Turner's Beloved Son

George Turner, Beloved Son. London: Faber, 1978.

Ever since Macaulay, back in the 1830s, pictured a New Zealander contemplating the ruins of London Bridge the notion that the Antipodes might one day pick up the fallen torch of civilisation has been reworked many times.

Beloved Son touches on this theme, being set in a tiny Melbourne of 2032: one of the reconstructed towns in a world depopulated by eco-catastrophe. While elsewhere America is Communist, England a radioactive wasteland and Russia a theocracy, to a team returning from the first interstellar voyage, life in the Lucky Country is relatively recognisable. One starman is moved to exclaim ‘for God’s sake, we’re in St. Kilda Road!’, a touch of nostalgic chauvinism unlikely to stir many.

Later impressions are less attractive. The ‘biological time-bomb’ has exploded. Genetic rewiring, cloned humans, drug-induced learning producing pubescent graduates: Turner catalogues all these horrors with a zest and inventiveness almost reminiscent of Alfred Bester. His society of a lifetime hence in an unusual vision: an odd blend of jerry-building and advanced bugging, of crumbling metropolitan ruins and space shuttles, of youthful idealism and hypnodrugged mobs. It has a nasty realism about it: it could be like that here, a few decades after cataclysm in the other hemisphere. Technical detail is handled too, with an easy if slightly over-confident assurance. Turner needs to look again at the physics of interstellar radio, and his date for the first vegetable cloning is out by several years.

Ironically, in that Turner has several non-SF novels to his credit, Beloved Son fails most at the structural level. Disappointingly, he has not solved – he has barely confronted – the elementary problem that a futuristic novel must get large gobbets of information down the reader’s throat without choking him. Here Turner relies on the old conversational-essay format, where the characters hector each other in a fashion that would be intolerable in a seminar and is merely grotesque in social intercourse. Nor does Turner, so critical of the pretensions of the life sciences, escape the lure of their hilarious jargon: people are not just old but ‘well past the cellular climactic of maturity’; not paranoid but ‘blinded by the light of a supernal ego’. Beloved Son may well be the best Australian SF novel yet – competition for that title is not exigent – but by a wider criterion it is an average sample of the genre: good in imaginative realisation but deficient in its literary technique.