By Jack Cameron Stanton
SHORT STORIES
Gunflower
Laura Jean McKay
Scribe, $29.99
The debate between “literature” and “science-fiction” has deep roots but reminds me of my days working in a Sydney bookstore. The guy who worked in the sci-fi/fantasy section would use the computer to recategorise Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut and H.G. Wells, arguing that this was where they belonged. It’s a division that seems pure semantics, a quibble for fans and theorists, until you visit a publisher’s page and see that disclaimer: “We are not considering fantasy and science-fiction.” This exclusion means something else. It means hard science fiction. No spaceships or intergalactic wars.
Laura Jean McKay inhabits or blurs the lines between human and non-human consciousnesses.Credit:
Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals in That Country won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction and the Victorian Prize for Literature, but also the Aurealis and UK-based Arthur C. Clarke awards, which are given to the best science-fiction work of the year. What makes her selection interesting is that it signals a broadening of what contemporary science (or speculative) fiction means.
In this time of accelerating technological change and diminishing global climate, a subset of Australian writers, including James Bradley, Jennifer Mills, Claire G. Coleman, Jane Rawson, and McKay, are publishing fiction that defamiliarises the real by way of speculative tropes.
The zooflu at the heart of The Animals in That Country had a serendipitous (in thematic terms) and unfortunate (in real-world ones) alignment with the outbreak of coronavirus, putting to the test McKay’s predictions of how Australia might respond under pandemic conditions. Time, in a way, was on her side.
I’m on her side, too. The Animals in That Country is an excellent novel. As the virus infects humans, they understand the animals, who speak with a truncated strangeness reminiscent of Les Murray’s poems in Translations from the Natural World. But McKay’s animal voices are not poetry. They are a babel of personalities and lives. The novel holds up, although reading it in 2023 may incur unpleasant flashbacks to days of lockdown and panic.
The genre-hopping short stories in Gunflower, written over the past two decades, offer invaluable insight into the obsessions that have compelled McKay to return to the page. One overriding obsession is the collapsed boundaries between the human and non-human worlds, the leading idea in The Animals in That Country, and there’s probably an academic essay waiting to be written about McKay’s animal-human hybrids of subjectivity.
She inhabits or blurs the lines between human and non-human consciousnesses. These imaginative endeavours are acts of empathy and transferral. In Those Last Days of Summer we inhabit the mind of a chicken in a factory farm, while King embodies the alpha mentality of a kangaroo as it fights for supremacy. Cats at the Fire Front is an amusing inverse of domesticated and farmed animals in which sheep are great with kids and kept in the house while cats are farmed for their pelts. An insect bite in Flying Rods causes a woman’s metamorphosis into a giant mosquito. At one point, in Come See It All the Way From Town, rocks communicate their spiritual worship of human light. But amid these stories of animal-impersonation, metamorphosis, and clever reversals lie deeply human portrayals of ordinary suffering.
The most memorable stories are often the most human and the lengthiest, such as Lightning Man, Nine Days and Gunflower. They share the mood of uncanniness with the rest in the collection but fixate on a moment of loss and zoom in on that tragic state.
Lightning Man, for example, tells the story of a woman taking her child to watch her partner’s first day on the job as a lighting technician at a circus, a job they desperately need. Gunflower is a remarkable voyage of body and soul on a lawless abortion ship experienced by a woman terminating her pregnancy. And Nine Days lingers on the harrowing aftermath of a mother losing her child.
With such a diversity of lengths in the collection, McKay circles around her thematic obsessions — familial fracture, social and economic liminality, negotiations with motherhood, human and nonhuman subjectivities — and approaches them from multiple angles.
McKay has written about wanting to literally, rather than metaphorically or allegorically, portray non-human life. But, of course, we see ourselves in the animals.
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