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.
