26 - Indigenous Futurism

Summary

This chapter starts by locating Indigenous Australian science fiction, increasingly described as ‘Indigenous futurism’, within the broader framework of Australian sf and Indigenous Australian literature. Indigenous sf has had to contend with reader expectations of Indigenous writing, largely regarded by publishers, booksellers and critics as a niche market, thereby consigned within a very narrow box. Compounding this is the belief that some sf is frivolous, and thus inadequate to address Indigenous affairs. The following section traces the naissance of Indigenous sf in the writing of Sam Watson, Eric Willmot and Archie Weller. The aim is to demonstrate how these works revised mainstream sf by ‘Indigenising’ its tropes, and how the reception of these works has been changing from the 1990s onwards. The third section focuses on twenty-first-century Indigenous sf with Indigenous women authors taking over the global Indigenous sf literary scene. These women authors question traditional paradigms by fusing Indigenous systems of knowledge with the latest scientific thought. This discussion is exemplified by Alexis Wright’s, Claire G. Coleman’s and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s works. The final section demonstrates that Indigenous novelistic futurism has also been augmented by recent developments in Indigenous sci-fi television series and graphic novels.