What should science fiction do?
That question has had, over long decades, many answers. ‘It should entertain.’ ‘It should evoke a sense of wonder.’ ‘It should contain new ideas.’ ‘It should comment upon the present.’ ‘It should prepare us for the future.’ And most SF does indeed do one, or more than one, of these things. But those answers aren’t much of a guideline about why some SF makes our eyes widen and some makes them droop in boredom.
My own take on the Great SF Mission question is this: It should deepen our understanding of what it is to be human by letting us peer at how humans behave in novel situations. Thus, it is akin to staining a biological specimen to bring out its essential characteristics.
Thoraiya Dyer, who has only been publishing a handful of years, already does that superbly. Her story ‘Yowie’ won the 2010 Aurealis Award for Fantasy Short Story. ‘The Company Articles of Edward Teach’ won the 2011 Australian Ditmar Award for Best Novella/Novelette. This book you are holding is her first collection.
Her stories combine very strange settings with very familiar human desires. We get dropped into each new place and, as we strive to figure out the laws of this alien landscape, we become grounded in characters so completely human that we understand immediately what they want, and why. The settings offer alien worlds, strange religions, forbidding technology—but also include meticulously detailed near future settings just as foreign to me, such as a vet’s office servicing RAAF attack dogs. The characters include:
A veterinarian who wants to succeed at her new job.
A man who wants passionately to return to a lost loved one.
A blind artist who wants to live as well as he can with the cruel consequences of a random act of kindness.
An artificial construct with the desire to know what it is and where it fits in the world—as do we all.
The combination of strange and familiar gives Dyer’s fiction the power wielded by the best SF. The stories unerringly find the human inside the bizarre. These are unsettling, poignant, marvellous. Read them. You will be glad you did.
Nancy Kress