In Laura Jean McKay’s 2020 debut The Animals in That Country, a virus known as “zooflu” sweeps the world, giving humans the ability to intuit the thoughts of the nonhuman species with whom they share the planet. It won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction as well as a number of mainstream literary awards in McKay’s native Australia. With her short story collection, Gunflower, McKay reaffirms her virtuosic ability to twist consensus reality into unfamiliar shapes.
Concern for the environment, the mind-altering perspectives of other life forms and the increasing effects of the climate crisis – themes that were central to Animals – are re-examined here. Those Last Days of Summer is told from the point of view of battery chickens, whose eventual fate we as readers are all too aware of, but which the hens themselves grasp only in glimpses through a shared mythology. Territory explores the world from the perspective of a community of “piggers” – wild boar hunters who chase their quarry in beat-up buggies – while Cats at the Fire Front is about a family who breed cats for their fur, an established way of life in this particularly queasy iteration of McKay’s near future. King returns the power to the animals, as an old stag – or is he? – seeks to gain the upper hand in one last fight.
The protagonist of McKay’s debut novel was characterised above all by her hard-bitten determination to survive, and it is this same resilience we recognise in Smoko, a story about class and social deprivation set entirely in the real world, about a group of women working at a local supermarket. When the women learn that their morning cigarette break is to be abolished, Joni, who works in the deli section, organises a petition to get it reinstated. As the women unite around a common cause, they sense new possibilities for their own lives. Even management attempts to rig the outcome may not be enough to quash the nascent spirit of rebellion.
The harsh reality of working-class lives is highlighted also in Lightning Man, as a deeply stressed mother of four waits anxiously to see if her husband will be awarded a contract with a travelling circus. Conversely, Ranging reveals a world in which all husbands – all men, in fact – have inexplicably disappeared from the face of the Earth. This story, with its nods to Joanna Russ and Sandra Newman, intimates that while a world without men is no utopia, the unmistakable sense of freedom and lightness as a result of their absence is one that every woman will instinctively appreciate.
The title story could similarly be classified as feminist science fiction. Gunflower is set in the years after the 2022 overthrow of Roe v Wade, where abortion remains legal in only a handful of US states. A ship sailing under an Icelandic flag and rechristened Gunflower – “Gun, the old Norse word for war, and flower, obviously, the seed part of the plant, its reproductive organs. Birth and death” – has been repurposed as a floating abortion clinic. The Gunflower is crewed entirely by women, and the treatment they offer can only be taken when the ship is in neutral waters. Joan, a professor of law, is 44 years old and unexpectedly pregnant. She can afford to have her pregnancy terminated in a “friendly” state; instead, she opts to go aboard the Gunflower to highlight the crisis facing those less fortunate. When all communications are lost with the mainland, the crew initially believe the ship has suffered a systems failure, before fearing that they have been sabotaged. Sailing into a storm, Joan begins to see their predicament as a metaphor for her country’s toxic politics: “I thought: I’ve come so far from home to get access to my body. I thought: if this is America, there is no America. Has there ever been?”
Although Gunflower wears the narrative trappings of future dystopia, there is very little in it that is not already happening in our uncertain present. McKay has said that she began writing her debut novel in 2013 after she became infected with the chikungunya virus while travelling in Bali. How eerily prescient, then, to see Animals published during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Twenty Twenty, her take on the recent pandemic, is equally chilling, and all the more compelling through being told from the perspective of a family of Covid-deniers. Holly is a British woman married to an Australian, Dan, a homeopath and fervent anti-vaxxer. Keen to escape the city and its stringent Covid restrictions, the family make their way to a resort on the coast. Unsurprisingly, they find themselves less than welcome. As first her daughter and then her mother-in-law falls ill, Holly wilfully ignores her suspicions about a disease her husband insists does not exist. This is a peculiarly discomfiting story, which, like Those Last Days of Summer, achieves its effect through placing the reader in direct opposition to the protagonist.
An illness of a different kind is the subject of Flying Rods, which appears at first to be about a young woman in the grip of a fever. It is only in the final paragraph that we learn the true nature of her disease, and the likely fate of her irritating partner, Dean. Flying Rods is a horror story hiding in plain sight, and McKay’s use of speculative materials here as elsewhere is all the more potent for being so economical. A Sensation of Whirling and a Loss of Balance and The Two O’Clock, both off-kilter portal fantasies, are similarly skilful, and Site, in which an artist awaiting the arrival of her married lover becomes distracted by the vision of a ghost ship, is especially beguiling.
For a writer, one of the most attractive aspects of the short story is the opportunity it offers for experiment, and McKay’s deployment of language is as exciting and original as her manipulation of ideas. The stories in Gunflower are provocative, poetic, vibrantly alive to contemporary concerns. Rather than providing a handy escape route, the elements of fantasy heighten the tension, starkly illuminating the predicaments of her characters and the often gritty reality they inhabit.
I was particularly delighted by the formal risk-taking in this collection, with vignettes, tone poems and odd snippets of contemporary mythologising sitting alongside longer, more conventionally plotted pieces. These flash fictions, dreamlike as film stills, are as powerful and shocking as the longer stories. Reading the acknowledgments, I was surprised to discover that the stories in Gunflower were written over a period of two decades. In terms of theme and technical accomplishment, the overriding impression is one of unity and cohesiveness: less a collection of individual pieces than a deliberately constructed whole. Gunflower is a book of and for our time, and as readers we should pay careful attention to what its singularly talented author has to say to us.
• Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay is published by Scribe (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
