I have been thinking and posting about epic fantasy recently and those posts are by no means finished, but the announcement of the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2011 finalists last week set me on another track. I observed last Friday that “… I think the Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists this year make a very strong showing—a great tribute to the SFF currently being created in New Zealand”—and since then I’ve been thinking: yes, but is there a distinctively NZ flavour to the SFF that we’re creating?

I have argued here previously that there doesn’t need to be—that spec fic is spec fic is spec fic (or SFF by any other name) and there’s no requirement for it to come with a passport. I still hold to that view, but nonetheless confess to curiosity: with or without passport, does NZ spec fic come with a Kiwi accent?

I would love to know what you think, because it’s hard for someone like me, who is both inside the genre and resident inside NZ to necessarily ‘see clearly’ on the matter. Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead (a finalist for this year’s Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel, Young Adult) and David Hair’s The Bone Tiki and The Taniwha’s Tears both actively draw on NZ Maori myth and folklore as the basis for their Young Adult fantasies. Interestingly, I understand both are now resident in Australia, which leads to further speculation as to whether geographic distance calls one more strongly to the motifs and cultural roots of “home.”

So what does make speculative fiction distinctively Kiwi in flavour? Is it enough that the author carries the passport with ‘Enzed’ stamped thereon and therein?  Does it have to be set in New Zealand, have identifiable NZ sub-locales and Kiwi protoganists? Must the fiction work with NZ folklore and myth, either Maori or otherwise (e.g. in the way that Orson Scott Card works with colonial North American folklore in the Alvin Maker series that starts with Seventh Son?) Or is drawing on NZ landscape in the way that Elizabeth Knox does in the Dreamhunter/Dreamquake duology sufficient to give the work a distinctively NZ flavour?

Cheryl Morgan, in her Salon Futura review of The Heir of Night comments on the treatment of issues of ecological impact and colonialism within the story, and reminds the reader that: “Lowe lives in New Zealand, issues of colonialism are very familiar to her.” For me, her observation raises another question: is it possible that cultures have values and preoccupations that come through in their literature and give it a “flavour” that is as distinctive as a passport? And if this is the case, what are our Kiwi preoccupations?

In the 2010 anthology A Foreign Country, (which is a finalist for the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2011 for Best Collected Work) I noticed two strong themes in the collected stories: the first  around environmental (in general) and climate change (in particular) dystopia; the second concerned what I would call “reproductive scifi.” (I also note that examples from both these categories, Lee Murray’s Consumed and Ripley Patton’s  The Future of the Sky respectively, are finalists for the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2011 for Best Short Story.)

But are these topics, particularly climate change dystopia, exclusively NZ preoccupations?  Or is it their treatment that is in some way distinctively Kiwi: for example, I loved the portrayal of bureaucratic “border control” at work in Consumed—but although environmental border control is undoubtedly a NZ preoccupation, I doubt it is an exclusive one internationally.

I have heard another NZ author, Kate De Goldi, (best known for The 10 Pm Question, which I note is not speculative fiction) say that every author has their writing “bone”, upon which they gnaw through the medium of their work. If she is right then I suspect it may be equally true that writers born of the same nation may also have certain cultural bones upon which they all gnaw—perhaps even as nebulous as a Kiwi value set / attitude to the world that imbues our writing. But I do not feel I have sufficient distance to even say whether such bones really do exist, let alone to opine with any certainty as to what they might be.

I would love to know your thoughts though, or whether others out there see more clearly and feel that there is something present in our speculative fiction that is distinctively New Zealand?