tambour’s work. It resides in the heart of her two novels, Spotted Lily and Crandolin, and her collections, Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales and the recent The Finest Ass in the Universe (published by Ticonderoga Publications). In Tambour you will find not just Australia, but also the worldly citizen that Australian literature can also be. She is the most modern of white Australian fantasists, drifting from deals with the Devil in Surry Hills in Sydney, to Gorbachev’s Russia, Middle Eastern confectionery artists, horrors, satires and, naturally, donkeys.

Lastly, Trent Jamieson, a traveller of the colonial tracks — in 2010 he began the Death Works series for Orbit in the UK — who has returned to Australia with a new novel, Day Boy, published by one the strongest independent presses in Australia, Text Publishing. It is excellent to see Text bringing back the authors who have left, and even better to see Jamieson return with in a vampire novel set in Australia’s hot, dry landscape. It is defined by a voice that uses the casual colloquialisms unique to English speaking Australians without fear.

The four authors are just a small sampling of what is available in Australia. The modern world is breaking the old colonial tracks down and if you have not read what is being produced, then you can find these books easily online. They provide a good place to start sampling Australian science fiction and fantasy.

Ben Peek is a Sydney-based author. His books include Black Sheep, Twenty-Six-Lies/One Truth, Above/Below, The Godless and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His most recent novel is Leviathan’s Blood.