The MUP Encyclopaedia of Austra - Paul Collins, ebook
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//-->1TED BYP A U LC O L L I N SForeword by Peter NichollsTHE MUP ENCYCLOPAEDIA O FAUSTRALIANSCIENCEFICTION&•FANTASYEDITED BY PAUL C O L L I N SAssistant Editors:Steven Paulsen &- Sean McMuIlenForeword byPeter NichollsMELBOURNE UNIVERSITY P R E S SMelbourne University PressPO Box 278, Carlton South,Victona 3053, Australiainfo@mup.unimelb.edu.auwww.mup. com.auFirst published 1998Text © Paul Collins 1998Design and typography © Melbourne University Press 1998This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under theCopyright Act 1968and subsequent amendments, no part may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any meansor process whatsoever without the prior written permission of thepublisher.Typeset by Melbourne University Press in 9.5/10.5 pt BemboPrinted in Australia by Australian Print GroupNational Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entryThe MUP encyclopaedia of Australian science fiction andfantasy.ISBN 0 522 84771 4.ISBNO 522 84802 8 (pbk.).1. Science fiction, Australian—Encyclopedias. 2.Fantastic fiction, Australian—Encyclopedias. I. Collins,Paul, 1954- . II. Paulsen, Steven. III. McMullen, Sean,1948— . IV. Title: Encyclopedia of Australian sciencefiction and fantasy.A823.087609003FOREWORDam pleased to be able to write this foreword: it is seldom that one encyclopaedistreceives this sort of compliment from another. Dr Johnson famously defined a lexicog-rapher as a 'harmless drudge', and there is an unfortunate tendency to think ofencyclopaedists in the same way. This is far from the truth. Encyclopaedists are dangerouspeople. It is no coincidence that two of the three editors listed on the title page of thisbook are black belts in various martial arts. In this business you need to be.You have to be tough even to get a literary encyclopaedia off the ground.This is nobusiness for scrawny scholars; you need to be big. I, personally, am huge. In their innocence,it is possible that Collins, Paulsen and McMullen do not yet realise the hostility thatencyclopaedia editors face. Give one author a 32-line entry, and another author only 23lines, and you've made an enemy for life. The letters received by editors of encyclopaediashave to be seen to be believed.They come not only from authors who feel snubbed; mostletters are from astonishingly well informed nit-pickers. This is especially so in Australia, anation that picks more nits than other countries twice its size.Then you have to decide who and what to put into the book and who and what toleave out—and how much information, and what sort of information, to put into theentries. W h e n describing authors, do you include information about their alcoholism,their sex-change operations, their suicides, their divorces? (In the case of my ownencyclopaedia we decided probably not, partly for reasons of tact, partly because we werea bit overwhelmed—someone ought to do a sociological study of writers—by the sheernumber of writers whose lives had been damaged or changed in these ways.)D o you list short stories, itself a massively mind-numbing task? I didn't, but PaulCollins bravely and usefully does. D o you include writers of short stories w h o have neverhad a book published? (This is an especially difficult piece of research, and I admire Collinsand his team, who in many cases have done it.) D o you distinguish between professionaland semi-professional magazines? D o you list non-sf and non-fantasy works of writerswho may have written only one genre book, but may by dint of their other work get a2000-word entry?D o you count as Australians people like Cherry Wilder or Jack Dann w h o havelived and written here while maintaining their previous nationality? (Both these authors,the first from N e w Zealand and the second from the USA, are included. And you will findIvFOREWORDperhaps as many as thirty entries for authors like Victor Kelleher, who emigrated toAustralia from the U K in childhood or even later.) D o you attempt a wholly n o n -judgemental tone, or do you include critical summaries of an author's ability, knowing thatencyclopaedias can never be truly objective anyway? There are a dozen other similar issues,and every encyclopaedia editor must be respected for the decisions he or she makes. M yown decisions were quite different from Paul Collins', but each of us editors has the rightto do what he or she thinks best.W h e n it comes to books about science fiction and fantasy, a particularly snarled-upissue is whether one takes 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' as commercial categories, oracademic categories, or something else again. T h e problem is that genres are nothomogenous, and at their fringes stubbornly resist definition. I'm glad to see that PaulCollins takes a latitudinarian line on this, as I do.N o matter how many thousands of entries you include, you will get nasty lettersabout omissions, and people are quite passionate on these issues. And there willalwaysbeomissions. I made a bad mistake with the first edition of my own encyclopaedia, andnaively announced it as 'fully comprehensive'. I cannot begin to describe the gleefuldelight that accompanied the literally hundreds of letters that put me right on this falseclaim.The Greek wordshubrisandnemesisshould be engraved as warning signals on everyencyclopaedist's word processor. O n e of our accidental omissions was Damien Broderick,and I'm relieved to see that in Paul's book he receives a long and careful entry, as he rightlydeserves.In my own encyclopaedia, which covers the whole world and not just Australia, Iwas continually surprised at the number of writers with Australian connections.There was,for example, Austyn Granville (not in this book), an American writer who lived some yearsin Australia. His forgotten 1892 novel isThe Fallen Race,which envisages a lost civilisationset on the shores of Australia's hypothetical inland sea, ruled by a white human queen, butlargely inhabited by a race of spherical creatures resulting from miscegenation betweenAborigines and kangaroos.This is now unacceptable on so many grounds—racism, sexismand sizeism being only the most obvious—as to create some kind of record. But sizeism inan Australian context entered literary history long before the nineteenth century. Anybodywho has taken the trouble to look up the latitude and longitude given for Lilliput—theland of wilful, aggressive, small-minded tiny people in Jonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels(1726), two generations before Captain Cook—will find Lilliput in the heart of Australia,a circumstance that has led to some ironic commentary over the years.Australia has not yet—in my own possibly minority view—produced a truly greatscience fiction writer or a great fantasy writer (although some of us have high hopes forGreg Egan and Sara Douglass respectively among today's up-and-coming writers). It has,however, produced a large number of good ones. Paul Collins' book, by drawing togetherexisting scholarship in the field about all Australian writers in these two genres, does a realservice not just for the hardcore fans of science fiction and fantasy, but also for othergroups: those who are interested in the history of young adult and children's fiction inAustralia, for example.The book will have a few mistakes, for all such books do, but not too many, or so myreading of it suggests. This is just as well, for it will—because it is the only one—becomethe classic text almost at once, and will therefore be regarded as authoritative. A word ofwarning: no reference books are fully authoritative. O n e of the first things you find when
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