A long way from home: science fiction and the construction of time and place in Peter Carey’s short stories

Abstract

When Peter Carey’s first collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History, was published in 1974 the book was a critical and commercial success and the subsequent collection War Crimes (1979) was hailed as marking Carey’s mastery of stories displaying more tender and ‘emotionally generous’ narratives. Despite their acknowledged significance, Carey’s short stories have been relatively overlooked critically. In particular, while their science fictional qualities have received passing acknowledgement, the meaning and significance of how science fiction (hereafter referred to as ‘sf’) operates in Carey’s work has largely been ignored. Crucially, sf criticism as an academic discipline was new when the stories were published. The tools and terminology of sf criticism, therefore, were mostly not known to contemporary critics, in the unlikely case they did read sf or consider it seriously. In the following thesis I use the lens of sf and concepts from sf criticism to enrich our understanding of the stories and to examine how they work as science fiction. I use concepts from the developing field of sf criticism to guide a close reading of three stories from the second collection, War Crimes: ‘“Do You Love Me?”’, the novella ‘The Chance’ and ‘Exotic Pleasures’. Expanding on the generic discussion of sf as the literature of cognitive estrangement to the relation between sf and other genres (such as the Gothic and the pastoral) I harness emerging critical theory sf as a critique of imperialism and settler colonialism to explore how Carey’s stories imagine Australia’s past, present and future. I critically discuss several sf works that serve as templates for how Carey uses sf to illuminate ways Carey’s work sketches the emotional and physical impacts of the rise of neoliberalism and is in step with the environmentally aware-and-alarmed turn that sf takes in the 1960s-70s. This thesis opens with the generic discussion noted above, followed by the chapters of close reading of the stories. I argue that the cognitive estrangement characteristic of sf, as well as its complex relation to notions of history and place, are especially apt for Australian postcolonial writing. These qualities offer Carey powerful ways of developing many of his themes: imprisonment, homelessness, lostness, orphans, failures of and limits to cognition—and, more significantly, the disturbing resonance of the stories with our current climate of environmental catastrophe. This is followed by a 6 short bridging chapter to the novel novel, The Aquarium, set in present-day Sydney and developing many of the themes explored in the thesis, especially environmental catastrophe.

Date of Thesis submission	2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Sara Knox (Supervisor), Colin Harvey (Supervisor) & Matthew McGuire (Supervisor)