INTRODUCTION I, by Damien Broderick

Pierre Marie François de Sales Baillot, who flourished at the turn of the nineteeth century and taught violin at the Paris Conservatoire, wrote in his L’Art du violon: “The quartet is a conversation among friends, communicating to one another their sensations, their sentiments, and their mutual affections.” Literary genres—their texts, writers, readers—are time-lapsed conversations in somewhat the same way, each voice contributing, if only in the silence of one’s head while reading, responding, deciding whether or not to read any more in this particular mode, or by this author, or to contribute some writing oneself to the great fleuve of story.

Think of the many-braided conversation (conveyed by speech, letter, email, blog) where interested people articulate their views of a given book or body of writing, sharing more penetrating and intimate reactions than just, “Hey, hated that,” or “Oh, I love her stories, so romantic!”

Today, increasingly, that discussion is conducted by blog, listserv, and for all I know an endless nervy cascade of tweets. But the great historical record of conversations about imaginative literature is the magazines shared by a lively international community of readers and writers. This book is a selection from such a journal, one not easily available to US or British readers, since it was produced and funded by an Australian academic and science fiction fan, Van Ikin.

The leading characters in classic science fiction by, for example, Asimov and H. Beam Piper had crisp but unfamiliar names: Hari Seldon, Salvor Hardin, Preem Palver, Tortha Karf or Verkan Vall. You could easily suppose from his name that Van Ikin, the editor and publisher of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, came from the same futuristic lineage, and perhaps he does.

Van is a connoisseur of all the odd flavors of sf’s menus. His first anthology, Australian Science Fiction, in 1982, was an early and exemplary sampling of the best sf from the island continent. John Baxter had released The Pacific Book of Australian SF and its sequel in 1968 and 1971, but these reached back only to 1955. Van’s Australian Science Fiction, published by University of Queensland Press, delved back into the roots of fantastika in Australia in 1845, and forward to brilliant writers such as Peter Carey (later a multiple Booker Prize winner and US National Book Award finalist) who were opening out literary fiction in this formerly despised direction. In 1990 he edited the anthology Glass Reptile Breakout, published by the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, and two years later he and Terry Dowling compiled the excellent anthology Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF.

This background of knowledgeable scholarship is the basis for the most important historical study to date of Aussie sf: Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction, from Greenwood Press in 1999, co-written by Van with Dr. Russell Blackford and Dr. Sean McMullen, both contributors to Warriors of the Tao.

Van’s chief contribution to the sf mode is his distinctive and long-running (if sometimes belated) critical magazine, familiarly known by the iconic initials SF, from which we have drawn the contents of this book. With its cleanly printed pages and a trademark yellow or ivory stiff cover and crimson title, always a cut above the traditional mimeograph-copied sf fanzines, SF was not quite an academic literary review nor a wildly anything-goes celebratory or controversy-fuming fanzine. The voices in Van’s magazine engaged in a long conversation, with no stuffily imposed tone beyond civility and a willingness to cite sources, usually good-humored, sometimes naive, sometimes hair-raisingly hieratic (like the splendid colloquium with famous sf theorist Darko Suvin—another of those names from Asimov or Piper!—included here).

Australia has been a serious source of science fiction and fantasy scholarship and reviews since at least 1966, with John Bangsund’s witty Australian Science-Fiction Review, followed in 1969 by Bruce Gillespie’s SF Commentary. The first Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy was compiled and published by independent Tasmanian scholar Donald H. Tuck, published between 1974-83 before Tuck lapsed into long silence (he died in 2010). Two Hugo awards were shared by the greatest of all sf encyclopedists to date, Australian Peter Nicholls and Canadian John Clute, for their Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1979 and 1993). Van Ikin’s small magazine fits into this trajectory as part of the long conversation, from its first issue in 1977 to its latest in 2010, a memorial number for the late brilliant independent sf scholar and fan John Foyster.

In Warriors of the Tao, from its cheeky, deliberately pulpish title (borrowed from Russell Blackford’s opening essay) to the formidable cultural and political analyses of the closing interview with Professor Suvin, we have selected a mix of items that represent the many voices at play in SF during a third of a century (which of course extended, like science fiction itself, from the twentieth century into the twenty-first…). We hope to return to these accumulated treasures in a second volume. For now, enjoy the table talk—and watch the skies!