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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Plotting Pasifikafuturism 

November 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

Na Viro by Gina Cole (Huia, 2022), 352pp, $35 

Tia Grom-Eddy steers the carved kauri drua into the ocean current, the sail billowing and flapping above her. Wind in her face, the blue-black night sky alive with stars, she begins the long journey from Aotearoa along the Kermedec Trench and on, to the Lau archipelago, calling on the ancestral navigation skills that taught her ‘how to keep your body in tune with tides, flows, currents, animals, signs. The ways of her Fijian and Tongan and Mayuro ancestors, always guiding her.’ A few chapters on, Tia is using the same ancient methods of wayfinding to navigate another kind of drua, the Pawta, a huge, rock-like, voice-responsive, extra-terrestrial spaceship built by the inhabitants of far-away Thrae. Aboard the Pawta, she now rides the currents and swells of the mighty Tijen galactic whirlpool, in search of her sister, thought to be trapped in a tiny probe deep in the turbulent vortex. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, sci fi fantasy

Turning in Time

May 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Rachel O’Connor

Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara (The Cuba Press, 2021), 291pp, $37; The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist by Trisha Hanifin (Cloud Ink Press, 2021), 259pp, $30

‘If I could turn back time,’ sang Cher in her 1989 smash hit. ‘If I could find a way,’ she says, she would unsay all the hurtful words that had brought a sad end to her relationship. We can’t, of course, take back ‘all those words that have hurt’. Mere mortals and insomniacs especially are condemned instead to endlessly revisit the mistakes of our own history, impotent to avoid or undo the damage done by our younger selves. But what if we could? Just how far would we be willing to go to alter the fabric of the past, and therefore the present and future, of ourselves and those we love?  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, sci fi fantasy

Between the Long and the Short of It

April 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell 

Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Craig Gamble (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), 478pp, $35

‘Maybe I could sew my legs together,’ Loretta muses, wishing for a tail. Penned-on lines or her own rashy, eczematic skin could pass for scales. Sniffing, dripping, allergy-ridden Jeremy is a likely candidate for the required slimy hagfish; a sickening Mrs Wilberforce (a nod to Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain) is Loretta’s longed-for mermaid kindred spirit. This is the alarming, yet vividly drawn cast of ‘Scales, Tails and Hagfish’, Octavia Cade’s story of an insistent, angry, self-proclaimed mermaid that sets the pace for this collection of fourteen long short stories with unflagging brio.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, literature, sci fi fantasy, short stories

Dust-Red Wings

February 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Emma Neale

Unsheltered by Clare Moleta (Scribner, 2021), 242pp, $35

From its comfortless Grapes of Wrath epigraph to its acknowledgement in the endpapers of the Whadjuk Noongar people, this novel is unforgiving, underpinned by fear and grief that are not solely personal but species-borne; and yet it also lifts us with its glimmers of social connection, and speeds us along as if on dust-red wings.

Suffering no illusions about what a world that continues to careen into climate crisis will be like, Unsheltered also keeps the reader gripped by its alternately guttering and reigniting candle of hope, as the narrative follows the unpredictable knife-edge luck of its protagonist, the unsentimental and enormously pragmatic survivor, Li. [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, sci fi fantasy

Drink ’til Dead

February 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 241

 

Janet Newman

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe, 2020), 280pp, $29.99

‘Do we want to know what pigs on the way to slaughter are thinking?’ asked Australian author Sophie Cunningham at the 31 March 2020 virtual launch of Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in that Country. ‘No, we don’t,’ Cunningham answered. But that is what we get in McKay’s novel. Battery-farmed pigs are released from a truck on a five-hour-plus trip to the slaughterhouse––this is the Australian outback––because their constant hello-ing has unravelled the farmers in the cab. One pig asks, ‘Is it / good. What is / it.’ It’s grass and creeks. We discover that the pigs are not merely fearful; rather, they feel something more terrible and familiar: [Read more…]

Filed Under: fiction, sci fi fantasy

The Grief of Ghosts

October 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Shana Chandra

The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade (Stelliform Press, 2021), 77 pp, $14.99

Octavia Cade’s The Impossible Resurrection of Grief is a non-traditional ghost story, one that truly haunts as it is set in a future not so distant from ours, where the destruction of our seas and wildlife has left familiar land- and seascapes drained of life. Cade has won three Sir Julius Vogel awards for speculative fiction, and it’s worth noting that, besides her recent win for The Stone Wētā (2020), the other two were for novellas, both packing important questions into the small creative space. It’s also worth noting their titles—The Ghost of Matter (2016) and The Convergence of Fairy Tales (2017)—which hint at the themes she explores. [Read more…]

Filed Under: sci fi fantasy

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