NEW ZEALAND

   One of the last lands discovered by Europeans, New Zealand was a convenient setting for moral and UTOPIAN tales. The anonymous Travels of Hildebrand Bowman, by Himself (1778 UK) anticipates Samuel BUTLER'ssatirical Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901). Utopian fiction by New Zealanders includes Anno Domini 2000, or Woman's Destiny (1889 UK) bythe NZ Premier Sir Julius VOGEL, a dreary novel of a UK/US empire formed through dynastic marriage, and Godfrey SWEVEN's difficult novel sequence Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles (1901 US) and Limanora: The Island ofProgress (1903 US), the latter described by E.F. BLEILER as "probably the greatest of all early utopian novels". Some 19th-century works, mostly published in England, are extrapolated from a remark of Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) in Critical and Historical Essays (coll 1843): ". . . whensome traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul's." The UK writer Francis Carr's Archimago (1864), partly set in aruined London of 1964, is an example.A more popular taste is seen in the end-of-the-century boom in romance. The Great Romance (1881) by "The Inhabitant" is NZ's first space story. The heroes in Ajor's The Secret ofMt Cook (1894) revive frozen people; in Hedged with Divinities (1895) by Edward Tregear (1846-1931) all men die; the subject of The Elixir of Life (1907 UK) by William Satchell (1860-1942) is self-evident.A puritan realist mode dominates NZ MAINSTREAM fiction and criticism, yet writers within the tradition often use sf and fantasy tropes. Robyn Hyde's Wednesday's Children (1937 UK) is fantasy; Maurice GEE has writtenfantasies for children; M.K. JOSEPH wrote the speculative The Hole in the Zero (1967 UK) and The Time of Achamoth (1977); Janet FRAME's metafictionsScented Garden for the Blind (1963) and Living in the Maniototo (1979 US) are fantastic; and the dystopian Smith's Dream (1971) - filmed as Sleeping Dogs (see below) - by C.K. STEAD tells of a future military dictatorship.Current writers such as Russell Haley, Marilyn Duckworth (1935-) and Rachel McAlpine (1940-) are adept at using sf devices for mainstream audiences.Works marketed as sf include Adrian Geddes's The Rim of Eternity (1964), in which aliens invade, Colin GIBSON's tale of nuclear winter, ThePepper Leaf (1971 UK), and the novels of Hugh COOK, which are fantasy. Peter Hooper's fantasies and Craig HARRISON's thrillers have escaped the genre label. Phillip MANN and Cherry WILDER (who now lives in Germany) are the best-known contemporary NZ sf writers, along with Sandi HALL. NZ sf in the CINEMA started with the now lost A Message from Mars (1909), based on Richard Ganthony's popular 1899 UK stage play, which he and Lester LURGANnovelized (1912), the play itself being published much later (1924). There was no further NZ sf film until the successful Sleeping Dogs (1977) dir Roger Donaldson, a NEAR FUTURE political thriller envisaging atotalitarian government. The industry flourished from this time until the mid-1980s with government subsidies, its sf titles including the routine, post- HOLOCAUST Battletruck (1982), the violent, lunatic brain-surgeon-and-his-experimental-subjects story Death Warmed Up (1984), the sf thriller DEAD KIDS (1981; vt Strange Behavior) and The QUIET EARTH (1985); then subsidies were withdrawn. Subsequent films, such as thedeliberately disgusting BAD TASTE (1987) and the TIME-TRAVEL fantasy The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988), plus tv shows such as Space Knights(1988), seem to show that, in the visual media, NZ sf and fantasy must cross genre boundaries if they are to be viable.

   MM