This chapter explores the rise of an allegorical mode of imagining in twenty-first-century fiction by Australian women. Analysing a mode of literature associated with universality, ahistoricism and abstraction in such a nationalist, historical and gendered context might appear a contradictory enterprise. However, it is one necessitated by the doubleness of allegory itself, which is marked by an enigmatic and therefore productive relationship between the timeless and historical, the literal and figurative, the aesthetic and material. This chapter examines a range of novels written by Australian women and published in the twenty-first century, focusing on Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace (2017), and Carmel Bird’s Field of Poppies (2019). Existing in the liminal space between fantasy and realism, the allegories surveyed here intersect with various genres, such as the speculative, magical realism and Indigenous futurism, and often veer into the dystopian. They provide an uncanny and defamiliarising model for drawing attention to contemporary national problems related to gender, the postcolonial, asylum seekers and the Anthropocene.

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.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a still-emerging but broad and diverse category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings. This chapter offers an inclusive definition of this increasingly urgent genre, aiming to capture what's currently being published and to suggest other possibilities available to future cli-fi writers. Additionally, it sets out to expand the history of the genre, drawing on the work of Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra before offering a taxonomy of cli-fi's various contemporary forms, with examples from literary fiction, hard and soft sci-fi, eco-fabulism, afrofuturism, solarpunk, indigenous futurism, uncivilized writing, and other related subgenres

The intellectual territory of “apocalypse in American literature and culture” rightfully belongs to indigenous peoples as a result of their historical experiences of what historian Gerald Horne has recently called “the apocalypse of settler colonialism.” Indigenous speculative fiction occupies an epistemically privileged standpoint for historicizing and theorizing the planetary apocalypse that we all (and many nonhuman others besides) increasingly face in the form of biospheric deterioration—a deterioration so profound that it registers in the geologic record, prompting the formulation of a new epoch, the Anthropocene. This “end of the world” follows directly from the rapacious practices of dispossession and accumulation that ended indigenous worlds. This essay decolonizes the Anthropocene by coining the term Americocene to pinpoint a specific process of settler apotheosis as a key cause of our planetary plight. The designation Americocene traces the environmental degradation inscribed in the geologic record to the eschatological inscription of settler life into indigenous lands. Now more of us can see what indigenous peoples have always been in a position to see—namely, that the systems of production and social reproduction variously written into the earth by settler apotheosis promise not the advent of the millennium but the protraction of apocalypse.