Voyagers Read online

  This defi nition is inadequate – it would exclude a number of poems in this anthology – but it makes some key points:

  • Science fi ction is a literature of change.

  • It is often set in the future.

  • Science fi ction is counter-factual: the universe is changed in at least one respect from the universe as it was known to the writer.

  • The changes in science fi ction are extrapolations based on accepted or speculative scientifi c principles.

  This is why some types of universe are excluded, such as

  those of fantasy, where the changes are supernatural rather than natural, or of magic realism and fabulation, where the changes are not rationalised. In addition, we reluctantly had to exclude xiii

  many excellent poems which dealt with astronomy, or with the history of space exploration, but which lacked the crucial element of speculation.

  But what riches remain! You’ll fi nd the ‘traditional’ concerns of science fi ction here: aliens, space travel, time travel, the end of the world – and also concepts you may not previously have thought of as science fi ction. Whether questioning, apocalyptic or playful, these are poems which shine the fl ashlight of science fi ction on our universe, and relish the strange images which result.

  In this way we have chosen to organise the sections using

  well-known movie titles as thematic and fun links, i.e. ‘Back to the Future’ (futuristic or time travel poems), ‘Apocalypse Now’

  (apocalyptic visions), ‘Altered States’ (robots and other altered states of existence), ‘ET’ (extraterrestrial sightings), ‘When Worlds Collide’ (explorations of other planets and stars), and ‘The Final Frontier’ (space travel poems).

  2

  Now for a few historical comments on the contents and make-up of this anthology. It is possible to trace a lineage of SF themes in New Zealand poetry, dating back to the 19th century. But it is not clear whether particular writers and their ‘schools’ or groups ever intended to create a specifi c genre of New Zealand science fi ction poetry. Whereas, in Britain, the New Apocalyptics (of the 1940s) and the ‘Martian School’ (of the late 1970s/early ’80s) emerged, and poets like D.M. Thomas specialised in SF poetry at various times, this was not the case in New Zealand. It is more likely that groups like ‘The Wellington Group’ of poets of the 1950s, several of whose poems are included in this collection, were ‘occasional’

  writers on SF themes.

  New Zealand poets have included SF themes in individual

  collections, such as Louis Johnson, New Worlds for Old (1957), Bill Sewell, Solo Flight (1982), David Eggleton, People of the Land (1988), Robert Sullivan, Star Waka (1999), Alan Brunton, Ecstasy (2001) or Tim Jones, Boat People (2002) and All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens (2007). Other collections, like Owen Leeming’s Venus is Setting (1972), Cilla McQueen’s Anti gravity (1984), Bill Manhire’s xiv

  Milky Way Bar (1991) or David Eggleton’s Rhyming Planet (2001), have shown an awareness of science fi ction themes in their titles.

  Individual small presses too held that awareness, such as Merlene Young’s Kosmick Studios (in the ’70s) and Nigel Rowe’s Martian Way Press (in the ’80s), though they didn’t publish science fi ction poetry (the idea had probably come to them from pop culture).

  Fleur Adcock’s ‘Gas’ (from High Tide in the Garden (1971)), Rob Jackaman’s Lee: A Science Fiction Poem (1976), and Bill Sewell’s sequence in Solo Flight are notable examples of longer New Zealand science fi ction poems; but they are notable for their rarity as well as their quality.

  It’s a truism of SF criticism that SF, even if it’s set in the far future, is mainly about the present. The nuclear bomb and the new threat of a man-made apocalypse, the space race of the ’60s and the 1969 moon landing, SF fi lms and TV shows, popular music i.e.

  classic rock to current electronica, the increasingly secular nature of our society, the information age … all have been refl ected in New Zealand science fi ction poetry. Some of the poems in this anthology were written long enough ago that their imagined future is now in the past; others lay out a speculative map of our future.

  3

  Due to permissions issues and lack of necessary funding for payments to authors, we have not been able to include all the poems we wished in this anthology. Instead this book is very much compiled on the cooperation and goodwill of the poets

  included (and/or their publishers/executors), and as we complete the compilation of this anthology, we are sure that further New Zealand science fi ction poems have been and are being written.

  Among poets not included whom we know to have made

  contributions to the genre are Bill Manhire (‘The Selenologist’ and

  ‘The Next Thousand’), R.A.K. Mason (‘Latter-day Geography

  Lesson’), and Cilla McQueen (‘Anti gravity’). Others like Murray Edmond, Hone Tuwhare, Denis Glover, James K. Baxter, Keith

  Sinclair, Jack Ross, Bernard Gadd, F.W.N. Wright, Ian Wedde, John Gallas, J.C. Sturm, Kendrick Smithyman, Allen Curnow

  (writing both as himself and as Whim-Wham), C.K. Stead,

  xv

  Australian-domiciled Douglas Stewart in Rutherford (1962), or more recently Albert Wendt in The Book of the Black Star (2002)

  and American-now-NZ-based Bryan Walpert have written SF

  pieces. This is a snapshot of the fi eld, and the fi rst such anthology we know of in New Zealand, and we hope that it won’t be the last such snapshot. Overseas, there have been several anthologies such as Keith Allen Daniels’ 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology (Anamnesis Press, San Francisco, USA). We’re sure there are others too well worth searching out.

  Above all, we hope you fi nd this book an entertaining and

  challenging selection that gives you a new perspective on New Zealand, on science fi ction, and on the range and scope of New Zealand poetry.

  – Mark Pirie and Tim Jones

  Wellington, New Zealand

  January 2009

  xvi

  Back To The Future

  Anna Rugis

  the poetry of the future

  it’ll all be like mine

  but not for long

  then people will get into

  elaborate hand gestures instead

  and there’ll be no applause because

  then that will mean something else

  3

  Louis Johnson

  To a Science-Fiction Writer

  Strange how those in your fi eld have become

  so uniform, now, in a bleak view of the future.

  What happened to perfectibility? What became

  of great-grandfather’s dream of progress –

  the race aspiring always towards improvement,

  perhaps becoming fulfi lled? It was this

  festered for you, failed, showed the sickness –

  Man, and not the machine. But then,

  the hopeful ancestor’s sights were blurred

  by braided nobility and the cavalry charge

  blinding him to the ultimate use of the engine.

  He had not known of the Marne or the Somme,

  the millions rotting in trenches, gasping

  against the poison gas. Not known of harvests

  rusting or dumped in the midst of famine;

  not known of the wheels and gears unleashing

  the greatest terrors ever on civilised Europe.

  Your lot is aware that under every bomb

  is a kind of perfection – machine-turned

  steel that mirrors the hand and satisfi es

  touch quite impersonally. But beauty

  stops there. In your apple, man is the maggot

  who has not learned to live with abstraction

  any more than the ancestor with his dream.

  Effi ciency is fi re-power and obsolescence, and in

  your dream of the future – which could be clean

  and good – it becomes more clearly established,
r />   the human is the component that must be replaced.

  30/6/70

  4

  A.R.D. Fairburn

  2000 A.D.

  The normal population

  Has been evacuated from the South Island, which has been given over to the tourist industry for purposes of hunting, shooting, boozing,

  mountaineering,

  fi shing and fornication.

  Rugby football having been discarded as much too tame,

  Fighting with spring-knives has become the national game,

  Carried on by a small class of specially-bred gladiators,

  The rest of the public being bubble-gum-blowing spectators.

  Votes for cows was carried some years ago by a show of feet; Totalitarian democracy is now complete,

  And the present Prime Minister, known to everyone as Jackie, Is a ten-year-old steer from Taranaki.

  His authority, and that of Bullamy’s, is only nominal, all power being vested (along with the right of self-perpetuation)

  In GENERAL OECUMENICAL DEVELOPMENT (INC.), a

  world with headquarters in Monte Carlo and branches throughout the Creation.

  A complete monopoly of Radio, Television, News and Information Services, Education and Entertainment, including six selected sub-varieties of religious practice

  Is operated on behalf of G.O.D. (INC.) by the New Zealand Broad-serving

  Cactus,

  Which is situated on the Desert Road, plumb in the middle

  Of the North Island, where the major administrative fi ddle Of the nation is conducted

  In an ant-hill suitably constructed.

  5

  Poets and artists are heavily subsidised by the State, on strict condition that their work shall be totally incomprehensible,

  Because that which is incomprehensible cannot possibly be subver-sive, a working assumption that is eminently sensible.

  The defence of the country is in the hands of G.O.D. (Inc.) and (for decorative effect) a standing army of 100,000 marching girls (‘Don’t shoot until you see the whites

  Of their eyes,’ counsels the Ministry of Tourism), along with (not to be out-done) 50,000 marching bodgies in gents’ Hawaiian fl oral shirtings and shocking-pink tights.

  Now therefore, although everything worth buying has become pro-gressively scarcer and dearer,

  Lift up your voices in joyous celebration of the Second Millennium of the Christian Era.

  6

  Janet Charman

  in your dreams

  Transit passengers

  who wish to refrain

  from inhaling

  may simply press the icon

  you see below you

  on your left screen now

  apply the mask

  that falls from the bulkhead

  directly above

  If you are

  disembarking

  inhale

  a spray

  from

  the kete

  as the language ministry

  offi cials

  pass among you

  and you will notice

  a slight change

  in cabin pressure

  which is the effect of

  crossing

  the language barrier

  7

  Ladies and Gentlemen

  Girls and Boys,

  thank you for fl ying Air Aotearoa

  8

  Bill Sewell

  Utopia

  nowhere is there

  to be found such health

  as in the city of the mind:

  marble gleaming white

  under a gentle sun

  and men & women

  in freshly laundered robes

  walk up & down conversing

  cooling refreshments are offered

  from well-situated stalls

  (courteously & without charge)

  respect and not subservience

  sways the nods & smiles –

  not a rag to be seen

  not a smear of excrement

  on the paving:

  all this projected from the mind

  onto faraway places & faraway times

  while here & now the world

  wobbles on its axis:

  the bickering the jostling

  and the passing of coins

  one system soiling after another

  no salve yet concocted

  to remedy these boils –

  9

  or disease beyond disease

  spreading out of the mind

  to a living relic who

  meets a lesser breed of men

  conversation monitored

  by a vigilant bureaucracy

  hoodlums roaming the streets

  to prey upon the feeble

  or everyone just too happy

  to give a damn about anything

  (an 18th century adventurer

  found more to admire in horses):

  nowhere is there

  any health and the boils

  keep on erupting.

  10

  Alistair Paterson

  Time traveller

  Somewhere

  you’re writing, putting words together

  but because I can’t see you doing it

  I have to visualise, guess

  make inventions, imagine as

  in the behaviour of blue penguins

  what’s happening to you

  that you’re hidden by water…

  or you’re riding a bicycle where

  afternoon is trees & the sun –

  summer is endless…

  You inhabit

  a distant, an imaginary country

  you live on high hills far from the sea

  you’re a time traveller

  moving through the dust of centuries –

  who travels like that because

  it’s the way you see yourself

  or because someone’s imagined you there

  in front of the Parthenon

  a thousand years on –

  at the sea’s edge watching the sun…

  11

  You’re writing

  (uncomfortably) at a kitchen table

  or you’re kneeling by a stream

  looking into the water

  you’re working in a library

  (to the sound of bells, a fl ight of music)

  you’re using the telephone

  or as in a painting by Chagall, moving

  through the powers

  – the impossible, unbelievable powers –

  of the mind…

  And suddenly I recognise

  it’s a mystery:

  the fall of leaves in autumn

  clouds drifting across the sky

  light across a footpath, a roadway

  that you’re a long way off

  & driving away from me –

  driving along a highway towards

  something, somewhere neither of us

  has ever heard of

  or is likely to arrive at…

  12

  You telephone to say

  you’ve discovered

  there are places where

  the sky is luminous, the moon dark

  the sun moves west to east – backwards –

  that you can’t understand

  why no one else seems to see it:

  I tell you I believe you – which I do

  because there’s no reason not to

  because belief gives shape to things

  structures the world…

  You write at the kitchen table

  & I remember

  how the weather follows you

  – the clouds, the moon, the night –

  that the trick isn’t

  to think logically, be reasonable

  but to work in a place with windows

  that’s open to air & light:

  when the day’s over, to walk in the park

/>   & look at the harbour –

  at leaves, at trees & the sky…

  13

  David Gregory

  Einstein’s Theory Simply Explained

  When I returned

  I went to see myself,

  still working on the motor of the thing.

  We had a pleasant chat,

  so startling.

  We talked of time, Einstein and you.

  Then I went out,

  denounced the project

  and bought the weapon.

  Knowing how he sleeps,

  I shall kill him in the night,

  so he will not have you

  again.

  14

  Jenny Powell with John Dolan

  Note to the Aliens

  To be fossilised is actually a long shot

  and yet, in yesterday’s assembly

  two children showed fossilised shells.

  Th

  ey, of course, have the calcium advantage.

  Th

  ey pay for it in mobility though –

  and the long wait to be pushed, sea for hilltop.

  In the layers of time where would

  you be?

  Upper-middle at best. If that. If ever.

  But if I get lucky, let me explain

  the much repaired teeth: don’t assume

  this skull ranked high in my tribe.

  We had conquered; dentists needed work;

  cake was everywhere. Until dentists

  became rare. You can tell from

  the following layer; greater prevalence

  of untreated dental decay.

  – A more honest portrait, all in all.

  We are pressed there to prove something else.

  Even fossils can lie.

  15

  Raewyn Alexander

  in the future when we grow new brains

  old ideas will not fi t

  same as new cars with improved engines

  we’ll be streamlined too with sleek genes

  part eggplant and olive oil

  lick your arm and enjoy a salad in Greece

  in the future when we learn to love completely

  broken hearts will be a joke

  same as how wooden spoked wheels are laughable

  tears will be rare and set into jewellery

  our past blue but tomorrow lipsticked kisses

  in the future we shall choose how to die in style

  death the new black

  every clone and thought kept on silicon chips

  rebirth as natural as a botox break

  grief played out in theatres for the old fashioned

  in the future we will look back at now and smile

  the colours and aromas rejuvenated in theme parks

  revisiting who you used to be