Cirrus@Austlit

'Even when its concerns are extraterrestrial, science fiction can have a national accent.Not surprisingly, there is a distinctly local flavour to Rob Gerrand’s compendious collection of Australian science fiction writing from the past fifty years. Landscape may be one reason for this. With its megaliths and arid wastes, the Australian continent seems an especially suitable backdrop for narratives of alien visitation. Australian SF has also been influenced by the situation of the country’s indigenous people, as Russell Blackford points out in his helpful introduction. This can be seen in Norma Hemming’s “Debt of Lassor” (1958), one of the anthology’s earlier stories, in which a ruthless intergalactic empire is forced to acknowledge its crimes of conquest by sending a Rehabilitation Director to revive the Terran civilization it…' (Introduction)