This chapter starts by locating Indigenous Australian science fiction, increasingly described as ‘Indigenous futurism’, within the broader framework of Australian sf and Indigenous Australian literature. Indigenous sf has had to contend with reader expectations of Indigenous writing, largely regarded by publishers, booksellers and critics as a niche market, thereby consigned within a very narrow box. Compounding this is the belief that some sf is frivolous, and thus inadequate to address Indigenous affairs. The following section traces the naissance of Indigenous sf in the writing of Sam Watson, Eric Willmot and Archie Weller. The aim is to demonstrate how these works revised mainstream sf by ‘Indigenising’ its tropes, and how the reception of these works has been changing from the 1990s onwards. The third section focuses on twenty-first-century Indigenous sf with Indigenous women authors taking over the global Indigenous sf literary scene. These women authors question traditional paradigms by fusing Indigenous systems of knowledge with the latest scientific thought. This discussion is exemplified by Alexis Wright’s, Claire G. Coleman’s and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s works. The final section demonstrates that Indigenous novelistic futurism has also been augmented by recent developments in Indigenous sci-fi television series and graphic novels.

This chapter considers Alexis Wright’s trajectory as a writer from Grog War (1997) to The Swan Book (2013), arguing that her body of work presents a consistent vision that is “at once Aboriginal and Australian, modern and ancient, local and yet outward-looking.” It pays special attention to the notion of “all times,” the relation between form and politics, and how imaginative sovereignty underpins Wright’s work.

This chapter examines the transnational Australian novel from a different perspective, focusing on First Nations writing. Whereas most visions of the global privilege literary institutions whose power stems from existing political and global inequalities, First Nations writing fosters a transnationalism of resistance, solidarity, and fungibility. It considers Alexis Wrights novels in translation, and writers engaged in collaborative projects.

This chapter argues that the geographical heterodoxy of Pacific surrealism might be understood as a correlative to surrealism’s transgressive impulse, extending logics of inversion across oceanic space. It discusses how irregular forms of mapping were commensurate with surrealism’s aesthetics of defamiliarization. More specifically, the chapter discusses representations of Pacific iconography in visual artists (Man Ray, Brassaï), visits to Pacific regions by European surrealists (Paul Eluard, Jacques Viol) and the role played by surrealism in theorizations of ethnography (Claude Lévi-Strauss). It also analyzes the ways in which Pacific space was understood by theorists of surrealism such as Bernard Smith and James Clifford, while addressing the complicated political situation of surrealism in mid-twentieth-century Japan. The chapter subsequently tracks more recent manifestations of surrealism in Pacific writers and artists such as Aloï Piloko, Shane Cotton, Len Lye and Alexis Wright, commenting on connections with cultures of indigeneity and ways in which these artists integrate styles of hybridity.