Keeping the Meter Running

In the Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine Aurealis, 20/21, April 1998 a special double issue speculated on the possible futures of an Australian republic. SF is, afterall, the 'literature of ideas'. Below is an extract from Geoffrey maloney's 'Keeping the Meter Running'.

On the morning of the 40th anniversary of the People's Democratic Revolution Jerzhi Kapuscinski woke up feeling like a piece of beef jerky that had been left out in the sun for far too long. He had drunk himself into a stupor at the Hari Krishna Club the night before, celebrating the ned of the Revolutionary year with his colleagues from the Bureau of State Security ...

Kelly Country - an Australian future?

What if Ned Kelly escaped police capture in 1880 and led a successful Irish-Australian rebellion against British authority? A. Bertram Chandler’s novel Kelly Country (1984) explores an alternate history in which the bush ranger Ned Kelly was not captured and hanged but led a successful revolution, ultimately becoming the president of an Australian republic, which degenerated into a hereditary dictatorship with the result that Australia becomes a world power.

The books synopsis centres around a mental time traveller who organises Kelly's escape. In the nineteenth century, Ned Kelly (and friends) lead a revolution against corrupt colonial government in order to establish a republic. They use various technologies available at the time (but not all widely used), including a precursor to airships, rail and gatling guns. A number of other historical figures, events and technologies affect the story. This book fits into the SF genre of Steampunk.

The story shifts between the nineteenth century and modern times. When the time traveller wakes up the world has changed with Australia rather than the United States embroiled in the Vietnam War. All because Curnow never stopped the train (he ended up getting his brains bashed in instead)! The Australia has now shifted to a future where "The Kelly" is a hereditary dictator.

Arthur Bertram Chandler (28 March 1912–6 June 1984) was an Australian science fiction author. Born in Aldershot, England, he was a merchant marine officer, sailing the world in everything from tramp steamers to troopships. Chandler emigrated to Australia in 1956 and became an Australian citizen. He commanded various ships in the Australian and New Zealand merchant navies, and was the last master of the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne as the law required that it have an officer on board while it was laid up waiting to be towed to China to be broken up. Chandler wrote over 40 novels and 200 works of short fiction. He was most well-known for his John Grimes novels and for the Rim World series, which have a distinctly naval flavour. He won Ditmar Awards for the short story The Bitter Pill (in 1971) and for three novels False Fatherland (in 1969), The Bitter Pill (in 1975), and The Big Black Mark (in 1976).

‘Kelly Country’ was originally published as a short story in Void, 3 May 1976 and received a Ditmar nomination and was the basis of the novel of the same name.

It’s a knockout

In New Statesman, 9 July 2009, Michael Hodges reports from the future on the end of hereditary monarchy in 2020 and how the British people are about to elect their first king or queen. See http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2009/07/british-king-queen-monarchy

Tonight will decide everything. Thirty million Britons – and many more millions throughout the world – are expected to watch. It is a staggering figure, a record British television audience, but these are staggering times. Hereditary monarchy has been abolished and the nation is on the edge of a momentous decision: we are about to vote for our next king or queen.

Pressure for an end to the monarchy built inexorably when Prince Charles came to the throne in 2009, refusing to allow his son to take the crown, even though the Queen had made it known it was her wish when she abdicated.

The king’s subsequent conversion to Islam unleashed a constitutional maelstrom. As a consequence, Vince Cable’s Lib-Green-Lab coalition went into the 2014 election on a joint platform of renationalising the denationalised banks and democratising the monarchy. Cable won with a huge majority, and when the Democratic Succession Act 2015 passed through parliament with ease, most of the Windsors sloped off into polo-playing obscurity.

There was some protest, but largely the country took the end of constitutional hereditary monarchy quietly. Scotland was an independent republic anyway, and although Ulster threatened, as it often does, to say “No!” and leave the remaining rump of the Union, there was never any serious prospect of the then 89-year-old Queen Mother exchanging Balmoral for Belfast. Instead, Elizabeth accepted a deal that left her in possession of several palaces – though not Buckingham Palace – and still one of the richest women in the world, knowing that to fight the will of parliament would be to encourage other, wilder, suggestions. Among the wildest were plans for Regicide, a live, pay-on-demand reality TV show, abandoned after an outraged campaign by the Daily Mail.

But live TV did win in the end: the hustings of the initial eight candidates for monarch attracted huge audiences for the BBC (though not as big, perhaps, as Regicide would have pulled in). The debates proved impassioned, and at times chaotic. George Galloway’s flamboyant candidacy, in which he promised to take the throne on behalf “of the dispossessed of the world and the countless unnamed victims of British imperialism”, attracted global attention. DJ Chris Moyles’s clownish campaign met only ridicule. Too old to catch the youth vote yet too offensive for everyone else, Moyles finished in last place in the first-round vote – a contest that set another astonishing record when 68 per cent of the electorate turned out.

The four favourites have, predictably, made it through to the last round, due to take place tomorrow after tonight’s final live debate. Now they must address the country. Charles Windsor’s Islamic dress and manner – and in particular the beard that he has grown – have made him an easy target for satirists. Yet his principled effort to recapture what he has lost has rescued much of his reputation. His address promises a mix of tradition and modernity: he will have a faith-based approach to ruling, but will be a king for all Britons.

He is followed by Joanna Lumley, who argues in the main for Buckingham Palace to be used to house asylum-seekers. Next is William Windsor, who has not spoken to his father for more than two years. Still shy, and almost completely bald, the 38-year-old ex-prince gives a halting speech that shows his dental work to good effect but carries no force apart from a reference to “strengthening the place of women in society”, when he appears to look directly at his estranged father. In so doing, he plays to his strongest card: public support for the prospect of a Queen Kate.

Then the hush comes. Charles twitches and adjusts the sleeves of his djellaba. Lumley runs a hand through her still-blonde tresses and smiles, it must be noted, regally. William simply looks resigned, knowing, as the watching millions do, that there was only ever going to be one winner. Comfortable in the knowledge that he is destined to be returned as the elected monarch of the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and stretching his palms outwards in a gesture that is at once inclusive and dominating, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair turns his eye to the camera and speaks. He is, someone observes later, going to be a pretty straight kinda king.

Australian War of Independence?

What if Henry Parkes and the other Founding Fathers had moved for full independence from the British Crown throughout the 1880s and 1890s leading to a war in 1901?

I wonder what such an Alternate History would like and how an Australian War of Independence would play out?

Australian Visions

In the Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine Aurealis, 20/21, April 1998 a special double issue speculated on the possible futures of an Australian republic. SF is, afterall, the 'literature of ideas'. Below is an extract from Michael Pryor's 'Australian Visions’.

"The door to the cockpit was flung open and a steward stumbled out, wide-eyed and pale. "The crew's all dead," he announced to the apprehensive passengers. "We're out of control and plunging into the heart of the sun." Desperately, he looked around the cabin. "I just hope to God we've got an Australian aboard ..."

The Republic of Cats

Mark Twain’s last major work, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, first appeared in 1889. Twain was no friend of monarchy, once calling it “… surely the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented by man.” In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Twain’s hatred of aristocratic privilege is played out through assailing the ideals associated with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is this mockery of the British monarchy that is at the heart of the story.

The protagonist of the story, Hank Morgan is no doubt a ferocious champion of Twain’s own anti-monarchical leanings and calls for the creation of a republic through a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed.

Hank discusses this idea with his friend Clarence, who describes his idea of a republic without privileged orders but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate. When Hank urges that kings are dangerous, Clarence replies, “then have cats”.

He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and ‘Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the Grace of God King’, would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on. “And as a rule,” said he, in his neat modern English, “the character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its monarch’s. The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we would become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we shold furnish the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no more forever … Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow-fzt-wow!”

Habits of Empire

In the Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine Aurealis, 20/21, April 1998 a special double issue speculated on the possible futures of an Australian republic. SF is, afterall, the 'literature of ideas'. Below is an extract from Sue Isle’s ‘Habits of Empire’.

"Australia had always rather admired the perceived splendour of the British Empire, so it was hardly surprising that it tool the first chance available to get one of its own …”