Hide Description- Show Description+

November 2020

Too stuffy inside? All those familiar social realist furnishings, all those comfortable literary tropes. Perhaps a stroll out under the trees, where things are breezier, stranger, more liable to break the rules. You may meet monsters out there, true. But that's the point.

Casting its net widely, this anthology of Aotearoa-New Zealand science fiction and fantasy ranges from the satirical novels of the 19th-century utopians – one of which includes the first description of atmospheric aerobreaking in world literature – to the bleeding edge of now. Spaceships and worried sheep. Dragons and AI. The shopping mall that swallowed the Earth. The deviant, the fishy and the rum, all bioengineered for your reading pleasure.

Featuring stories by some of the country’s best known writers as well as work from exciting new talent, Monsters in the Garden invites you for a walk on the wild side. We promise you'll get back safely. Unchanged? Well, that's another question.

'This is New Zealand’s own literary Wood Between The Worlds, with added birdsong and a touch of sea air, an irresistible gateway to all sorts of unexpected places.' —Sam Finnemore, Kete Books

'What we have here with Monsters in the Garden is a place where the strange collides with the familiar; a place where magic is just around the corner; a place of darkness, wit, and strange new beauty.' —Alexander Stronach, The Spinoff

David Larsen is a Wellington-based writer and editor with a long-time love for science fiction, fantasy, and most adjacent genres or genre-like categories.

Elizabeth Knox is the author of thirteen novels, three novellas, and a collection of essays. Her latest book is The Absolute Book.

cover by Rodney Smith

Contents

Elizabeth Knox, Introduction 1

David Larsen, Introduction 2: Counting Worlds

Godfrey Sweven, Riallaro (two chapters)

Anon, Aerobraking sequence from The Great Romance

Janet Frame, Two Sheep

Margaret Mahy, Misrule in Diamond

Maurice Gee, The Halfmen of O (chapters 1 and 2 )

Patricia Grace, The Parson Who Thought She or He Was A Bishop

Owen Marshall, Immortality

Phillip Mann, The Gospel According To Mickey Mouse

Witi Ihimaera, The Last White Rhinoceros