Monsters in the Garden

Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen (Eds)

Victoria University Press

Otago Daily Times, January 16th 2021

In curating Monsters in the Garden, Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen have chosen examples of what they consider “the most enjoyable and interesting” short English language New Zealand speculative fiction (a catch-all term that covers everything from fantasy and sci-fi to ghost stories, myth, magic realism and surrealism). Some of Aotearoa’s most beloved writers – Maurice Gee, Janet Frame, Witi Ihimaera, Owen Marshall, Patricia Grace and Knox herself – are represented alongside newer voices such as Pip Adam and Lawrence Patchett. Others, such as Tamsyn Muir, Karen Healy, and Juliet Marillier, may be less familiar to New Zealand readers despite achieving considerable international acclaim.

As one might expect from such a line-up, the stories are excellent, and because they span everything from hard sci-fi to full-on fantasy, there is something here to suit all tastes. (It probably says something about our national psyche that ghosts and dystopian futures predominate). My personal favourites include Danyl McLauchlan’s “The Everything Store”, which takes place inside the mall that ate the world, and “The Tenth Meet” by Lawrence Patchett, which transplants a piece of 19th Century Shetland folklore to a near-future New Zealand in which the effects of climate change are making themselves felt.

The anthology also contains a few surprises: Knox’s reconstructed excerpt from a lost Margaret Mahy adult fantasy, two chapters from a Swiftian satire by James K Baxter’s grandfather, a chillingly recursive parable by Janet Frame about sheep to the slaughter, and a detailed account of a spacecraft’s use of orbital manoeuvering to travel from Earth to Venus from a novel written in 1886. Authorship of the latter – which also posits the use of cryogenic stasis during interstellar travel – is cautiously attributed to a Mr Henry Honor of Ashburton, and I love the idea that a South Island sheep farmer may have written the first literary description of atmospheric aerobraking. It may also be no coincidence that this story emerged contemporaneously with Richard Pearse’s experiments in aviation and the world’s first shipment of frozen meat.

The editors’ introductory essays are just as interesting as the stories themselves. Larsen and Knox describe their selection process, discuss the slippery relationship between genres, and explore the reasons behind (Pākeha) New Zealanders’ tendency to dismiss non-realist fiction as frivolous and, by extension, not literature. As they point out, all fiction is, by definition fantasy; sci-fi, particularly hard sci-fi, can be firmly grounded in – even shape ­– the real world; and speculative writing can explore different ways of seeing, being, and valuing (and the consequences thereof) in a manner that that realist fiction cannot. The stories in Monsters in the Garden exemplify these qualities and more. Not only is it an excellent starting point from which to further explore the rich tradition of science fiction and fantasy writing here in Aotearoa, it will, as Knox so eloquently puts it, transport you “all over the place, outside of [your]self and [your] experience.” And that, in itself, is a thing of value.