Lay down the book

The best literary short fiction gives the author an opportunity to stretch their limbs from poetry into abstraction, painting emotion in words without the need to make figurative or even internal sense. The story does not need to be a medium for delivering ‘story’, as such, but can become a container of emotion, for the feelings the artist intends to deliver. The emotion delivered by literary fiction teaches us to feel empathy for the characters, making the short form an effective empathy delivery vehicle.

Speculative short fiction, on the other hand, is a machine built to fill us with wonder and make us wonder (both the noun and the verb forms are appropriate). It could be said that the job of short speculative fiction is to make us lay down the book at key moments and reflect. Our imaginations are engaged, which can help us to understand worlds and cultural contexts we would not normally be exposed to.

In that cultural and literary landscape, Firelight, written by Melbourne-based Kalkadoon writer John Morrissey, is an exemplary collection of Indigenous literary speculative fiction. It engages with both a sense of wonderment and our innate capacity for compassion, wonderful and abstracted at turns, often simultaneously. Literary spec-fic is a genre to which Aboriginal people seem well suited, for a number of reasons; one of them is that Aboriginal literature is constantly and instinctively engaged with the fantastical. Morrissey’s stories, those of a new writer stretching his mind and experimenting with form, demonstrate that perfectly.