Two (French) SF Novellas

wadholloway Science Fiction , , , , ,

Horsefly, Mireille Gagné

Autrice (romancière, nouvelliste et poète), Mireille Gagné est née à l’Isle-aux-Grues et vit à Québec. Elle travaille dans le domaine de la culture et des communications.​ I can read that as it happens, have retained enough schoolboy French, but couldn’t have written it (it was lifted from Goodreads). Basically, it says my Canadian reading now includes Quebec.

Horseflies are large flies which, especially the female, bite the skin of vertebrates (us!) to feed on blood. I think they are the same fly known in Australia as march flies. Horsefly (2025) is a strange little SF novel told partly from the point of view of the eponymous horsefly; and is an extrapolation of what might have gone wrong with Allied biological warfare experiments in Quebec during WWII.

The story takes place on two timelines. In 1942 Thomas, an etymologist, is one of a number of scientists virtually imprisoned in a former quarantine station on Grosse Île in the St Lawrence River, downstream of Montreal. His job is to locate flying insects which can be used to deliver diseases behind enemy lines. Other scientists, from Canada, USA and England are working to weaponise anthrax. As there are only a few French speakers amongst the scientists Thomas makes friends with the locals, especially Émeril and his brothers, fishermen who are used by the establishment as handymen.

Eight decades later Quebec is suffering under an unprecedented heatwave and a massive outbreak of horseflies. People are falling prey to strange flights of rage. Our fly narrator has a predilection for human flesh: “I had never seen a half-naked man before. The sight alone was delicious, intoxicating.” Émeril is by now in a nursing home. His grandson Theodore is bitten.

Conditions on the island are primitive. Scientists start getting infected by the diseases they are researching. Then Émeril is bitten, becomes infected, but appears to be partially immune. Their Washington masters order that Thomas take Émeril to the US for further study. An epic journey by canoe across the partially frozen St Lawrence ensues (I love Canadian ice stories).

Theodore breaks his grandfather out of his nursing home. The old man wants to go home. The closer they get to Grosse Île the more Émeril’s memory returns. He will reveal to Theodore secrets entrusted to him by Thomas.

The horsefly mates, lays its eggs. Humans have created an ongoing heatwave. Horseflies will contribute an epidemic of rage.

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Mireille Gagné, Horsefly, Coach House Books, Toronto, 2025. 160pp. Trans by Pablo Strauss. Read on Kindle

The Gasp, Romain Gary

The Gasp (1973) is an SF novel in English by French writer Romain Gary (1914-1980) which he subsequently updated in French as Charge d’âme. (1977) (see Emma/Book Around the Corner’s review, which she has subtitled Not His Best Books). Gary is not an author I have previously read, and Emma is not sure The Gasp, in which Gary is having some fun in a genre in which he did not usually write, is the best place to start.

The premise of the novel is that a French scientist, Mathieu has discovered a major and seemingly unlimited source of new energy which depends on capturing the departing life force of people as they die. The containers in which these life forces may be held are supposed to be impermeable but they radiate an aura of sadness and strange feelings.

Mathieu publishes his discovery to the world and soon every major country has capture points set up around hospitals and old peoples’ homes to generate power. The problem, reflecting society’s concern with nuclear weapons at that time (which we seem to have become blase about in the half century since), is the potential for much more destructive bombs.

Mathieu has an American girlfriend, May, chosen largely for her looks and her large breasts, who is devoutly Christian. She complains constantly about the life force powered toys which Mathieu brings home; and keeps both US and Soviet Intelligence up to date as Mathieu attempts to refine his discovery.

The Chinese, after a misadventure which kills a lot of people, team up with the Albanians to build a facilty in the Balkans which if focussed properly has the potential to create a swathe of devastation through Europe and across the Atlantic to the US.

The US President, not Nixon but a folksy, God-fearing Nebraska farmer, insists that God won’t let it happen (but he has bombers ready just in case).

Gary maintains a sardonic note throughout, but unlike Emma I believe he has a serious purpose: to expose the madness of Mutually Assured Destruction, and to highlight through Mathieu the Anarchist ideals of the Paris 1968 uprisings.

“.. he could still see clearly that street of Paris, on May 20, 1968, the wall of the Sorbonne and the student who was writing clumsily ..: DOWN WITH UNLIMITED GROWTH, DOWN FROM NATIONAL STATES TO INTERDEPENDENT CULTURAL UNITS ..”

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Romain Gary, The Gasp, first pub. 1973. 254pp. Read on Archive (here)

House Made of Dawn, N Scott Momaday

wadholloway Literature, USA , ,

I said in my recent review of Fools Crow that James Welch was a founding author of the Native American Renaissance but that N Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winning House Made of Dawn (1968) was considered the “first”. So, having had plenty of work recently, I downloaded it on Libro.fm and soon had time to listen to it.

In the Preface to this work Momaday describes growing up on reservations in New Mexico where his parents, who were Kiowa and Cherokee, were teachers. First a Navajo reservation then Jemez Pueblo which forms the main setting for this novel. The country is as I imagine Navajo country – all mesas and rocky canyons.

Momaday was born in 1934, so he was too young for WWII. His protagonist, Abel is a returned serviceman, so about a decade older. By the end of the War Momaday would have been 11 or 12, old enough to observe the men returning and trying to make lives for themselves. He went on to complete high school at Augusta Military Academy, a BA in English and then a PhD at Stanford in English and US Lit. (I think his thesis was to do with writing poetry), meeting along the way giants of US literature Faulkner and Dos Passos.

Going by House Made of Dawn I would put Momaday firmly amongst that generation of early postmodernists – Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), Joseph Heller (1923-1999), Robert Pirsig (1926-2017), Philip K Dick (1928-1982), Tom Robbins (1932-2025) – who began publishing after the War. Now I’ve listed them I see they are all older than Momaday, and many are returned servicemen. Add in James Baldwin (1924–1987) and the Harlem Renaissance; the Beats – Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg; don’t forget Brautigan who was Momaday’s age but published ten years earlier; lets say they started out reading Dos Passos and Hemingway. Yes I know, that’s a lot of (mostly white) men. And the only writers Momaday actually cites are poets like Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson.

What I am saying is that for all that his topic here is Indian life, Momaday’s education, inclination and ability put him firmly within that flood of great US post-War writing – offbeat, poetic, often satirical, leading edge.

There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colours on the hills and the plain was bright with different coloured clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around. (Prologue)

Momaday doesn’t say so in the Preface, but this work apparently started out as a suite of poems, then short stories, and only slowly developed into a novel. So the narrative proceeds as a series of images. First of Francisco, Abel’s grandfather living a traditional life; then of a young Abel growing up, tending sheep, learning the ways of the tribe; soon he is on a bus, the first time he has been in a motor vehicle, leaving the village; the next image is of him in a trench, under mortar fire; then he is back in the village, stumbling, drunk, into Francisco’s arms.

A wealthy white woman from Los Angeles, Angela, takes a house outside the village, apparently to ‘take the waters’. She employs Abel to chop firewood.

Abel has returned from the War damaged. He turns to alcohol. When he is defeated in a traditional competition he kills the winner, stabs him to death.

We pick up his life some years later, after his release from jail. He’s in LA, under the influence of a gospel preacher who uses peyote in his services. One critic later wrote that Momaday “borrows heavily from some of the slacker rhythms of the King James Bible” but I was put more in mind of the rhythms of the preaching in James Baldwin’s (later) Just Above My Head (1979).

Abel is befriended by Ben, who gives him somewhere to live and finds him work, and by Milly, his assigned social worker, but his life continues its downhill trajectory. A policeman makes himself Abel’s enemy. Abel wakes on a beach, injured, covered in blood; is hospitalized. Ben calls in Angel who recounts an old Navajo story.

Finally, Abel is back home caring for his dying grandfather, listening to his stories of traditional life. The implication is that Abel has travelled a full circle, is in some ways back where he started. Will he take the chance to restart, to reset his life? Momaday leaves that up in the air.

Read this book, because it is important for introducing FN life into US Literature in the way that Zora Neale Hurston did for African Americans; because it stands on its own two feet as excellent writing; and because it is an interesting story well told.

“Many major American Indian novelists, e.g. Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich have cited [House Made of Dawn] as a significant inspiration for their own work” (Wiki). There’s a few names there I don’t know (the first three), more reading to look forward to. (Unless I get sidetracked, my next N.American FN read will be Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko, which I have on Kindle)

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N Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, Harper & Row, New York, 1968 (cover above, first ed. Sorry I can’t name the artist). 198pp. Libro.fm audiobook read by Darrell Dennis, Introduction read by the author. 6 hrs 30 min.

Under the Udala Trees, Chinelo Okparanta

wadholloway Africa, Literature , , ,

Chinelo Okparanta (1981- ) was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Igbo country. She was raised a Jehova’s Witness, moved to the US as a child, and is the author a short story collection and two novels of which Under the Udala Trees (2015) is her first. As is the problem with so many of my reviews, I ‘consumed’ this as an audiobook.

My next problem is that I wish to say less than what you might read on the net. This is the story of a girl and her loves, first at boarding school, then as a young woman, and finally as a wife. I think that the problems she encounters along the way should be revealed during the course of the novel, and not be revealed/discussed prematurely here, even if that leaves me very little to say.

I started my most recent trip away listening to Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which I had listened to some years ago and had clearly misremembered, confusing it probably with Nnedi Okorafor’s (entirely dissimilar) Who Fears Death and The Book of Phoenix. And you may remember I reviewed a little while ago Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun. These things are all relevant, partly because both Half a Yellow Sun and the first part of Under the Udala Trees are historical fiction dealing with the Igbo (Biafran) experience of the Biafran War (1967–1970); and partly because listening to Americanah and Under the Udala Trees one after the other, the female protagonists bled one into the other.

The protagonist of Under the Udala Trees is Ijeoma, a young girl in a rural village who lives through the Biafran War. As the breakaway country is slowly retaken by Nigerian troops and as villages ahead of the front line are bombed by Nigerian planes, Ijeoma’s father becomes depressed and eventually makes the decision during one bombing raid not to join Ijeoma and her mother (Adaora) in the bunker at the end of the garden. The house is bombed and Ijeoma and Adaora return to the house to find him dead (this apparently was the experience of the author’s mother).

Adaora decides to leave and places Ijeoma with a childless couple in a nearby village, “the grammar school teacher” and his wife – they remain a presence throughout the novel but are never named – with the assumption that she will be their ‘house girl’ and in return they will be responsible for her education. This was also the situation of Ugwu, the house boy in Half a Yellow Sun. Ijeoma’s quarters are a hut (the “hovel”) at the rear of the house.

She, aged about 10, is expected to work but is not treated badly and when she befriends Armina, a Hausa girl whose family have all been killed, the grammar school teacher and his wife take her in too. I find it interesting that the author writes as though the Hausa – the mostly Muslim people of Nigeria’s north – are the Biafrans’ only enemy, ignoring Nigeria’s (Christian) Yoruba majority.

Ijeoma and Armina become close but something goes wrong – we only slowly discover what – and Ijeoma’s mother has to take her away, to the town where she has established a shop. Ijeoma is subjected to a great deal of Christian lecturing which only ends when she starts boarding school. Armina is there too – the grammar school teacher has kept his end of the bargain – but there is a distance between the two which Ijeoma struggles to overcome.

And so life goes on. They graduate. Ijeoma, despite doing well at school, returns to work with her mother in the shop. She makes friends, falls in love, is persuaded into marriage with an old friend from her home town, they have a baby. There are ups and downs.

This is a novel of everyday Nigerian life, admittedly by an author who has lived in America since she was 10. The story is carried by the conflicts between Ijeoma’s loves and her marriage – which is as much as I will say – and I thought it was well done.

In passing, Ijeoma mentions repeatedly that she has read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. She also mentions briefly Efuru by Flora Nwapa and The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amoa Tutuolla, but no other Nigerian books or authors. I suppose she would have been in her 20s by the time Ben Okri published his first (Flowers and Shadows, 1980)

I was going to say a little more about Americanah but I’m sure you’ve all read it. I hope I keep it straight in my mind this time – a primer on Blackness in America, and of course, a love story. Instead I started looking for other authors Ijeoma might have read. Here’s a no doubt incomplete list:
Wole Soyinka: Plays including A Dance of the Forests (1960) for Nigerian Independence; novels The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973).
Cyprian Ekwensi: People of the City (1954); Drummer Boy (1960); Jagua Nana (1961)
Elechi Amadi:  The Concubine (1966); The Great Ponds (1969); Sunset in Biafra – memoir (1973)
Buchi Emecheta:  Second Class Citizen (1974); The Bride Price (1976); The Slave Girl (1977); The Joys of Motherhood (1979)
Gabriel Okara: The Voice (1964)

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Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, USA, 2015. 328pp. Audible version read by Robin Miles. 11 hours

see also: The myths behind the udala tree (here)

Silence is my Habitat, Jessica White

wadholloway Australian, Life Writing , , ,

Jess White is a writer and academic who has been a long-time friend of this corner of the blogosphere – as an editor for AustralianWomenWriters.com, as a guest poster here on early Australian women writers, and as an occasional correspondent. I haven’t seen a newsletter from her for a while but I see she’s on Substack (which I can’t access because it wants me to prove my age – God knows what they’re writing there!).

Jess, who lost most of her hearing from bacterial meningitis at age 4, has written two novels, A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement; a “hybrid memoir”, Hearing Maud, which entwines her own experience of deafness with that of Maud, the daughter of early Australian author Rosa Praed; and she’s co-founder of the digital magazine Science Write Now. Silence is my Habitat (2025) published by independent Perth press, Upswell, is another “hybrid memoir”, a collection of essays in which Jess “attempts to work out who I am in a world without [my mother], and what kind of writer I am now that she is no longer my reader.”

Many of us follow US blogger Melanie of Grab The Lapels who has for the last few years been combining book reviewing with writing about her own partial deafness, and about becoming proficient in (American) sign language. Melanie interviewed Jess in 2020 (here), and has been active in educating us about Deaf culture. This brings up two things: first, Jess is (still) not proficient in sign language – her parents brought her up to manage in a hearing world; and she uses “deaf” to describe herself, using “Deaf” presumably only for people whose preference that is.

It is interesting that just as ‘western’ Sydney is anywhere without a view of the Pacific or the Harbour, so ‘western’ NSW generally means west of the Great Divide, ie. about 90% of the state. So Jess starts this collection with – and often returns to – reflections about childhood on the family farm in ‘north-western’ NSW, Gamilaroi country, good farming land between the Newell and New England Highways, where she gets the infection while playing outside that leads to her deafness.

Until my mid-thirties, I depended on my family to survive in the hearing world. I relied on my brother, seventeen months younger than me, to explain what I was missing in conversations, and to interact with people on my behalf. My parents supported me financially when I was establishing myself as a writer and an academic. My sister was a saftey net when I finished my doctorate and moved from London to Brisbane.

She does not say that she misses the access to the Deaf community that learning Auslan would have afforded her, but alludes quite often to the physical and mental strain of participating in ‘hearing’ environments, not least with students, and to periods of isolation. Of course we were all isolated to a greater or lesser extent when Covid-19 struck. As a truck driver crossing interstate borders I was in almost continuous isolation for more than a year (the rule was isolate for 14 days after every border crossing or keep driving, so I kept driving). Jess was in Germany, experienced great difficulty making her way back to Australia, and then spent six weeks alone in the family’s beach house on the NSW north coast.

Throughout, Jess discusses her life: the importance of friendships with fellow deaf writers; her mother dying – of a life-long respiratory infection; living with and then in separate states from her partner; her coming to grips with her partner not wanting to have children; her difficulties with teaching.

For most of the time since completing her doctorate she has been working on a life of Georgiana Molloy, an early white settler in Western Australia – on the south-west coast, Wadandi Noongar country. Georgiana was a self-taught naturalist who collected seeds and specimens for naturalists back in England, this has led to/intensified an ongoing interest in the natural world for Jess and to her incorporating it into her writing (see also Georgiana Molloy: Collector of Seeds and Words).

The essays, and the book as a whole, are very easy to read as Jess goes backwards and forwards over her life to date, her writing, her observations of the natural world, often all three in successive paragraphs. If I wish she would write more fiction, well that’s just me, her life writing is also very good. She says she’s been at Georgiana Molloy for half her life now. I hope it is finished soon (but not before we finally get to meet in Perth for a cup of coffee).

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Jessica White, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, Upswell Publishing, Perth, 2025. 170pp

see also:
Wardandi Massacre

Uprising, Tahmima Anam

wadholloway Asia, Literature , , , ,

Uprising (2026) is a novel about young women trapped into prostitution, held against their will, with their girl children – boy children are sold – on a small, shrinking mud island at the mouth of a river in Bangladesh. It is told with a fable-like quality by a chorus of the children, interspersed with the stories of their mothers – how they were betrayed one way or another by their families and sold to Amma, the madame who runs the island.

The story begins with the mothers, in their brightest clothes and make-up, lined up on the shore to welcome the boats bringing customers from the village across the water. They work all night and then fall into bed with their children who are just waking to begin a day of chores and play.

The last young woman brought to the island, Kussum, is the one who fights back, teaching the children to read, and then leading a rebellion. Kussum’s parents were poor, but had managed to give her and her sister some years of schooling. When she passed puberty her parents found her a likely husband, an accountant. But when Kussum becomes involved in student protests, and her sister is shot and killed by police, the accountant pulls back, the parents are shamed, and Kussum is sold to Amma.

The subject matter is dark, but the telling is bright, reminding me strongly of the Kenyan/Muslim The House of Rust. Hearing the story from the children puts a distance between us and the protagonists: we know what the children jointly feel; we see the women act, and the children tell us why they think the adults act; but we are always at one remove, we are never inside the protagonists’ heads.

The author, Tahmima Anam (1975- ) is a Bangladeshi woman living in the UK. Her parents were diplomats and she grew up in Paris, New York, and Bangkok. This is her fifth novel. Anam says she got the idea for the novel after visiting the infamous “floating brothel”, Banishanta (The Guardian).

I feel strongly about our failure to protect children, about how often they are sexually abused. As I have got older it has become increasingly clearer just how many children of my generation were abused, by fathers, uncles and people in authority. And, of course, how many children are still abused.

The abuse of the mothers in Uprising, who were all children when they were sold, the imminent prospect of the older (10, 11, 12 year old) children being forced to follow them, ties in with two other works I read over the last few days.

Michael Bradley in Crikey, 6 July 2026 quotes the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: “Of all ordained men of the Christian Brothers order of the Roman Catholic Church from 1950 onwards, 22% had been identified as alleged paedophile predators. And between 1980 and 2015, 1,015 people made child abuse claims against the Christian Brothers, with 483 individual alleged perpetrators named. That, like all child sexual abuse statistics, was undoubtedly an underrepresentation.”

Now we discover that over the last decade the Christian Brothers have sold a large proportion of their property holdings for a token $1 each to another entity (now worth $2.3 billion) and are claiming that as a consequence they have insufficient funds for reparations in the 572 cases they are currently facing.

Bradley, a well-known lawyer, writes, and how can you not agree with him: “This behaviour is not merely amoral, deceitful, or corrupt. It is depraved. For a religious institution to be even capable of thinking like this, let alone executing it, then going to the court to say, ‘Oh, woe is us, making amends is costing too much’ — I can’t begin to fathom the internal darkness in the souls of the men making these choices.”

More surprisingly perhaps, I want to discuss #55 of the 64 “in Death” novels by JD Robb (a pseudonym used by romance writer Nora Roberts), Desperation in Death (2022). The “in Death” series is crime fiction set in New York in the 2060s and featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas who was rescued as a child after being sold into abuse by her father.

I like the series because, unlike most US crime fiction, there is very little killing (in fact, there are no guns, only stunners) and because nearly all the principal actors are strong, competent women. Desperation in Death, which is otherwise similar to every other “in Death” novel (I skip the obligatory steamy lovemaking between Eve and her husband), stands out for being quite obviously about the “Epstein files” – the capture, sale and abuse of young women for the pleasure of what seems to be a large number of American businessmen, almost certainly including the current US President, his Treasury Secretary, and the founder/owners of two of the major tech behemoths.

Desperation in Death starts with the kidnapping off the street of a pretty middle class white girl on her way home from school. She ends up in The Academy where girls are trained for sexual slavery, and there she becomes friends with a Black girl who has run away from a loveless home where she is routinely beaten by her mother. They escape and the story goes on from there. The Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell roles are played respectively by a rich unmarried businessman who runs auctions for the sale of young women into slavery, and by ‘Aunty’ his long-time friend who runs The Academy.

I admire Robb/Roberts for doing her bit to make clear to her vast readership that what was once an unlikely conspiracy theory – that rich men bought and sold young women and girls – is in fact a real and ongoing tragedy.

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Tahmima Anam, Uprising, Canongate, 2026. 208pp. Audio ver. (from Borrowbox) read by Ayesha Dharker. 6 hours
Michael Bradley, ‘The Christian Brothers are crying poor and avoiding paying abuse survivors. They have no social licence to exist’, Crikey, 3 July 2026
JD Robb, Desperation in Death, 2022. 368pp (I listened to the audiobook, from my local library).

see also:
This Reading Life (Bron), The Orwell Prizes 2026

UKLG Prize 2026 Shortlist

wadholloway Science Fiction , , , , , , , , ,

Journal: 136

My intention this week was to post a review of Uprising (2026) by Tahmima Anam, a fable about a rebellion by women sold into prostitution and held with their girl children on a small, slowly disappearing island in the mouth of a river in Bangladesh; but I have run out of time.

I spent this past weekend at Denmark on my daughter’s bush block, variously minding grandchildren, watching my older grandson’s soccer game on a country football ground in the mud and the rain, and socializing with Milly. On the way down I listened to Uprising and on the way back last night to Thirst Trap by Grainne O’Hare – a sad story of 3 Irish women in Belfast, living together, turning 30 after a decade of grog, drugs and sex, and all they have in sight for the forseeable future is more of the same (Kimbofo and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year judges disagreed with me).

Tomorrow I’m loading to go north. I think I’ll listen to The Nix by Nathan Hill. That’s 22 hours, so depending on where I load home from that might keep me going for the whole trip.

Over the past three or four years I have found that the Ursula K le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlists have suggested some great new innovative writing. Marcie (BIP) and I try to stay ahead of the shortlist announcement but I certainly haven’t read anything the judges have selected this time. My two tries were Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva and Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei. I thought Dengue Boy – a Kafkaesque story about a boy who is a mosquito – was a shoo-in. I didn’t bother to fill in a nomination, but I should have.

So here is the 2026 shortlist for fiction published in the spirit of le Guin, in the US, in 2025 (publisher in brackets). I must write to ‘Dave’ who runs Neon Hemlock and see if he’ll send me a review copy again.

Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press)
Pip Adam is a NZ author, which makes me think one of you has already reviewed this. Audition is published in Australia by Giramondo (and in the UK by Peninsula) so it should be easy to obtain.
“Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.”

Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press)
Alexander is Cuban American, this is his first go at SF. The novel “follows a planetary courier training adolescent androids in a solar system grappling with interplanetary conflict after a devastating explosion on Earth’s moon”.

Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock)
Fantastic short stories which “unravel the complicities of personhood and gender, slavery and war.”

Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin)
Bora Chung is a South Korean writer and translator. She appears to specialise in Slavic languages. Midnight Timetable is a work of SF Horror published in Australia by Scribe.
“In a labyrinthine research facility … the guard shares another tale of cursed objects and lives unspooled by vengeance, sorrow, or revelation. But these are not mere ghost stories. They’re warnings. Lessons. Or, perhaps, confessions … Our protagonist starts to suspect that the building itself is alive with malevolent intent.”

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books)
Ennes is a writer from the US West Coast. Three years ago they “burst onto the speculative scene with the startlingly original and compelling post-apocalyptic sci-fi, gothic suspense, and body horror mash-up, Leech” (Grimdark Magazine)
“As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny pests that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a worm the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork… its toxin reshapes the future of the city.”

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books)
Available from Pan Macmillan Aust
“A trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, which goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.”

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books)
Tashan Mehta is from India. This is her second or third SF novel.
“Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to their creator, the Great Wisa. For Laleh, this is everything. For Myung, it is not enough.

One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). She has written a number of SF novels and novellas.
This is “a collection of three brand new stories set in a morally ambiguous world of war and magic.”

Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit)
Published in Australia by Hachette.
Catherine Webb (1986- ) is a British author. As Kate Griffin, they write fantasy novels for adults. As Claire North, they write SF and novels based upon the work of Homer.
“Slow Gods is proper science fiction… Set in the far future and spanning a galaxy, it remains a high-concept effort full of delight and invention.” Mawukana na-Vdnaze (Maw for short) was born into debt, and charged for his birth. Every breath taken, every bit of sustenance consumed, in the ultra-capitalistic world of the Shine has a fee attached. (Strange Horizons).

That’s not a bad mix of men and women writers, Americans and others. I’m not sure why the prize is conditional on publication in the US, and I can’t tell how restrictive that is for non-US authors, bearing in mind that the first winner was from Kenya (The House of Rust), the second from Canada (Arboreality) and last year’s was from Sri Lanka (Rakesfall).

Official UKLG Prize 2026 site (here)

Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, Brett Heino

wadholloway Australian, Writers , ,

Brett Heino “is a legal scholar and historian in the Law Faculty at the University of Technology Sydney”. Last year, seeing that John/4ZZZ and I were discussing the works of David Ireland he asked would we like to review his newly released book. Nothing loath, we decided to give it a go, with reviews to be done by mid-2026.

“Ireland represented aesthetically the tension between the abstract space of capitalism and the struggle of the working class to transform that space into meaningful social place, a tension that, due to its affective dimension, is especially potent in the literary form.
(Introduction)

Heino describes his overall project as undertaking a Marxist analysis which furthers an understanding of the questions:
1. What is the nature of the geographic knowledge embedded in literature?
2. How does literature inform the constitution and reproduction of spaces and places? (p.36)

The first novel discussed is The Unknown Industrial Prisoner which “reads as a lengthy indictment of all the ways capital squanders resources (both material and human), locks in inefficient practices and more broadly pursues irrational projects that promise failure.” The abstract space within which the Puroil refinery at the heart of the novel operates is faceless, global capital, over which the Australian nation-state has very little influence, and the worker none.

It is central to Heino’s thesis, indeed to any understanding of political theory, that ‘the state’ is the system by which the dominant class maintains its control of society as a whole (and that governments are just the visible faces of this system). Heino divides Ireland’s treatment of the state into three epochs:
a left-nationalist phase,
a neoliberal phase; and
a post-neoliberal authoritarian phase
which is key, in my view, to understanding how his novels ‘progressed’ over the 50 years of his writing career.

Clearly The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971) is ‘left-nationalist’ and so, for Heino, are The Glass Canoe (1976) and Burn (1974), the story of an Aboriginal returned soldier, a “powerful depiction of the process of indigenous dispossession, which is central to how the state forges and reproduces the structural conditions for the creation of abstract space.”

So, the state creates the space in which capitalism operates, redefining native bushland as ‘industrial’ for Puroil to establish its refinery; or making Indigenous use of the land impossible – the whole settler/colonial dispossession and confinement of Aboriginal Australians was a necessary precondition for the establishment of the (Australian) nation-state.

“In the 1980s, however, we witness a very discernible shift in the handling of the nature of the state.” In Archimedes and the Seagle (1986) and Bloodfather (1987) Ireland “creates a potent aesthetic defence of democracy as an enshriner of individual rights and freedoms.” Both these novels are built around the philosophising of the protagonists as Ireland works his way to the neoliberal position (some years before Margaret Thatcher) that egalitarianism and the welfare state unfairly privilege ‘society’ over the individual and the family.

Finally, in his last three works, The Chosen (1997), The World Repair Video Game (2015) and Time Capsule (2016), Ireland goes beyond neoliberalism to “a thoroughgoing assault upon the ideologies of egalitarianism, bureaucracy and identity politics that he sees at the core of the modern state.”

The 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis made clear that “neoliberalism had created a rentier economy fuelled by financial speculation, debt-financed consumption and levels of inequality not seen since the beginning of the twentieth century”. One apparently contrary reaction to this was the rise of far-right populist movements around the world, which Ireland embraced.

Although Ireland’s individuals are defined by their nation or ‘group’, he became anti-state, believing the state must necessarily use violence to enforce equality. In his old age Ireland saw democracy as antithetical to individual freedom; saw ‘marxist’ governments, educated elites, and ‘others’, especially Muslims as the enemy; and entirely failed to see that the ills of society today arise mostly from unfettered capitalism.

For all this, Ireland in all his his fiction depicts capitalists as despoilers as they aggregate space to their own uses. Puroil flattening the mangroves and pumping waste into the Eel River (The Unknown Industrial Prisoner); “From the distance the city’s a big garden of hardy perennials, made of concrete, watered with money” (The Chantic Bird); or “a hill, a rise – once covered in trees and bush and grass … now crowned with a house that was fine once, surrounded by the slyly aggressive millions of cheap houses; small, resentful.” (City of Women)

In the final third of the book Heino discusses at length how Ireland shows the ‘lower’ classes temporarily at least reclaiming places for themselves in the face of mostly rampant capital.

Firstly the working class – when Ireland still believed in the working class: the “Home Beautiful” in the mangroves opposite Puroil; the Southern Cross Hotel in The Glass Canoe – transforming “the abstract and alienated space of capitalism into meaningful social place“. Places where you did things for yourselves and your mates and not for some remote other.

Heino in this context makes a connection between the current and previous/first occupiers of these places*. He says Ireland implies this connection, but I think he underestimates how old and oldfashioned Ireland was even in the 1970s. When Ireland uses ‘tribe’ he is saying, as white South Africans did at that time, that we whites are the tribe currently on this land.

Then the lumpenproletariat/the underclass in The Chantic Bird and The Flesheaters. Not being employed, the lumpenproletariat are necessarily dependent on either welfare or theft, with no permanent place to call their own. The narrator of The Chantic Bird moves frantically from place to place. The narrator of The Flesheaters lives in Merry Lands, an asylum for the unemployed.

And finally/remarkably A woman of the Future and City of Women mark Ireland’s venture into Magic Realism with two female protagonists reclaiming the spaces of male dominance; enormously at odds with the secondary places women occupy in all his other fiction.

Ireland is Australia’s greatest observer of the old Anglo working and underclasses. He remains relevant because with the coming of AI and automation we will soon all either be workers in a Taylorist machine – every action pre-determined and recorded – or unemployed: ‘Frees’ if we are lucky, or more likely lumpenproletariat. We must learn to make places for ourselves and then, to reclaim space from capital. Heino doesn’t say Vive la révolution, so let me say it for him.

The strength of this book for me was the often line by line analysis of Ireland’s writing and what it says about us as people – whether as cogs in the Capitalist machine, as escapees, or, increasingly, as discards.

.

Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026. 319pp. The cover image is from WH Chong’s design for The World Repair Video Game

*Brett and I differ over the ‘real’ location of the fictional Puroil refinery, and therefore over who the original inhabitants might have been. Brett suggests Kurnell on Botany Bay and the Gweagal. I, Silverwater on the Parramatta River and the Eora.

Other David Ireland posts:
The novels of David Ireland (1927-2022), overview
The Chantic Bird (1968)
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), review
The Flesheaters (1972), review
Burn (1974), 4ZZZ review
The Glass Canoe (1976), review
A Woman of the Future (1979), review, Bonny Cassidy in Sydney Review of Books
City of Women (1981), review
Archimedes and the Seagle (1984)
Bloodfather (1987), 4ZZZ review
The Chosen (1997), 4ZZZ review
The World Repair Video Game (2015), review
Time Capsule (2016) verse novel

Reviews by Brett Heino at Progress in Political Economy
Vale David Ireland
Geographies of Space and Place in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Radical and Literary Geographies
The World Repair Video Game, Nature and genocide – ecofascism in world literature

Women’s Work

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Journal: 135

One of my earliest posts was ‘I am not a Feminist‘. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening years writing about the Independent Woman in Australia and elsewhere and reading women writers. But I’m still not a feminist. If I were, I think I’d be First Wave. Second wave feminists, women my age, Womens Libbers, have always got on my goat; too sure that they had discovered something new, that they were starting from ground zero (and admittedly the 1950s felt like ground zero for women’s rights). And Third wavers – is there still a third wave? – are like music post-rock’n’roll. Something’s going on, there’s lots of noise, but not anything I can make sense of. (How did I become my parents??!!)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been driving, firstly in the Eastern Goldfields around Kalgoorlie, then up north, past Broome. And home again, as always. It’s a very circular activity, driving. This means I have a few audiobooks to get off my chest, mostly from the library rather than Audible, and one from Libby which I am trying for the first time and had some problems with. And all by women.

The Bride Test (2019), Helen Hoang

A relatively well-off Vietnamese family in California ask a young woman from Vietnam to live with their son for three months, to see if she might suit him as a bride. The young woman, Esme, lives in a hut with her mother and grandmother, and a young daughter – which fact she keeps to herself. The young man in California, Khai, is autistic, runs a successful software business, and has a run-down house. Esme and Khai decide to share a bed, without the intention of having sex, because … the spare bed was uncomfortable, she was afraid of the dark, something, something.

This is a long book ( 2 mp3 discs) with of course Esme and Khai each misunderstanding the intentions of the other; but Hoang discusses the issues the two face in considerable detail and that – me learning how people interact – keeps me interested.

The Sisters (2019), The Ruin (2018), Dervla McTiernan

Dervla McTiernan is a solicitor, born in Ireland, now an Australian citizen living in Perth. She began writing detective fiction set in western Ireland, the Cormac Reilly series, after moving to Australia

McTiernan’s site says The Sisters, which is a prequel to The Ruin, is set in Dublin. I’m not going to listen to it again, but I thought it was set in Galway. Anyway, the gist is two young sisters sharing a studio flat are respectively a garda (Carrie) and a barrister (Aifric). Aifric, who has been given the opportunity to be the junior defending a murderer, leaves the case file on the kitchen table. Carrie reads it, and off her own bat begins interviewing witnesses. This goes as well as you might expect.

In The Ruin, Cormac Reilly has transferred back to Galway after a number of successful years as a detective in Dublin. In the Prologue, Reilly as a very young garda, is called to a decrepit house where two abused children Jack, 5 and Maude, 15 are downstairs while their alcoholic mother is dead upstairs of a heroin overdose. Back in the present, a young man in a committed relationship has apparently suicided by jumping into the river. It turns out that young man is Jack. Maude, and Jack’s partner, call for the suicide to be investigated as murder, but Reilly is instead assigned to investigate if Maude, 20 years earlier, murdered her mother. Carrie, who is now in Domestic Violence gives him a hand.

Both novels are ok, though like most detective fiction, a bit far-fetched. McTiernan strikes me as a poor man’s John Banville but she seems to be a success, so what would I know.

The Moroccan Daughter (2021), Deborah Rodriguez

As best I can gather Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser and an American. She spent some years establishing a hairdressing school in Afghanistan – creating opportunities for women – and now lives in Mexico. And yet The Moroccan Daughter is a very detailed description of Moroccan life.

Amina, a young Moroccan woman living in California (where her father thinks she is a grad student) with her American husband, Max, returns home for her sister’s wedding. She takes with her her hairdresser and best friend, Charlie and Charlie’s psychic grandmother Bea. They all stay for some weeks in father’s large house in Fez, joined later by Max, who is impatient for Amina to tell her father that she is married. There is a very complicated plot or plots revolving around Charlie having a secret ‘green card’ Moroccan husband; the lifelong housekeeper, Samira’s brother, an Amazigh (Berber) man from the Atlas Mountains, having been in the jail when Amina’s father was the Director; Amina’s father attempting to arrange a traditional marriage for her. And a very HMS Pinafore ending. All wonderfully and colourfully described, I must say.

A Great Act of Love (2025), Heather Rose

Heather Rose might be Australia’s most disappointing writer. She writes beautifully, but her novels apart from The Museum of Modern Love, lack originality.

A Great Act of Love is the story of a young woman, Caroline, who migrates from London to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. The author has (too) obviously researched her material: herbal lore, winemaking and 19th century life in some detail; Caroline does some interesting things; her father, born a French Duke in Champagne before fleeing the Revolution to become an apothecary in England, ends up a convict transported to Norfolk Island; we move seamlessly backwards and forwards in time as their stories are built up; but there is absolutely zero narrative tension. And Rose tells us nothing about Hobart or convict life that Quintus Serviton (1831), Caroline Leakey, The Broad Arrow (1859) and Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life (1874) didn’t do earlier and better.

It is routine these days for women writers to use historical fiction to present a more positive view of women, and I don’t blame them. But Caroline, apart from the fact that she doesn’t seem to need a man (or a woman), is a nothing burger, just quietly making her way through what for all its suffering is a relatively privileged life.

Bron at This Reading Life also posted a review of A Great Act of Love today.

The problem with Libby, which is where I borrowed A Great Act of Love, is that the book is downloaded a chapter at a time, so that if I happened to be out of phone reception at the end of a chapter – and along most highways in Western Australia phone towers can be 100 km or more apart – then the book came to a stop. Borrowbox, which has its own difficulties, at least lets you download the whole book,

Fools Crow, James Welch

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I’ve had Fools Crow (1986) in my Audible library since I first wrote about making Black and FN North American writing a ‘project’ – five years ago this month as it happens (Project 2022). That project has led to some amazing reading so I’m not sure why it took me so long to get here when Welch “is considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance” (wiki), though that link has N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as its ‘first’ before going on to list FN authors back to the 19th century.

Anyway, having got to Fools Crow, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

James Welch (1940-2003) was a Blackfeet and A’aninin man who grew up in Blackfeet country in Montana. The Blackfeet speaking peoples – the Piegan, the Siksika and the Kainai (or Many Chiefs) – were the dominant nation on the northern Great Plains of the US and Canada; the Piegan in what is now Montana, and the Siksika and the Many Chiefs over the border – the ‘medicine line’ – in Alberta.

The Piegan’s traditional enemies were the Crows, a Plains tribe whose connections extended along the Yellowstone River from southern Montana to North Dakota, where the Yellowstone feeds into the Missouri (where they run into the Ojibwe, the largest Indian nation).

If you, like me, are wondering how this geography connects with Reservation Blues which I reviewed recently, then the Flathead Reservation in Montana which the girls, Chess and Checkers comes from is about 100 km west of the current Blackfeet Reservation. I would say that the Flatheads are mountain people and the Blackfeet, as I said, are of the Plains. They don’t come into contact in Fools Crow.

Fools Crow, set in Montana in the 1860s, after the US Civil War, is a work of Historical Fiction set around the coming of age of young Piegan man, White Man’s Dog, who later earns the name Fools Crow. The novel reflects the duplicity of the US government in its signing of treaties which it never honoured; the ongoing encroachment by ranchers, with the support of the Army, on lands supposedly reserved for Indians; the active resistance of some Blackfeet; and, finally, government retaliation culminating in the massacre of 200 Piegan Blackfeet, mostly women, children and older men, by US Army forces under Major Eugene Mortimer Baker on January 23, 1870.

And speaking of massacres, it also reflects the spread of smallpox through the tribes, but not through the whites, at a time when vaccination had been available for at least a century. Even if it was not deliberately spread in the US as it was in Canada and Australia, it is still unforgiveable.

Though of course the US had their own ‘weapon’, the eradication of the immense buffalo herds the Indians relied on for food (see Prairie Edge).

The language of Fools Crow is straightforward English. Where other writers convey non-whiteness through the use of patois and (non-English) language, Welch uses Piegan names – for people, places and objects – directly translated. So, for instance, a repeating rifle is a ‘many shots gun’, and this works surprisingly well. The one main exception is ‘Napikwan’ for white people. It is never stated whether this means whites or foreigners or invaders, though occasionally the Piegan also use ‘hairy faces’.

Piegan children are given names which reflect the hopes of their parents, and which are then replaced by names referencing something significant about them, or something which they have done. So, White Man’s Dog got his name for following around another Indian called White Man. His later name arose from him escaping being killed, by fooling a Crow into believing he was already dead.

WMD is nearly always the main protagonist, but sometimes Welch will transfer his point of view to another character who is temporarily important, most often to WMD’s age mate Fast Horse who leaves the tribe and joins a small band of rebels who attack white farmers and prospectors and venture into towns, to the brothels and bars.

WMD and Fast Horse represent the two divergent paths which Indians were being forced into – an increasingly constrained traditional life; and lawlessness dressed up as fighting back.

We follow WMD, who is anxious and uncertain compared with the brash Fast Horse, on his first act of manhood – going with a raiding party of young men under the supervision of a more experienced brave, to steal a mob of horses from a Crow encampment, which I must say involves a lot of shooting people asleep in their tepees and lodges (I never did work out what a ‘lodge’ was). WMD barely escapes being killed, but is seen to behave more responsibly than Fast Horse, who causes the capture of their leader. From this point WMD grows into manhood, learning medicine, marrying, becoming listened to, while Fast Horse goes off to become an outlaw – both in the eyes of the Indians and of the US Army.

Traditional Indian life is coming to an end. The Army is intent on capturing the Blackfeet leadership and on punishing the raiders; as well as on restricting the Piegans to a smaller and smaller area of the Plains; hunters are slaughtering buffalo for their hides (or just for the fun of it in one case); and the smallpox epidemic is getting closer. The Piegans consider crossing the Medicine Line into Canada to join their brothers the Siksika, out of reach of the US Army, but family ties and obligations hold them in place until it is too late.

Ironically, the tribe that Major Baker’s soldiers massacre is led by the one chief, Heavy Runner, who was in favour of reaching an agreement with the Government. He runs towards the soldiers waving a paper, a safe conduct from a General he had been negotiating with, and is the first man killed.

A band led by Fools Crow come upon the site soon after and are left contemplating an uncertain future.

I have summarised the historical skeleton that contains this story, but through it all we get close to Fools Crow, to his wife, to his wider family and to everyday life on the Plains. It is very well done.

.

James Welch, Fools Crow, first pub. 1986. Audible version read by Darrell Dennis. 14 hours

Broken, Remote Control

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To be clear, this is two reviews – Broken: Not a Halal Love Story (2023) by Fatima Bala and Remote Control (2021) by Nnedi Okorafor. Both are Nigerian women living in N America and, as it happens, I read both on kindle. Apart from that they have nothing in common.

All that Bala’s bios say about her is that she is a writer and lecturer living in Vancouver. They generally have photos of a young African woman in a head scarf. Some also have pictures of two books with Bala’s name on them so I’m guessing this her second novel.

The main character in Broken, Fa’iza, is a young Hausa woman, from a very well-off, conservative Muslim family in northern Nigeria who goes to Toronto to study Law. The Nigerian ambassador to Canada has his residence in Toronto (and not Ottawa, which seems disrespectful. Also, Nigeria, like Australia, actually has a High Commissioner. So perhaps this is a way of creating a bit of distance between the actual and fictional offices). The ambassador’s family and Fa’iza’s parents are friends, and Fa’iza stays with them on arrival and during term breaks. Fa’iza is friends with the ambassador’s daughter and soon meets their oldest son, Ahmad, thirtyish, a wealthy entrepreneur and of course devastatingly handsome in the best Mills & Boon tradition.

What lifts Broken above an ordinary M&B romance is Fa’iza’s strict adherence to her religion. Ahmad falls for Fa’iza and begins taking her out, but he is a playboy used to a western lifestyle. To have any hope with Fa’iza he must give up drinking, womanizing and eating (non-halal) steak.

Just then, the soulful call to Asr prayer filled my room … After my four raka’ats, the series of movements during prayer, I seemed to have got more clarity about my outfit choice. I walked to my closet and brought out a pair of grey jeggings I’d never worn before.

The tension in the first half of the novel is all about him coming to understand just how serious she is about her (their) religion and how they deal with becoming more and more sexually attracted to each other. Interestingly, moving along in the background is the ambassador’s daughter whose boyfriend has married someone else and their secret plan for her to become his second wife.

In the second half of the novel Fa’iza is back in Nigeria with her parents, the religious gulf between her and Ahmad apparently insuperable. Fa’iza has established a home for single mothers (to which Ahmad is secretly a donor) and, over the course of five years both move towards making ‘acceptable’ marriages.

Would I be as interested in a similar book where the protagonists were Catholic? I’m not sure. One of the attractions of Broken is of being so deeply invested in the nitty-gritty of a new-to-me culture. Sure, the Mills&Boon element never completely goes away, but overall I enjoyed following Fa’iza coming of age as a Muslim woman.

Fatima Bala, Broken: Not a Halal Love Story, Masobe Books, 2023. 439pp

Nnedi Okorafor is one of my favourite authors. She lives in the US, but moves between America and Nigeria – where her family background is Igbo, from the south east. I haven’t read her YA fiction but have greatly enjoyed her adult Science Fiction Fantasy which she terms AfricanFuturism and AfricanJujuism (see my review of Lagoon)

Remote Control begins with Sankofa,14 dressed as though she were her mother, walking through the forests of Ghana, accompanied, at a distance, by a fox. She is universally feared as a bringer of Death. When she chooses to enter a house she is fed all the best food, and given the best clothes. Her talent is that she is able to glow green in the dark. If she glows too strongly she will kill the people around her, but she has learnt to control her gift and uses it to bring to an end the lives of the terminally ill.

As a much younger child she was climbing a tree when a meteor shower deposited a glowing green seed in the roots of the tree. A year later a box rises out of the earth, containing the seed. The girl keeps it in her room, but her father sells it to some government men who, on their journey back to the capital are attacked and the seed is taken.

A little later, the girl is struck by a car. She bursts into green light and all the people in her town, including her family, are killed. Sankofa can feel the seed tugging at her and so she begins to walk.

This is all so juvenile and it doesn’t get any better. Sankofa finds respite for a while living and working with a woman who owns a shop. Until she accidentally destroys the robot that controls the town’s main intersection, and she is forced once again to move on.

Okorafor says this is the same ‘universe’ as Who Fears Death (2010) and The Book of Phoenix (2015) but it has none of their complexity. Which is a shame as this is the first of Okorafor’s books I haven’t liked.

Nnedi Okorafor, Remote Control, Tor, 2021. 160pp