The Forrests as science fiction

Abstract

This article positions New Zealand author Emily Perkins’ celebrated novel The Forrests (2012) as an example of science fiction, reading it against the grain of critical reception, developed by Patrick Evans especially, that locates Perkins in globalizing trends in New Zealand literature. Instead, this article suggests that The Forrests’ science fictional qualities are connected to very particularly New Zealand and postcolonial concerns, and that Perkins’ development of an alternative future in her fiction serves ethical and political ends. Drawing on the work of Seo-Young Chu, I consider the ways in which this text’s qualities as science fiction relate to its status as a postcolonial novel.

Emily Perkins’ The Forrests (2012), a novel tracing one migrant family’s fortunes and alienations as they settle in New Zealand in the period between the end of the colonial (and its associated “Commonwealth literature”) and into the moment of the “postcolonial”, begins with an image of dislocation, one drawing readerly attention to the complexities of representation itself:

[t]heir father balanced behind the movie camera, shouting directions as he walked backwards and forwards in front of them. He handled the Kodak, their most valuable possession, as though it were an undulating live animal, a ferret or a snake, and it was leading him. ¹

The novel proceeds in this fashion, time rushing “backwards and forwards” in chapters that proceed via indirections, gaps, stray details, memories. Perkins’ is an impressionistic art, following in the line of a certain Antipodean modernism. Like Mansfield, “indifference is really foreign” to her “nature” (Mansfield, 1987: 5) as a writer, and The Forrests proceeds not so much along lines of narrative clarity but rather according to moments of intensity. Its hinges are a disastrous meeting with potential in-laws at a Chinese restaurant; half-drunken martial confessions; a very ordinary sort of tragic death; the awkwardness of funerals, all rendered through a prose particularly concerned with registering sensation, smell, stray detail. The Forrests travel to New Zealand as a family from the United States in the late 1960s, and the novel traces the lives of the siblings — focalized primarily, but not exclusively, through Dorothy, the second youngest daughter, who makes her way from hopeful and rebellious teenager to agoraphobic, lonely and alcoholic middle-aged mother, pursued always by an elusive and never-properly-requited love for Daniel, a family friend who has become almost part of the family. The novel is a collection of set pieces and well nigh stand-alone short story-length chapters taking up the family’s narrative with gaps and missing details in between them. It is a family-centred work, with the siblings’ emotional connections and estrangements, offering an imaginative centre around which other material — social, political, historical — is ordered and organized.

Is this, then, a mere New Zealand variation on the globalized middle-class novel of manners, those forgettable complacencies of divorce and dinner parties Iain Banks dismissed as “Hampstead novels”? Perkins was, some time ago now, and notoriously, selected as a star exhibit of what Patrick Evans called the “spectacular babies” produced by “the globalisation of New Zealand fiction”. “The rise of the young female writer” was, for Evans, “a commonplace of contemporary publishing wherever it occurs” (2000: 96) and Perkins, in her success, proved herself both a copy and easily copied, part of the “publishing industry’s contribution to the Baudrillardian hyperreal […] [as] commodification fractalises authors, turning one into a simulacrum of another” (2000: 97). The spectacular baby — “preferably female and attractive” (2000: 98) — joins the production line of London publishing and marketing slickness, their works so many interchangeable stories of globalized middle-class life across the “smooth space across which subjectivities glide without substantial resistance or conflict” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 198). Evans found these lines convincing enough that he would, in The Long Forgetting (2007), re-use them, presumably finding in Perkins’ two other novels from the 2000s nothing to alter his critical view. His argument is more complex than this précis suggests, and Evans combines unease at a certain placelessness in contemporary fiction — its interchangeable locations — with its commercial and creative-writing-school development. Fiction’s location, in terms of geography and story, and the location of fiction — its place in the social conversation, in politics, in culture — are, for Evans, linked, and Perkins’ treatment of these two types of place in this novel and elsewhere takes up this concern. Ursula Le Guin, reviewing The Forrests for The Guardian, read it in terms remarkably similar to Evans’ earlier framing of Perkins’ work more generally; the novel had, for Le Guin, a “generic suburban setting” in which “History is entirely outside the frame: only social fads and brand names locate the era” (2012: n.p.).

Social fads proliferate through the narrative discourse, to be sure, with the question “why Marc Bolan had to die” (40) and the arrival of the iPod (161) acting as precise temporal markers for readers tracing the Forrests’ story from the late 1960s onwards. Shades of Briony Tallis’ “pointillist approach to verisimilitude” (McEwan, 2001: 359), and its attendant dangers! There is nothing generic in this setting, however, and the work of local reconstruction this narrative style forces on the reader pushes History itself, and a very particularly postcolonial confrontation with the representation of History, to the centre of the novel’s ambitions and aims. This text is not a mere symptom of the “globalisation of New Zealand fiction”, and neither is it a record of middle-class anomie across consumerism’s smooth spaces. Rather, the journey represented, “from oh my god the hub of the world, New York City, to Westmere, Auckland, New Zealand” (4) narrates and makes the process of globalization itself graspable and available for representation. A novel can function as both a document of a particular process and its critique: The Forrests is both “about” and itself a product of globalization, in that it tracks the movements of peoples and commodity culture from the United States to the world and that world’s further standardization in late capitalist consumer culture. Reviewers, in Britain and New Zealand, made much of the book’s modernist inheritance, its concentration on “these separate moments of being” in the line of Woolf (2002: 84) and the demands of reconstruction that places on readers, as so many constituent events happen without representation or in asides and glancing phrases. This initial experience of reading, disorienting as the text “swam and blurred” (115) at crucial points, matters, certainly; equally important for criticism, however, is the precise chronology the text allows a reader to construct from these asides. The Forrests move to New Zealand in 1967 (4), with the eldest child, Michael, being born in 1956 and Dorothy, through whom most of the novel is focalized, in 1960; Dorothy is pregnant with her daughter Grace in 1985 (65). A gesture towards “the new Sky Tower” on the Auckland skyline during Evelyn’s time in hospital dates her accident to 1997 (140), and so on. The Forrests’ narrative method may involve “spots of time”; its story, however, is a wider and more capacious matter.

These carefully placed temporal markers are crucial for the argument in what follows. The Forrests’ great emotional and aesthetic power comes from its careful representation of the quotidian, with ordinary people and ordinary lives, with “[t]he kitchen with the paint samples brushed on the walls, Donald in his bouncer on the table” (179) at its heart, certainly, but these details cannot be given their full aesthetic weighting if washed with that great sodden critical sponge “realism”, and its associated debates. This novel is, rather, I argue in what follows, a text that must be read as science fiction, and more specifically as an example of what Brian Stapleford’s Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature (2004: 125) and the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, 2007: 70) define as “future history”, a narrative of a history yet to happen. Beginning in medias res, and in a 1960s recognizable as our agreed historical past to the contemporary reader, The Forrests travels, by indirections, to future history, to an Auckland blighted by untrammelled neoliberal deregulation, generalized poverty, restored contact with nuclear-powered vessels and uncertain social change. The novel’s ancestors are future histories such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), in which the Axis powers have won the Second World War. Dick’s narrative style is scrupulously “realist” and his details, for the most part, recognizable from his then-contemporary Californian moment; what estranges with “future history” is the gathering sense, in the process of reading, that the coordinates of our present have been shifted. This is science fiction working, to use the terms of the most influential scholar of the genre, Darko Suvin, as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (1979/2005: 24). “SF sees the norms of any age”, Suvin argues, “including emphatically its own, as unique, changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view” (1979/2005: 26; emphasis in original). The Forrests’ dystopian future-Auckland arrives, in the process of reading, in snatches and hints, and must be reconstructed by the reader as she loses confidence in the text’s presentation as a work on the contemporary situation. It is thus estranging and, in its tracing of a future from elements of this present, cognitive in its drawing present dilemmas the better into view.

“Another nuke ship out there” (279) in the harbour, a detail the reader catches only as an aside late in the novel, connects Perkins’ science-fictional aesthetics with The Forrests’ political power. Reading The Forrests as science fiction offers generic tools for decoding these local and postcolonial politics. Three words — “another nuke ship” — carry, in the New Zealand setting, considerable dystopian political weight and demand what the narratologists call over-reading. The nuclear-free legislation of 1987, currently supported by all major political parties in New Zealand and acclaimed in Parliament as “iconic” (McCully, 2007) by both National and Labour speakers on its twentieth anniversary, is, more than any other piece of legislation or social marker, a sign of settled and widely shared social values and political consensus (on which, see Leadbeater, 2013). For this to have changed, and to be just “another” detail in a harbour-side view, implies behind it widespread social and political transformation, and transformation for the worse. The Forrests’ future history contains an active dystopian element, and it is this — more than the clichéd tropes of space travel or aliens those unfamiliar with the genre expect from its practitioners — that marks the novel as Science Fiction. ²

These are details from our own present, with the science-fictional twist that this is the present treated as an historical problem, and they are details of a particular kind. Postcolonial literature and criticism, and the “polycentric devolution” and “reticulated system” (Ross, 2004: 296) of reception and production it involves, with “centre” and “periphery” re-thought or refused as cultural terms, has taught us all to read detail differently. Whereas Le Guin sees nothing but a “generic suburban setting” (2012: n.p.), a New Zealand reader will find in “the burned knife by the stove top” (228) an obvious reference to local cannabis use habits and “spotting” (“hot knifing” in United Kingdom English), the method of the serious smoker. Michael Forrest, Dorothy’s older brother, is, by this stage in the novel, mentally unwell, unemployed, living alone, despairing: this simple detail of a burned knife evokes not just location but class location as well, his place at the outer of Auckland’s social world. Dorothy’s father moves from the United States as a trust fund child, for “reasons to do, she later figured, with lack of success back home, a paucity of funds, an excess of entitlement” (4). The family’s encounters in New Zealand, where, “Dot thought her father said, ‘At least we live in a cloud-less society’” (4) allow Perkins to map out the end of a particular sort of “cloudlessness”, with the onset of neoliberalism locally, and the fractured relations of globalization — represented via the Forrest family’s fractured existence in both the United States and New Zealand — making class and class relations visible. The problems of money, of work, of employment “in what everyone had taken to calling ‘these times’” (217) come to dominate the text, transforming material that seem to be about erotic and personal relationships into investigations of social relationship and class struggle:

something had happened to money; not just theirs, other people’s too, even those like them without investments. There was less of it. Andrew was made redundant and the teacher’s union lost a pay dispute. The kids needed help with student loans. Petrol. Food. The cost of moving house. (240)

The global financial crisis, and our newly acknowledged awareness in the era of Greece and global austerity, never wholly repressed before, of capitalism’s instability and danger even within the global north, makes its presence felt in these sentences: whatever the last decade’s debates around globalization, this more anxious mood links The Forrests to contemporary literature more generally, from John Lanchester in fiction to Thomas Piketty in economics. After so many clear temporal markers, and with another the following page — with Andrew approaching “unemployment in his mid-fifties as a self-improvement project” (240–1) — what does this “something”, and its attendant vagueness, signify? When are “these times” (217)? The older Dorothy got, the narrator tells us, “the further away they moved the retirement age” (299), the careful dating cues of the novel’s first half giving way to comparative terms offering nothing to be compared with. An early scene at a 1970s commune run by “wimmin” (22) is represented with a similar temporal uncertainty: “days passed free of lessons and duties. Time belonged to the sunlight, and the Forrests’ stay might have been a week or several months” (12). Perkins’ prose shifts from a careful timelessness and imprecision — as in several passages on motherhood and its labour, “here in the constant turn of the washing-machine drum, the bottles forever sterilising on the stovetop” (93) or Dorothy “absorbed in the dense volume of things to do in her day” (137) — and nuggets of temporal detail, the release of a pop song, the death of a pop star, a mention of “the new anti-nuclear policy” (67). What to do with these shifts?

The shock of The Forrests, and its great aesthetic innovation, comes only in its last third, when the reader is forced into a realization that this text, packaged in its paratexts and marketing as a contemporary novel located somewhere between “literary” and “popular” fiction, transforms, in its later sections, into a narrative of the future. Its setting becomes the future, a world in which New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy has been overturned (“[s]o I hear there’s another nuke ship out there”, he said, nodding in the direction of the invisible harbour”; 242) and Dorothy and Andrew grow old in an Auckland transformed by some sort of economic crisis or collapse during the 2010s, “these times” taking on a greater significance for the reader once it becomes clear that these are future times, the representation of a world yet to come. Dorothy’s life — and thus the novel’s focus for its first two-thirds — follows the “accelerated culture” (Coupland, 1991) of Generation X as we know it from our own experience of contemporary life and recent history. The “twisting, claret undercurrent” (104) of Evelyn’s dissatisfaction and married life; quiet grief on a 49th birthday when “it was easier to admit these things than pretend the ache did not exist” (222); a reader can easily enough find disappointments in their own life to match and parallel these fictions. The hippie commune of the first section is a familiar enough cultural signpost. Harder to know, then, what to do with its reappearance at the novel’s end: “[t]he commune had expanded from the few prefabs and A-frames it consisted of over fifty years ago. Dorothy didn’t remember the way it looked; nothing would be exactly the same except the stern rocks, covered in lichen” (297). Over 50 years ago: with the first visit by the Forrest children to the commune in 1970 (11), and Dorothy’s move to New Zealand occurring when she was seven (8), this detail could date the novel in the 2010s. A few pages earlier, however, Dorothy’s age has been revealed, indirectly, as 64 (“we should do something for your sixty-fifth”; 289), making this part of the novel set in 2024/2025. This is the method of science fiction and future history; from the vantage point of 2025 we are given the chance to see the present as history. Part of the readerly pleasure offered by The Forrests comes from making sense of this temporal dislocation. The dating occurs almost entirely in asides and easily under-read reported speech, and what obvious indications of time could be used are represented in ways that are too general for obvious “historical” treatment. An (abandoned) move into political campaigning by Evelyn in what must be the 1996 general election is stripped of any local detail, with her potential employer described only as “the candidate” (116), both by the narrator and by characters in the storyworld. In the same chapter, however, a passage in free indirect discourse allows the reader to connect this material with earlier episodes temporally: “What would Daniel be like now, nearly ten years on, how much had he changed? Would the decade that had made her a woman have made him a man?” (122; emphasis added) J. M. Coetzee describes this experience of “time bunching and becoming dense at points of significant action in the story, or thinning out and skipping or glancing through nonsignificant periods of clock time or calendar time” as perhaps “at the heart of narrative pleasure” as a narrator makes “time bend and buckle” (1992: 203–4). Perkins’ mastery of these techniques offers pleasures enough; in addition, the way the future seeps into narrative consciousness, or re-adjusts our sense of the narrative present until the question of temporality becomes unsettled and thus only gradually visible, adds a social and political dimension to the novel’s science fiction. The future Auckland of The Forrests is changed, and yet changed uncertainly: politics is different, with nuclear ships in the harbour; people are poorer; the social order itself is uncertain:

“So I hear there’s another nuke ship out there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the invisible harbour. A bird purred from the bushes by the roadside.

“Yeah, apparently junk. It’s circling while they find a place to process it. Debt cancellation.” She was repeating what stood in for news, what presented itself as news these days although nobody trusted the source. Maybe debt would be cancelled; maybe it wouldn’t.

“I thought it was a Chinese deal.”

“Could be. Law firms, tax havens, whatever.” Knowledge had been replaced by phrases that induced a vague paranoia. Like everyone they knew, Dot and Andrew had stopped looking out into the frames of the world. They crossed the road to dodge a couple of beige dogs that were snarling and chewing at each other’s necks. (279)

The frames of the world have changed, marked as much by the incongruity of a “purring” bird as by the topic of conversation, and Auckland is altered other ways: Dorothy, in old age, lives in a block of flats (in a life where “everything looked soft, grey, old”; 311) maintained by a caretaker called “Diego” (311). A Spanish name, common enough in US settings today, is still unusual in New Zealand; The Forrests’ future hints at migration patterns and metropolitan redesign following full globalization in this dystopian Auckland of debt cancellation, worldwide recession and, through the figure of the teachers’ union that “lost a pay dispute” (240), an atomized and defeated working class. Knowledge itself — a shared sense of the facts of the world, of process — has been, in this dystopian vision, called into question; eyes are averted from the “frames of the world”, “vague paranoia” replaces contestation and debate. Perkins’ success here is to give us a dystopia estranging enough to frighten and yet familiar enough – in its “asphalt blur” (282) — to be comprehensible with today’s codes and through today’s forms of thought. Globalized thought, Fredric Jameson suggests, is caught in “ceaseless alternation between Identity and Difference” through a “blocked mechanism, whereby in our episteme these categories fail to develop, fail to transform themselves by way of their own interaction” as we remain stuck by

the absence of any sense of an immediate future and of imaginable change […] for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional stages. (1994: 70–1)

The choice here is between the Universal Mall, the Airport Transit Lounge, and Apocalypse, with nothing in between. If Pico Iyer chose jet lag and shopping malls as the experience and place for the search for a “global soul” (2001), Fight Club (1999) could resolve with nothing but apocalypse and our images of the global warming-induced end of the world, from The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to 2012 (2009), are without any mediating links in the representational chain connecting them to present problems. The Forrests bypasses all of this: its details are local and specific; the “vague paranoia” of its future history is stitched together with information from our own present; the “junk” of dystopic Auckland refers back to political choices in our present day.

If, as Peter Brooks argued some years ago now, we read “in anticipation of retrospection”, using this as the “chief tool in making sense of narrative” (1992: 23) then the stimulation of The Forrests is to do with its frustration of this anticipation and its necessary ordering. What read, for most of the narrative discourse, as the details of the life of a contemporary turns out to be preparatory material for an investigation of a dystopian future; nothing in the novel, and nothing in its publishing context, prepares the reader for this re-organization of perspective and material. The first two-thirds of The Forrests take us to our present moment in the “real world” so-called; the next third, in its dystopian Auckland, produces “generic discontinuities”, as its details require reading according to quite different generic codes from what has gone before. This is an estrangement, in Jameson’s terms, “of our culture and institutions — a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness, their profound dependency on the accident’s of man’s [sic] historical adventure” (2005: 255). Perkins attention to details in both their “historicity” and their “arbitrariness” — the spotting knife on the kitchen table, sunlight as it “badoinged off the storefronts’ painted glass” (293) — produces this shocked renewal of vision, as present-day Auckland, re-read in retrospection as a preparation for the Auckland of the global financial collapse and “debt cancellation” (279), comes, with renewed force, into focus.

This is the case for reading The Forrests as science fiction. Its representational raw material is the future; its tasks are speculative; its frames “cognitively estranging”. Perkins’ poetics follow what Joanna Russ elaborates as the “subjunctivity of science fiction”: “science fiction hasn’t happened” (1995: 22; emphasis in original). The Forrests draws readers’ attentions to frames and framing: the movie camera and its “sequence” (1) with which the novel begins, Daniel’s way of laughing “away his view of the world as a way of holding onto it” (340) with which it ends, all the photo albums, an “aluminium window frame” (133) in a hospital family room or a “trick of perspective” rendered by a child in front of a frame in between. These motifs to do with vision and perspective play with and announce the text’s wider concern with historical framing: “a reader judges the science-fictional-ness of what happens”, Russ argues, “by what he himself knows of the actual world; that is, the reader carries his frame with him” (1995: 21). The reader, in The Forrests, must operate according to the science fiction rules Russ assigns to the “Dislocated Reader”:

an even commoner pattern is The Dislocated Reader — that is, the story begins as if it were a naturalistic story, and the reader must find his own way through the strange world; to the characters in the story, of course, it’s not a strange world at all. (1995: 21; emphasis in original)

Although it has not, to my knowledge, been described in these terms by reviewers or critics to date, Perkins’ combination of characters for whom the strange world is not strange, with sufficiently — and cumulatively — estranging referents for readers, produces a science fictional text. The way the futurity of the novel’s final third becomes clear only fitfully and in fragments prompts the reader to negotiate this material’s meanings, and to reassess earlier descriptions of what had been taken for a “realistic” or uncomplicated present in knowing retrospection. The Forrests encourages, then, a particular attitude of both doubt and belief. “One does not suspend one’s disbelief in reading science fiction”, Russ maintains; “the suspension of disbelief (complex to begin with, as it is with satire) fluctuates constantly. That is, the relationship with actuality — what [Samuel] Delany would call the subjunctivity of the story — fluctuates constantly” (1995: 21).

This is, to my knowledge, the first scholarly article on The Forrests, and, without a critical context in which to intervene or argue against, this case for Perkins as a writer of science fiction may seem wilfully eccentric. ³ My use of the term science fiction draws on ideas proposed by Seo-Young Chu, in her innovative extension and redeployment of the field of science fiction studies through her stimulating book Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science Fiction Theory of Representation (2010). In this book, Chu proposes a broader and more generous understanding of SF than most theorists of genre have allowed:

All representation is to some degree science-fictional, because all reality is to some degree cognitively estranging. What most people call “realism” […] is actually a “weak” or low-intensity version of science fiction, one that requires relatively little energy to accomplish its representational task […] Conversely, what most people call “science fiction” is actually a high-intensity variety of realism, one that requires astronomical levels of energy to accomplish its representational tasks insofar as its referents (i.e. cyberspace) elaborately defy straightforward representation. (2010: 7)

What are Perkins’ referents? Globalization, for one thing, and the changes involved in the transfer of an American domestic life into a New Zealand social formation. “Nothing, not even vinegar, not even turpentine, would shift the chewing gum from where it stuck all through [Dorothy’s] long blonde new-girl American hair” (5) after her first day at school. By the novel’s end Auckland might as well be Los Angeles. The struggles of the individual subject to process this social transformation and the difficulties of making sense of this past — and to locate themselves in the shifts from the “deserted streets” (5) of late Welfare State New Zealand through to the recession of the 1990s and into the dystopian era of the 2020s — is rendered by the characters themselves in the language of science fiction:

“Well. That’s lovely. Anyway, I envy you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Living somewhere else. I hate being this age. I’d like to turn back on the past with a flame-thrower. One of those hoses that sprays fire. But I bet you don’t even feel it, the weight, dragging around behind you. I mean you’re American now, and your life — is it like our childhood was another planet?” (144)

Looking back at the old family home is “visiting Mars” (145). Ruth, who returned to the United States with her parents while Evelyn and Dorothy, older, stayed in New Zealand, returns culturally estranged, unrecognizable:

“You’re my family.” Dot leaned her head back into the sofa seat and looked at Evelyn’s upside-down face. “I mean, thank god we’ve got each other. I love Ruth, but she’s from out space.”

“I feel like the one who’s a Martian. Changed.”

Dorothy squeezed the hand that Evelyn had rested by her shoulder. “We all are.” (148)

Chu calls globalization “an elusive referent”, but one not “altogether insusceptible to representation” (2010: 87); “the jet-lag-induced hallucinatory sensation of inhabiting multiple localities at the same time” (2010: 97) is explored in The Forrests both through relocation, travel to the United States and back, and in the absent figure of Daniel, world-traveller and elusive object of desire, set on some kind of permanent OE (overseas experience) and returning with “the terrifying agelessness of the constant traveller” (242).

More significant still, for readers of this journal and critics of postcolonial literature more generally, is Perkins’ other “elusive referent”: History itself, and the gaps and evasions that make up settler–colonial accounts of its reach and relevance. The novel’s representation of the future rearranges the significance of those events from our own (non-science fictional) past and gives them, in the alternate reality of The Forrests, a different charge and significance. Absences, then — the absence of any sense of the colonial heritage or a postcolonial future in general, and of Māori as a people in particular — transform from a simple lack or symptom of authorial limitation into a sign of the dystopian future: that past, the past postcolonial thought struggles to preserve and transform has, in this universe, been erased. The word Māori appears nowhere in the text. “Every past is reborn in the present-becoming-past,” Daniel Bensaïd writes, “every present fades in the future-becoming-present. In the constellation of eras and events, the present indefinitely appeals to another present, in a discontinuous interplay of echoes and resonances” (2002: 86). Memory, cultural memory as much as personal, requires selection, a process of forgetting, to function. The retrospective menace The Forrests’ future world suggests is around what has been forgotten and suppressed. Memory needs management, ordering, narrative, as Evelyn reflects in the novel. The narrative filters her thoughts as these:

Obsessing was too strong a word. What this was, was trying to integrate. Either integration or a burn-off. You made a decision and everything followed from that, and the older you got the more impossible it was to see through the Vaseline lens of time back into the past, your alternative lives, the ones you never now would lead. (127)

Her thoughts here are on personal lost choices, but the novel’s end directs our attention to similar social impossibilities. Postcolonial fiction and its criticism has, for the most part, directed its attention back to reimagined pasts, and the “pleasure afforded” by what Linda Hardy calls “natural occupancy” is given, for the non-indigenous reader, at any rate, by the way imagined alternate histories “allow the heirs of a settler society to imagine our unhistorical origin as the (possibility of the) making of a settlement without a colony” (1995: 214). New Zealand culture is, in Alex Calder’s neat phrase, “unsettled about settlement”:

Whether it is possible to bring present and past, new and old, modern and traditional into some kind of narrative order is not only an historiographical question, it is also a political one, for the very possibility of accommodation between the “old” world of the Maori and the “new” world of the colonisers is at stake. (2011: 71)

Perkins’ science fiction, in contrast, historicizes the present by way of the future: there is no Māori dimension at all to the Auckland of the debt crisis and, from this view, Māori absence from the present-become-past (our world rendered as science fiction) acts as a warning. Race as a point of discussion or the representation of racial difference appear hardly at all in the novel’s future sections: in Diego’s name, in Dorothy’s abjection, and in commodified form. Whiteness, and the body itself, becomes, for Dorothy, abjection: “the roll of stomach below the bra, the protruding curve of oatmeal flesh that looked, to Dorothy, as though it belonged to somebody else” (291). Her grandchild, auditioning to be in a television commercial, is rejected because “they cast the parents as white” (292). Nothing further is made of her own ethnicity or her father’s role. This is not the liberal utopia of the “post-racial” future, but rather a vision of a world in which the confrontations demanded by postcolonial claims for recognition never happened. It is an Auckland that passed from Empire to neo-colony without pause.

“Begin anywhere”: The Forrests’ science-fictional ambitions are signalled by the novel’s epigraph, taken from John Cage’s “Composition as Process”: “[t]he early works have beginnings, middles, and endings. The later ones do not. They begin anywhere, last any length of time, and involve more or fewer instruments and players” (1961: 31). Globalized Auckland — with its “cargo barges lying like waiting crickets in a still harbour” (338) — exists without purpose, its mapping through The Forrests brought to an end (with Dorothy’s death) and yet denied anything like narrative closure; this dystopia, this future, persists, other possible futures lasting “any length of time”, disconnected from the usual tidying processes of the realist novel.

This is an intensely sad novel, one sensitive to the “sheer fucking hopelessness of it all” (295), its future world’s sufferings — debt, climate change, loneliness, racial injustice — predictable and all-too-imaginable. Perkins’ early short fiction in Not Her Real Name (1996) represented worlds of casualized labour and fragmented neoliberal lives, taking part in what Mark McGurl calls “lower-middle class modernism”, short stories “preoccupied more than anything else with economic and other forms of insecurity and cultural anomie” (2009: 32), registering in minimalist form an aimlessness that works as “barely disguised symbolic class warfare” (2009: 297). Its characters were “bulgy in the wrong places” distracted, caught in cycles of appetite and consumption and atomised self-scrutiny of “clumsy fat hands” (Perkins, 1996: 97) and meaningless work. The Forrests takes this sadness, this ressentiment from the era of neoliberalism, and, in the form of science fiction, offers it wider, more ambitious historical and representational possibilities. This is the globalized era stripped of its past; a future stripped of its futurity, its promise of some social transformation in our own era and reduced to a host of atomized, isolated individual experiences and social loss. New Zealand, in one possible future, becomes the endless globalized present, human communication an alien impossibility:

A young man in a blue store jacket passed her carrying a box of long-life milk cartons, and Dot followed him to the shelf where he was stacking them. He wore a nametag but the lettering was too small for Dot to read. She asked him where she might find the baking soda but he seemed unable to understand, or perhaps to hear her. There was nothing in his ears. She patted his arm and he turned to face her, and she asked him again, and he leaned in, but she may as well have been speaking Martian. (312)

Martians, again: the novel’s self-conscious allusions to its own science fictionality occur at the moments it documents what is most insistently familiar, most eerily recognizable in our own world, from supermarket shelf to family home. I find this extremely moving, not least for the ways in which the prose’s lyrical qualities assert, against the trajectory of that which it represents, the “physical bliss”, to take the novel’s other epigraph, “because one is experiencing at source the unmistakable good fortune of material existence” (Lispector, 1992: 122). This is also, in a combination I know nowhere else in contemporary fiction, a fusion of the super-historical biological orders of life’s end — a representation of death in its inevitability — and a rendering, through the “cognitive estrangement” of science fiction of a possible future very much avoidable, very much of our own time, part of the combination of possibilities produced by the history active now, in the world of the reader’s own life.

The Forrests’ science fictional achievements, then, its generic discontinuities, act as comfort and spur, investigation and warning. “The sheer fucking hopelessness of it all” (279) lies before us.