AustLit

'When I was very little-four or five, perhaps-I saw an unexplainable entity. There were two sightings of this creature, vivid enough to burn into my memory. First it appeared under my bed; it seemed white in colour and was pressed against the far wall, lurking in shadow. When my uncle, who was visiting, lifted the frilly valance to shoo the monster away, it had vanished.' (Publication abstract)

'I read Nevil Shute's 1957 bestseller 'On the Beach' in the early days of the pandemic. It seemed appropriate to the times. In the novel, Australia is a remote holdout against global collapse. The major and minor powers of the Northern Hemisphere have destroyed each other in 37 days of mutual nuclear attack. Now, particles of atomic dust released in the 'short war' creep below the equator, towards Australia's southern coastline and Melbourne, where the novel is set.' (Publication abstract)

'Utopias are neither as popular nor as frequent as their dark mirror, dystopias. Projecting from today into the future, using the thought experiment of extrapolation '(if this goes on...)' tends to produce more pessimism than optimism. That is hardly surprising in our perennially anxious times. Nor are vintage utopias palatable to a modern audience: they can contain racism, eugenics, or happily exterminate most of the biosphere (as in Joseph Fraser's 1889 'Melbourne and Mars: My Mysterious Life on Two Planets'). What can seem perfection then can read like tedious hell now. Additionally, utopias are not easy to write well, as polemical perfection lacks conflict, tension, the inherent interest of the devil's party. Some have endured, like Plato's Republic, but it is certainly less read than 'The Handmaid's Tale' or 1984.' (Publication abstract)

'Let's begin with the observation that evolution and culture exhibit a common pattern: descent with modification. The analogies have been made before. T.S. Eliot conceived the poetic tradition as an organism, a 'living whole' passed on and changed as each generation reads the poets who came before. Transmission is at once the technique of recurrence and the process of change. The miraculous variety of life on Earth has been created over millions of years by a still-mysterious cellular urge to replicate, repeated in organisms, generation after generation. Homer's replicated epithets enabled the transmission of The Odyssey over centuries. A circle of children reciting a growing list of items they went to the shop to buy or singing nursery rhymes hone these skills. Transmission, however, is more than mere duplication. Reproducing proteins are an engine of evolutionary transmission, but transmission also requires creativity.' (Publication abstract)