I know what you are thinking: What do the Australian Republic and science fiction have to do with each other?

If you class yourself as a non-SF reader, you’ll be wondering what the Australian Republic has to do with rockets, lasers and aliens. If you consider yourself an SF reader, you’ll be asking what relevance the Australian Republic has to the genre you know and love. Whatever camp you belong in, by the time you finish reading this special double issue of Aurealis, you will have your answer. Hopefully, we will create greater mutual understanding between the two camps along the way.

Why ask science fiction writers to write about the Australian Republic? The editors of Aurealis found it the most natural thing to do in the world. There has been a push within the science fiction community to refer to the genre as “speculative fiction”, since speculating is at the heart of the genre. (The abbreviation SF is used to cover both science fiction and speculative fiction.) This is exactly what the authors in this volume have done. They have speculated on the possible futures of the Australian Republic. And who better to do this in fictionalised form than the sorts of writers who choose speculative fiction as their preferred genre of writing?

And let’s not trivialise this activity. SF writers deal with possibilities. They speculate. They make the future seem real. But SF writers, of course, aren’t simply playing imaginative games when writing SF. To argue this would diminish the role of imagination and ideas in human endeavour. Quite the reverse is true. The idea, and the ability to come up with the idea, is crucial to any development and change in life. You can’t achieve anything unless you imagine it first. Before every great invention and before every great journey is the idea. Without ideas and imagination, we are all trapped in the past. Science fiction has always pointed the way forward. SF is, afterall, the “literature of ideas”.

Another question you will be asking is, “Why the title Vend-A-Nation?” This anthology has had a rather complex genesis. The idea of asking writers to produce stories set in an Australian Republic came a number of years ago. I had just finished an earlier version of the story “In Theory” which appears in this issue, and I asked myself the question, “How many stories have been set in an Australian Republic?” I made no self-conscious decision in that story about the political setting. I, like most other Australians, simply assumed that in the not too distant future, Australia would change its government from the present system to one which had an Australian rather than a British monarch as its head of state. It was no great revelation, but it did have implications for my story. Like it or not, politics has a wide-reaching influence on both the material and psychological being of a country.

The thought then occurred to me: if the majority of Australians have been saying for at least the last twenty years that an Australian Republic is inevitable (which they have), has this been reflected in the SF stories which have been written? I couldn’t think of any Republic-based stories off the top of my head. Why would this be? Have all the Australian SF writers not really thought about the issue? Do they consider it irrelevant? But even if it is irrelevant to what the author considers the essential part of the story, surely most of the stories set in an Australian future would have a Republic as the backdrop?

The idea lay dormant for a while until Shaun Tan submitted the painting which appears on the cover of this issue for our consideration. It was a striking image. A man standing at a vending machine with his options being a series of facets of Australian culture. Its title was “Vend-A-Nation”. It struck a real chord and this special double issue was born.

That was only the beginning, of course. We originally called widely for unsolicited stories set in an Australian Republic. The results were mixed and we ended up with only three publishable stories. Too many writers had gone out of their way to make the Republic itself the major feature at the expense of the other elements of good story-telling. We were stumped. Was our idea even feasible? Maybe it simply couldn’t be done.

We then decided to break our cardinal rule of not soliciting manuscripts and approached a number of established SF authors to write a story especially for this issue. This was not done lightly. We don’t solicit as a strongly held principle. We firmly believe, in keeping with the spirit of Australian egalitarianism and giving beginning writers a fair go, that all stories and all authors should be judged equally. Although we are almost on our own within the Australian SF publishing community in the upholding of this principle, we continue to believe this despite the persistent criticism we have received. We also believe that ultimately, we get the best stories as a result. But Vend-A-Nation was a special case, and we had opened it up to everyone first.

It was then that this double issue took shape.

And what an issue it’s turned out to be! I would argue that Vend-A-Nation is Australia’s most important SF anthology of short fiction to date for two reasons: it will fundamentally change the perception that Australian SF has of itself, and it will fundamentally change the perception of the genre within the wider literary community. There’s not a rocket, or laser gun or alien in sight (well… almost). These stories are all about Australia and about an issue all Australians are currently grappling with. The illusion that speculative fiction has nothing to do with “real” life and with “real” literature should be fading. Speculative fiction in Australia should now be seen as a valued part of Australian literature by those who have traditionally been both ignorant and dismissive of the genre. This volume is Australia’s Dangerous Visions. The visions are dangerous because they force every reader, whether of SF or of mainstream fiction, to reassess how they view SF.

And what futures are there for the Australian Republic?

Join me and glimpse what the future holds through the visions of those who have seen it.

Dirk Strasser