Rynosseros

FICTION Science Fiction First US Edition

Only North American Edition. First Edition. (USA)

Signed by Author (inscription).

Terence William (Terry) Dowling (born 21 March 1947), is an Australian writer and journalist. He writes primarily speculative fiction though he considers himself an “imagier” – one who imagines, a term which liberates his writing from the constraints of specific genres. He has been called “among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia, a writer who stubbornly hews his own path (one mapped ahead, it is true, by Cordwainer Smith, J. G. Ballard and Jack Vance).”

During the 1990s Dowling wrote his four-volume series featuring the hero Tom Tyson (aka Tom Rynosseros), set in a far-future Australia. The first volume, Rynosseros, collected short stories written up to 1990. Further stories of Tyson were written in the early 1990s, with two further volumes of Tyson’s adventures appearing in 1992 and 1993. The ‘Rynosseros Cycle’ would not conclude until publication of the fourth volume in 2007, but stands amongst Dowling’s most important work – a major conceptual series achievement in Australian science fiction.

The ‘Rynosseros Cycle’ is set in a far future Australia where great sandships (“charvolants”) roam the outback, and the Ab’O tribes control hi-tech and set protocols which restrict the movements of the “Nationals” (white people). In this future Australia, high technology and mysticism co-exist, and piracy and an intricate social order breed a new kind of hero. Tom Tyson, an Everyman figure who has echoes of the Fool of the Tarot, Tom O’Bedlam, the Green Man and other mythic figures, has emerged amnesiac from an Ab’O punishment place known as the Madhouse, with three images that may provide the key to his identity – a Ship, a Star and a woman’s Face. Tyson becomes one of the “Coloured Captains” – seven Nationals permitted by the Ab’O to cross the landscape – and wins his ship Rynosseros in a lottery, thereafter becoming known as “Blue Tyson”. To quote Van Ikin, “In this future Australia, the coastal cities, home of white Australians, are urbanely cosmopolitan centres of culture, while in the interior, around an inland sea, the Ab’O states represent the emancipation of the Aboriginal race whose heritage is both its past and its future destiny. Ab’O Princes use satellites to spy on tribal conflicts, and graceful wind-propelled sand-ships roll across the deserts, giving [the series] its symbol of freedom and inquiry.”^[5] Dowling has attributed part of the inspiration for the Tom Tyson character to Blue Tyson, a character from one of his high school story fragments, and to the song lyric “Loving Mad Tom” (also known as Tom o’Bedlam), which was drawn to his attention by sf fan and co-founder of Norstrilia Press, Carey Handfield in 1982.^[6]

David McKie has written: “Thematically, the work of Terry Dowling…extends the cyberspace of neuromancers Pat Cadigan, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling to an imaginative future Australia where the human/technology interface fuses Koori psychic technology with communication satellites in a sparse landscape populated by organicised artificial intelligences. In many ways what Dowling achieve in his (Rynosseros sequence) novels answers Donna Haraway‘s call for the collapse of binary categories between nature and humans, and for more ‘transgressive boundaries’ where ‘people are not afraid of their kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanent partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”^[7]

Brian Attebery offers another critical standpoint: “Dowling’s Rynosseros (1990) and subsequent collections marked a greater maturation of science fictional explorations of Aboriginal culture.Focusing on the adventures of a non-Aboriginal, or ‘National’ hero operating within this cultural sphere, Dowling’s Tom Tyson stories offer sophisticated narrative techniques, memorable images, and troubling themes. These themes usually revolve around conflicts between tradition and innovation or nature and artifice. Dowling does not equate Aboriginality with tradition or nature – he is just as likely to pit advanced Aboriginal technology against national attempts at resurgence or to frame the conflict between tradition and novelty as a struggle between tribal factions. Rynosseros adapts the SF tradition of Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance – characterised by distant futures; radically altered humanity; technological effects that resemble magic; and exuberant, even baroque language – to the Australian scene.Against the backdrop of Australia’;s wide, arid interior, Dowling places great sand-ships, talking belltrees, shapeshifters, cyborgs, and visionaries, while overhead, tribal satellites guard against encroachments from the remnants of white population along the coast. Though he received many honours for his evocative and inventive fiction, Dowling did not please all readers with his imagined future…Criticisms of Dowling fail to note how differently he constructs the relationship between the traditional and the modern. In the Tyson stories, mysticism is not separated from scientific knowledge. Either world view, or both in conjunction, can be found among characters of any race. Dowling, though, did not help matters when he chose the term ‘Ab’O’ to name his futuristic tribes. The shortened form of Aborigine, though not the most offensive racial epithet available, has been used derisively, more often than not. An extra apostrophe and capital letter did not provide, for many readers, sufficient estrangement of an all-too-familiar term….As Dowling’s series has developed, he has worked very hard to create an alternative vision of racial and tribal identities, to provide a genuinely new concept to go with the estranged term, but it is not an easy task for an outsider to imagine a new form of selfhood for a group that has been so strongly Othered.

pp. 184